RISD Museum Manual: 20 Winter 2025 - Technologies

Manual 20 (Technologies) considers the history and future of art and technology by examining artworks that combine manual techniques and handiwork with non-human productive agents associated with industry or technology. Manual 20 complements the exhibition Process Work: Intersections of Photography and Print ca. 1825 to Today, on view at the RISD Museum February 1–July 20, 2025. Sarah Mirseyedi, the curator of that exhibition, is this issue’s guest editor. 

From the Files

Elizabeth A. Williams calculates how Gorham replicated the Parthenon Frieze

Double Takes

Wendy Bellion and Erik Gould study a physiognotrace profile portrait of C. A. Rodney

Jan Howard and Colin Channer gaze on a Phoebe Boswell drawing and remind us that What You’ve Got to Remember Is What You’re Looking at Is Also You (after Baldwin)

Artist on Art

Jolie Ngo on Flatpack Vessel in Space Blanket: .Gcode is my love language

Portfolio 

An assortment of tools, gadgets, and technologies

Object Lessons

Gerry Beegan processes reproduction in Christiane Baumgartner’s Trails I and II

Sarah Mirseyedi considers a strip of lace, Henry Fox Talbot, and the mechanization of labor in Victorian Britain 

How Tos

Wai Yee Chiong activates a shikake-e (trick picture)

Polly Spenner falls in love with an industrial loom

Paula Gaetano Adi emancipates a robot

To purchase copies of Manual, visit https://www.risdstore.com/risd-museum-gifts/manual/. To read back issues, visit https://risdmuseum.org/manual.

Process Work is made possible by the Mellon Foundation, with program support from the IFPDA Foundation. RISD Museum is supported by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and with the generous partnership of the Rhode Island School of Design, its Board of Trustees, and Museum Governors.

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20 N. Main Street
Providence, RI 02903
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