The chapter explores the afterlife of mass-produced collectibles - Snoopy toys from 1999 McDonald's Happy Meals. Distributed globally, they attracted collectors who believed in their future economic value and fans for whom they held personal significance. Today, after 25 years, these once-coveted Snoopy toys are abandoned and sold in flea markets, car boot sales, and via online marketplaces for second-hand goods.

The work is focussed on an artist-made digital archive of 3D scans of these toys acquired from sellers and collectors across Hong Kong, the UK, Russia. The 3D models were reworked through creating custom textures, which attempt to highlight the gaps, mistakes, and absences in the economic environment around these objects and the patchy, changing, irregular, disappearing personal stories behind them.

We argue that exclusion of such objects from the mainstream consumerist cycles generates poetic absences that endow these objects with subversive potential. With their existence within an alternative mode of economic circulation, they challenge capitalist consumer behaviours and open up possibilities to reconnect with these objects, re-use them more poetically and more personally, also highlighting the potential of absence, mistake, and glitch in the processes of archive-making.

On the Uses of Absence

Archiving Economic Afterlife: A Dialogue Between
3D Scanning and Drawing

Museum virtual tours are interfaces of interaction with archival spaces situated at the heart of the debate around the (in)accessibility of archives. Focussing on the case of The Red Lodge Museum in Bristol, we argue that drawing attention to the ‘insignificant’ - the transitional and interstitial spaces of both the virtual and physical tours - bring opportunities for decolonising the representations of history. Drawing from the works of bell hooks, Jack Halberstam, and Sara Ahmed, this paper examines the successes, failures, and strange joys of moving from a virtual tour to a physical space and back again.

Genealogically and technologically, a virtual tour inherits the imperialistic and global capitalist undertones of panoramic painting and photography, but discursively presents a well-intended call for accessibility. In the Red Lodge Museum, where the history of the place presents almost entirely a sequence of its possessors, this opens room for questions: how can we make a museum experience continuous, not focussed on these possession-oriented moments in time? How can we capture continuity in the museum context, or alternatively - how can we bring the gaps to the forefront in representing history? 

The abrupt cuts in the transitions between the hotspots of virtual tours illustrate the gaps in the representation of the place’s history, which are also reflected in the patchwork-like organisation of the physical museum. In our experience of visiting the Red Lodge Museum, both virtually and physically, we wonder, “What happens when 'nothing noteworthy' happens?” 

Referring to Jussi Parikka and Trevor Paglen’s conceptualisations of surface in 3d spaces, Tim Barringer’s work on panoramic gaze, as well as Annet Dekker’s nuanced approach to the intertwinings of the digital and physical archives, the paper will suggest an artistic approach towards interpreting the gaps in the museum virtual tours.

Museum virtual tours as sequences of gaps: The Red Lodge Museum

This paper is an account of a collaborative project between three artists (3d artist, illustrator, rap artist), ChatGPT, and Stable Diffusion, which aimed at exploring the ways AI-produced digital mistake and glitch takes part in memory-making. The paper touches upon the transformations of materiality, authorship strategies suggested by the use of AI, and will build upon the recent discussions about ChatGPT by Lev Manovich, Boris Groys and Mark Murphy that present its productions as a ‘collective dream without a dreamer’, a ‘collective unconscious’ or ‘zeitgeist-machine’. Fundamentally it will draw upon the ideas of multiplicity of agencies developed by Rosi Braidotti. The paper will examine audio and visual glitches and misalignments in the human and AI interaction that question and potentially redefine the position of the author.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Drawing Research

Echo’s Echoes: AI mistake, materiality and memory-making

This article presents and analyses the results of a research workshop conducted during and after the 2022 Transitus symposium at Falmouth University. The article aims to explore our visions of physical space, travel and migration through stock landscape illustration. The workshop invited illustrators to draw a five-step sequence of images customising a stock landscape by turning it into a view out of their window, thus exploring how a visual digital ‘airport’, a utopian hub of a stock landscape, disintegrates into particularities of individual experiences. The resulting sequences of images were put together in an online magazine about illustration, slonvboa.ru, and are available here: http://slonvboa.ru/nonlandscape (Accessed 10 June 2023) This webpage collects 30-minute drawings from fourteen illustrators based in ten countries: Armenia, Dubai, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom, with ten of the participants being based outside of their home country. Building upon the idea of the ‘nomadic illustration’ suggested by Catrin Morgan and Marc Augé’s notion of ‘non-place’, this article will explore further similarities between nomadism and the circulation of stock imagery. It will thus use the term ‘nomadic’ not only as a metaphor, but also as a direct link to migration studies and studies of digital nomadism, which often describes the precarious occupation of a migrating illustrator. This project will aim to highlight the unlikely possibilities that stock illustration may offer as a point of connection, rather than presenting stock landscapes an alienating utopian abstraction. It will also analyse how individual authorial strategies deal with the notion of space, and how artistic means shape our visions of private and public spaces.

Ksenia Kopalova

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