Harris | Public Art Offers DH a Chance to be Part of the Resistance
Channel: MSU Digital Humanities
Date: 04/05/2023

Katherine D. Harris | San Jose State University, USA

Public art lives all over downtown San Jose, a city in the San Francisco Bay Area that is arguably becoming the “heart” of Silicon Valley. The public art exists on the sides of buildings, within public courtyards, behind gates in the community garden, and out in the open at cross-streets. People walk by this public art often without giving it a second thought primarily because there’s no single space to tell their history – with almost all of them representing diverse communities of San Jose and their staunch resistance to Silicon Valley assimilation. A team of faculty and students from the College of Humanities & the Arts at San Jose State University created the “Public Art as Resistance in San Jose” project that focuses on a walking tour of 12 of those public works of art that has become a successful community engagement connector between the university and different agencies in San Jose. Because of the nature of wavering funding, as a Digital Humanist and experienced project manager, I was keenly aware of the need for creating a sustainable digital footprint and embedding an ethics of (digital) care for the local artists who created these works. With attention to issues such as data privacy and intellectual property rights, we collaboratively created the digital story of 12 public works of art and their representative resistance in a way that’s valuable for all parties, including future users of the materials. In this way Digital Humanities becomes part of the resistance – resistance against the belief that public art is ephemeral, according to the developers who are knocking down buildings without thinking about preservation of these representations of resistance. This presentation focuses on the digital interventions inherent to this collaborative project that aided in preserving the voices of those diverse communities: https://www.sjsu.edu/ha-public-art-tour/about/index.php

Find out more about the Global Digital Humanities Symposium at https://msuglobaldh.org/