Digital remix

This samurai warrior and young married Matyó woman present the Hungarian and international collections of the Museum of Ethnography. Their costumes are fashioned from used ink ribbons and the printed QR codes generated to track individual items during the rehousing of the museum’s artefacts. Recycling rather than disposing of this waste is a way of paying homage both to the countless handcraft techniques represented in the exhibits and to the unseen work that goes on behind the scenes at the museum.

Linked to records in the museum’s database, the QR codes made it easier to identify and track individual artefacts during the recent move, thus turning the codes themselves into symbols of the collection’s relocation.

The Museum of Ethnography remained closed to visitors during the move, when energies were devoted to the background work behind the “facade” of displays and exhibitions. Although invisible to outsiders, these tasks are of vital importance, supporting as they do the full weight of the museum “edifice”. Record keeping, conservation, and the classification and positioning of objects are all ongoing tasks, carried out around the clock in the Museum of Ethnography’s Collection Centre.

The QR codes are also symbols of the museum registry system. Having become redundant for one reason or another, or detached from the respective object, these QR codes, which are readable, and therefore meaningful, only within the museum's internal database, reinforce the hidden nature of the museum’s inevitably invisible processes. The installation created from printed QR codes and ink ribbons reflect the alternative reality of objects created in the museum.

In the course of recycling, the codes, which supplemented the objects in the analogue collection with digital information, have gradually lost theirlabel-character; removed from their original context, they have begun to exist as independent works of art. In doing so, they have once again acquired a symbolic value — costume is itself is a symbol, after all — and have been transformed likemuseum objects.

Concept: Veronika Budavári / Realised by: Gyöngyi Gömöri, Veronika Budavári