Adopt a slide

I wrote about the potential demise of Manchester School of Art’s slide archive the other day here and how they we asking people to adopt a slide as a way of highlighting the issue. Well a researcher from the School picked up my block and alerted me to the fact that I could adopt a slide remotely and so that is what I have done.

Here is the slide:

And this is what I have said about it.
I chose to adopt this print because it embodies some of the issues raised by the potential demise of the a physical slide archive at Manchester School of Art.

Every time we create facsimiles  of things we transform them and in so doing remove something of the original essence. In this case the slide is already a facsimile of the leaf like print: we can’t feel its texture and the colours we see are those the processed slide offers. And so it is with any digital archive of the slide of the print.

It’s this transformation that is both wonderful and dangerous. Wonderful because now everyone can see the digital image of the slide of the print. Dangerous because if that is all we see we lose those aspects of the slide of the print that only it can offer. So we need to both keep the physical slide and share it digitally to widen access. Long live digital, but not at the cost of the loss of the physical. 

These words will now sit alongside the slide and stand as one testament to why it needs to be kept.

Isn’t the Net wonderful? Without it this action would not have taken place. 

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