Towards Embodied Paradata. A Diffractive Art/Archaeology Approach

Abstract

For archaeologists, artists, and cultural heritage workers, paradata are generally viewed as explicitly selected and documented attributes, or defined sets of circumstances, authoritatively considered to have a material outcome on the provenance, collection, and manipulation of both recorded data and metadata and their subsequent interpretation or analysis of artefacts and other (contextual) remains. Being chosen, their own provenance is questionable: why were the selected data, metadata, and paradata more relevant than other options? We (re)consider embodied practice as a form of paradata-making normally airbrushed out of the hegemonic accounts of how works of art and archaeological excavations are presented and analysed. Decisions to not include the embodied worker, their apparatus, and their practices of making, or uncovering, haunt images purporting to be historical accounts in the art and archaeology literature by their absence. Adopting a diffractive art/archaeology approach, and subversively applying several well-known cultural heritage recording and presentation techniques, recursively and unconventionally, we throw light on embodied paradata and (re)present them as potentially very valuable pedagogical boundary objects. We also dislocate paradata away from a purely epistemological dimension into an entangled onto-epistemological nexus.