Introduction

Abstract

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.