Final Report - Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage

Transforming Collections aimed to enable digital search and research across collections, to uncover patterns of bias in collections systems and narratives, to reveal hidden connections, and to open up new interpretative frames and ‘potential histories’ of art, nation and heritage. The project was underpinned by the belief that a national collection cannot be imagined without addressing structural inequalities, contested heritages and contentious histories embedded in objects. In 1999, the late sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall posed the question ‘Whose heritage?’. Hall called for the ‘unsettling’ and ‘reimagining’ of heritage and nation. Twenty-five years on, the need to critically question and transform notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘nation’ remains as urgent as ever. 

Led by UAL in close partnership with Tate among 15 partners across the UK, Transforming Collections sought to surface suppressed histories, amplify marginalised voices, and re-evaluate artists and artworks long ignored or side-lined by dominant narratives and institutional practices. The interdisciplinary approach brought together academic and artistic research into collections and museum practices, combined with participatory interactive machine learning (ML) design. The ML development was shaped and driven by researchers’ case studies and questions, terrogating small, bespoke, ‘messy’ datasets as well as larger collections’ data. The focus was not on achieving a technical solution to address problems in collections, but on developing lightweight adaptable tools that can support their critical analyses. The resultant critical analytical tool (ML CAT or Collections Transformer) has the potential to aid the rethinking of habitual formulations, hierarchies and values expressed in collections’ text-based digital records by offering critical prompts; while the creation of dynamic categorisations or tags refined by the user (that would not otherwise be made visible through standard search functions within collections databases), can surface unexpected connections and relations.

Transforming Collections culminated in a major public programme, Museum x Machine x Me, across Tate Modern and Tate Britain, which saw project insights and findings shared with wide-ranging audiences. Foregrounding a series of artistic residencies that critically and creatively engaged with the Transforming Collections research and developing ML tools, Museum x Machine x Me generated dialogues and expanded understandings of the ways in which the Transforming Collections research can support museums in reimagining an inclusive, evolving, (re)distributed ‘national collection’ that enables new, multivocal stories to 
be told.