The Museum of Lost Technology (ongoing)

Project Website: https://losttechnology.museum

The Museum of Lost Technology is an arts-based research project, carried out at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): V-795 in the Elise Richter PEEK Programme. Through practice-based research, the project investigates textiles in the art and technology context with the intention to challenge expectations brought by terms such as media arts and tech-arts and explore the position of “women’s work” in contemporary technology-engaged art frameworks. Placing a creative, and interdisciplinary mode of studio inquiry at its center, the project aims to seek new and original understandings of textiles and technology, beyond electronic textiles and wearable technology applications.

The four-year project builds on the premise that inventions in the history of science and technology were products of not only the intellectual capacity of the inventors but also their practical knowledge and skills. In the Western world, not only women but also particular knowledge that had been dominantly held by women had been excluded from official sites of science and technology research for centuries. By carrying out hands-on experiments at the intersections of textiles and selected scientific subjects, the project excavates some of the speculative “lost possibilities” that were unimaginable in the past due to the gendered social and spatial segregation of knowledge. Directed towards establishing a speculative museum of technology, the studio inquiry searches for an imaginative collection of information, techniques, and technologies that could have been conceived—but never were. The museum, in the scope of the project, is understood and explored as a site where truth is produced through the sorting of objects, knowledge, and practices.