Alex Weiss Hills

This interactive was created to accompany the exhibition Frontier Shores: Collection, Entanglement and the Manufacture of Identity in Oceania at Bard Graduate Center (BGC) Gallery. It was available in the gallery on a touchscreen that ran continuously while the exhibition was on view.

From the BGC website: Frontier Shores: Collection, Entanglement and the Manufacture of Identity in Oceania examined artifacts as the contested space of cross-cultural contact between European collectors and the native peoples of the region. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the growing discipline of anthropology was both a powerful tool of colonial control and an ideological justification for it. As European empires and their commercial reach expanded, different populations became intertwined in relationships of exchange and power. Focusing on Oceania—the vast region encompassing Australia, New Zealand, New Guinea, and the tropical Pacific Islands—Frontier Shores explored how anthropology was used by colonial powers to justify and gain control over the resources and lives of the various native peoples, how collection both described and pacified the frontier, and how marginalized peoples adapted to, resisted, or otherwise exerted their own power and agency in the colonial context.

The interactive served as a way to introduce the geography of the region covered in the exhibition to someone who might not be familiar with Oceania or its history. By placing objects in the exhibition on a map, visitors were able to better understand their context.

Content was managed on a cloud-based WordPress instance and loaded into an app on the touchscreen. Using a cloud-based CMS allowed the curator and curatorial assistants to add and edit content in an easy way. Loading the web page into an app allowed the device to be locked down so that gallery visitors couldn't accidentally escape out of the app.