Curatorial agency is situated in the introduction via an elaboration of the intersection between the mission of public museums to care for collections and their increased reliance on digital capitalism’s social, technical and material infrastructures for the circulation of digitisations, narratives and new research findings. We explain how this book approaches curatorial agency in four individually authored chapters, each taking its own approach to museum knowledge and curatorial agency in regard to the junction of humanistic interpretations and new materialist and posthuman frameworks. Moreover, we explain how each chapter acts as a case study that tracks objects from the Swedish History Museum’s Viking Age collection to distinct technological spheres: Swedish discussion forums, YouTube, Pinterest and the vast infrastructures and destructive processes of Technospheric curation.

No abstract

In this conclusion, we revisit some of the key findings of this book’s analytical/interpretative cuts into the online circulation of museum collections. The pedagogical challenges museums face when collection knowledge is appropriated by groups whose political aims threaten social solidarity and democratic values are discussed. Highlighted are the ways in which collection knowledge is both customised and open-ended when digitisations, narratives and research findings flow between multiple platforms and are transmitted through interfaces including home feeds or lists. We conclude that curatorial agency simultaneously becomes humanist and subjective; machinic and computational; and imbricated in more-than-human ontological formations that insert digitisations and museum knowledge in multi-scalar geographies and temporalities extending from deep geological time into unforeseen futures.