Discovery: A Transpacific Curatorial Experiment

Exhibition
September 10, 2011 - May 31, 2012
Doheny Memorial Library

What happens when you let the world curate an exhibition, especially one with a theme as broad as “discovery”? The result is 发现, a crowd-sourced display of images chosen by popular vote during summer 2011 from the online collections of the Pacific Rim Digital Library Alliance, a consortium of twenty-eight academic libraries working to improve access to scholarly research materials.

Unlike a traditional exhibition of original works, Discovery features images from digital libraries that were scanned from analog formats, such as photographs, drawings, and printed illustrations. Completing the elliptical nature of the project, they are re-analoged and presented here to allow viewers to have first-hand encounters with material objects in a physical exhibition space.