Codebreakers and Groundbreakers
- Submitting institution
-
University of Cambridge
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 9873
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Fitzwilliam Museum
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- -
- Year of first exhibition
- 2017
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
2
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- "The Codebreakers exhibition is lead output in this multi-component item, which includes the accompanying book alongside contextual information enabling the reviewer to visualise the exhibition. The exhibition and book (both co-curated/co-authored by Christophilopoulou with Galanakis and Grime) were the result of collaborative research on the relationship between scripts/codes and cultures. Scripts shape cultures, and vice versa; but how does this relationship work? To interrogate this, two fascinating, and seemingly unrelated, stories were brought together for the first time: the decipherment of an Aegean Bronze Age script and the work of British codebreakers during WW2.
The research process brought mathematics and the humanities into dialogue. Debunking the myth of the ‘isolated decipherer’, the exhibition and book brought to the fore the multitude of narratives associated with the lives of people (ancient and modern, ranging from the ancient administrator to the women at Bletchley Park) whose story is rarely heard. The exhibition drew the attention of the wider public to codes, writing and language as culturally dynamic and embedded phenomena, rather than abstract linguistic or mechanical codes, that require actors and contexts to become meaningful. Unlike past practice that saw texts in isolation (like the lonely ‘decipherer’ mentioned above), the documents on display (whether wartime codes or ancient administrative texts) are intertwined with the cultural backgrounds that shaped their invention and use. Christophilopoulou’s historiographical work in the under-researched Turing archives at King's College London was central to this argument, as was her object-based research in developing the visual arguments that enabled the two narratives to be intertwined within the footprint of the exhibition.
Using digital displays, hands-on activities and an interactive game, the exhibition explained how en- and de-coding work in practice, for what purposes these systems were developed, and what we can learn from them."
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -