Refresh-Reset-Reformat is an online conversation series between Bard Graduate Center students and technologists, digital humanists, museum and gallery professionals, artists, and educators, which explores the role and use of the digital in the study of material cultural, design history, and decorative arts.

In this talk Mark Olson will discuss the Lives of Things with MA student Madeline Porsella. Lives of Things, a project at Duke University, aims to create new interactive displays and hybrid digital/physical exhibition platforms that reconstruct the location, color, and meaning of works of art in the collections of the Nasher Museum of Art.


Mark Olson is assistant professor of the practice of visual & media studies at Duke University and a founding member of the Wired! Lab. His research and teaching focus on the historical and contemporary entanglements of medical practice and media technologies, as well as on the affordances of emerging technologies for the analysis and exhibition of historical material culture. He is currently collaborating with the Nasher Museum of Art on expanding their engagements with interactive media and developing an infrastructure for constructing immersive virtual exhibition experiences. He also collaborates with Duke’s History of Medicine Collection and Department of Radiology on the micro-CT scanning and digital reconstruction of Duke’s ivory manikin collection.