In the article “Teaching Collections Management Anthropologically” Cara Krmpotich describes the information technology and Coach House objects that she and her researcher Robyn Watt had assembled into a teaching collection. Krmpotich passingly remarks on it as resembling “what might be in a collection of the future: objects that will be historic decades from now”(114). The statement is made casually, but when examined it seems to hold a fair amount of weight, and to express a sentiment or a relationship. Note that this article was published in 2015. The objects that she is referring to are:

mostly outdated information technologies[…] VHS players, DVDs, USB keys, floppy disks, laptops, photographic negatives, desktop computers, video and audio recorders, radios, 8-track, digital scanners, cassette tapes, wax cylinders for phonographs, old Kodak cameras, laser printers, extension cords, and an overhead projector. (Krmpotich,114)

It immediately strikes me that this statement of futurity expresses a feeling of anachronism. The presence of this collection as a collection of technological/etc. objects of the near, but in some cases not that near, past evokes for the observer a particular sentiment, of their being outside of their proper time, a collection of the future whose objects, it seems implied, are obscured, which are novel in arrangement and the multi-source nature of their material pieces. As collector, Krmpotich feels dislocated from what she has arranged.

Darko Suvin, in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, defines SF as “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (7-8). It seems that Krmpotich views her collection as almost science fictional, that it is (or at least should be) a part of a world yet to come, whose norms are not revealed, and as she attempts to wrangle with it feels distant from it.

Now in a way, this perception of the teaching collection as “of the future” is both accurate obscuring:  it will not in the future exist as it does now/did then when she wrote the article, or when she initially assembled the collection. Sure. This perception, this anachronism, estrangement, is perhaps also an affect of it’s cold machinic gaze, the work of media archaeography that the objects themselves embody(Ernst 67).  But at a very pratical level, the “futurity” of the collection may just be a matter of a void left by a non-present vocabulary. She touches on this later in the article:

Applying the standard to the collection of information technology objects brought home the limitations for more recent objects of classificatory structures and terminology largely based upon historic artifacts failed to adequately capture these mass-produced, assembled-in-multiple-countries objects. (Krmpotich 116)

This anachronism/estrangement that Krmpotich experiences are indirect recognitions, or the sentimental responses to an object or objects for which one has no vocabulary of classification or categorization, or at least an undeveloped one.

So then, what Krmpotich and her “future collection” point to is the difficulty of classifying something that is both from near (culturally) and elsewhere (as a mechanically produced commodity), for which the vocabulary or categorizations are still developing. She’s simultaneously seeing her objects as punctuated, and not. A weird liminal space is perhaps created by lacking vocabulary.

I think we can see and look into these difficulties of classification if we take Prown’s categores and take, for example, the GB BOY Colour. This is a cloned Game Boy Colour created by a Chinese company called kong feng.

Do we classify it by it’s chassis, a transparent purple matte plastic? Is the transparent case decorative, utilitarian? It’s case is a deviation from the “original” grey—is that decorative? Do we classify it by it’s custom SoC (System-on-a-Chip), and it’s containment of 66×3 games (that’s right: it contains the same 66 games, three times)? These include “classics” like Mario Bros. and Contra, but also include various Chinese games. The games are listed in English, but also have Chinese characters that appear as I scroll through them. What’s more, it’s also, generally, compatible with “normal” Gameboy Colour cartridges. Do we classify it by it’s mimicry, as a clone of the original Nintendo Gameboy? Could we take from Prown’s categories: is it a diversion, or a device? (Prown, 3) Is it a modified/cloned diversionary emulation device (with cartridge compatibility)? How do we deal with these sorts of devices that are deviations from an “authorized” or “authentic” original, not only as clones but as modified or improved (the GB Boy colour has a backlit screen noted for it’s being an improvement over the original; but we can see thanks to the transparent case that it’s IR sensor, functional in a Nintendo Gameboy Color, is completely non-existent in the GB Boy.) How do we categorize this object?

A derivative object could be both an adjective, and a noun. As an adjective it invokes both the imitation of another work, as well as value stemming from variability. As a noun, it invokes an arrangement based on another source.  These invocations need not be negative, need not be derogatory. Finally, a poetic relation to Krmpotich’s “future” collection: derivative futures, whose value is based upon the performativity of underlying entities (“Derivatives”).  The derivative (perhaps we would say derivative device?) is a future instance of the object it stems from, containing both the possibilities of the original and future assets added through modification, improvement, subtraction, variation, multi-sourcedness. This is perhaps an initial step towards a larger vocabulary.

Works Cited

“Derivatives.” U.S. Department of the Treasury. https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Markets/Pages/derivatives.aspx.  Accessed 18 October 2017.

Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Edited by Jussi Parikka, U Of Minnesota P, 2012.

Krmpotich, Cara. “Teaching Collections Management Anthropologically.” Museum Anthropology 38.2 (2015): 112-22.

Prown, Jules David.  “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio 17.1 (1982): 1-19.

Suvin, Darko.  Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Yale University Press, 1979.