The proposed research project 'Reanimating Tibetan Heritage: Transforming collections, Empowering communities' will be undertaken by Thupten Kelsang as an AHRC Early Career Fellow in Cultural and Heritage Institutions. His praxis-based research focuses on how to create a sustainable and equitable relationship between the Tibetan diaspora and museums with Tibetan collections. The case of 'Tibet' in museums is a possibly unique example of being 'doubly colonial', having faced two major waves of mass extraction of objects, both within colonial contexts: British and Chinese. Even before 'historical Tibet' was subsumed under the People's Republic of China [in 1951], it witnessed a British colonialist intervention in the guise of the Younghusband 'Expedition' of 1903-04 which sought and extracted a substantial collection of Tibetan artefacts, much of which is now in public collections across the UK. The underlying rationale for this project lies in the untapped potential for museum collections with Younghusband provenance to become focal points for long-term and sustainable relationships between museum(s) and Tibetans. By catalysing these relationships through this research, British museums could participate in a potential act of symbolic reparation and restorative justice towards the Tibetan community as well as address the acute absence of Tibetan voices in the sector. Grounded in community-based participatory research (CBPR), this collaborative research explores the potential future(s) of Tibetan collections in museums in the UK and their latent affordances for the wider Tibetan community. Through collaborative enquiry and co-production of knowledge, this research project asks questions about how Tibetan collections in museums could be reimagined and reactivated. A parallel strand of this research project is focused on how the Fellow's research methodologies and findings could be applied to other communities: exploring engagement/collaborative practices which can accommodate the multiplicity of various originating communities, methodologies for 'sourcing' and conducting community consultations, and how to create best practices for museum engagement and collaboration as an antidote to colonial entanglement of certain collections. This Fellowship will enable an unprecedented UK-wide survey of Tibetan collections, two knowledge exchange workshops for the Tibetan community, pilot community consultation at the V&A, two GLAM sector facing workshops, and the publication of two reports. The first report's focus would be Tibetan collections and culturally informed protocols around the care and display of Tibetan objects. The second report's focus would be the production of a museum toolkit and a set of recommended general guidelines for consultation and collaboration with communities of origin (across different contexts).

Nearly all cultures have developed models of how to project and predict the future. Ways of thinking about the future range widely: from diviners and alchemists, through urban improvers and insurance companies, trend forecasters and risk assessors, and to film-makers and novelists. Projections of the future engage, whether explicitly or implicitly, with their own present. They may critique an existing state of affairs, or simply offer the promise of a better world. There is in one sense an inherent contradiction in the premise that expertise in projecting and predicting the future is possible. By their very nature, claims about the future are unverifiable at the time they are made. This places high rhetorical demands on self-proclaimed futurists or experts in the future who must demonstrate their superior insight through spiritual, statistical, or scientific means. The project will explore what societies at different times and places have considered constitutes expertise in the future, and how this expertise has manifested itself visually. This project will explore one major aspect of future expertise, specifically examining the visual dimension of the futurist's repertoire of persuasion. Most work in the field has emphasized text as the primary instrument of the futurologist. As a recent BBC radio documentary on the topic suggests, there is popular fascination with the predictions of future experts, from the Oracle at Delphi through Nostradamus and the science fiction authors of the twentieth century, and a rich literature on such expertise exists. The visual analogue to this tradition, however, has typically been treated dismissively. Future projection by artists and designers is sometimes used as an adjunct to verbal description; often it is seen as exceptional or eccentric (with notable exceptions, such as the oeuvre of Leonardo da Vinci). This project will examine less canonical material, seeking to provide an account of future expertise as such rather than a series of monographic examples. In addition, the scope of research will incorporate 'non-artistic' visual material of a technical nature, such as patents, diagrams, maps, charts and graphs. The research will feed into the V&A's inaugural exhibition for its new set of temporary exhibition galleries opening in 2016. 'The Future: A History' will be a thoughtful, research-driven examination of imaginary projection as a historical phenomenon across the globe. It will chart a passage from medieval depictions of the future as divinely revealed (e.g. medieval images of the last judgment), through increasingly instrumental and secular attempts to control the future (e.g. in modernist city planning), to a more recent exploration of explicit fictionalization as a modus operandi for future-oriented art and design, as practitioners have become more self-aware about their work's fundamentally speculative character. It will explore many interrelated avenues of research: cross-cultural comparison of religious art (eschatological imagery) and material culture (divination and fortune-telling tools); visual representations of utopias and dystopias, which have functioned as important means of political expression, particularly in repressive societies; and specific object typologies that have been used for manifesting possible futures (prototypes, renderings, data visualizations). Together, the physical artefacts and the models they represent constitute the hopes and fears of past and present.

This project seeks to facilitate the development of new approaches to videogames design and the communities that make and play them. It also aims to define the 'objecthood' of videogames as complex, interactive, digital objects encompassing both tangible (hardware) and intangible (user content, interaction) elements. It will posit that UNESCO's current definition of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) as 'traditions or living expressions inherited from our ancestors and passed on to our descendants', including 'oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe or the knowledge and skills to produce traditional crafts' does not adequately take into account the inherently hybrid, networked and interactive nature of digital objects and - taking videogames as a case in point - will produce, in collaboration with colleagues at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum (CHSDM), the draft of a new, critical framework for assessing, acquiring and documenting videogames into museum collections which will be trialled at both museums. This work will involve hosting closed workshops with practitioners and industry leaders in the UK and US, and staging two conferences to make public the work and findings of the Fellowship. This work and the insights generated will be tested and shared during the workshops and conferences and will be published broadly via the V&A's blog and Cooper Hewitt's public channels. The work will further form a case study for planned research into digital collecting at the V&A, and the prototype framework for videogames acquisition will also be published for a specialist audiences in both videogame and museum sector journals. This Fellowship is timely and urgent as both participating institutions acknowledge the pressing need to make informed decisions on the collection, preservation and documentation of intangible, complex, digital heritage.

The French collection of French furniture at the Victoria and Albert Museum is especially strong in pieces dating from 1640-1800, which were last catalogued in 1930. Amongst these are pieces by the most well-known cabinet-makers (including Boulle, Cressent, Oeben, Riesener and Roentgen), several of which have royal provenances. These all fit very well the established category of 'fine French furniture', which is exceptionally highly-valued on the art market. This catalogue of 143 pieces of veneered case furniture will fully document these pieces, bringing in-depth knowledge about them into the public domain for the first time. It will both add to the knowledge of the practices of individual workshops and extend our undertsanding of object types, such as chests of drawers, writing desks and music stands. \n\nHowever, it will go further than that, by including the history of those objects which were pieced together in the nineteenth century on the art market, and acquired by the Museum in the nineteenth century as authentic seventeenth and eighteenth-century pieces. These entries are not relegated to the back of the catalogue, or given any less attention than ornate cupboards owned by Louis XVI or Marie Antoinette. They will be fully documented and analysed so that readers can see (from text and photographs) how distinctions can be made between cabinet-making work of different periods, including the practices of sevententh and eighteenth-century French workshops and later English reproduction work. These pieces have long been relegated to store, and no published record of them exists, which means that all scholarship to date has ignored them.\n\nEach entry includes a great deal of physical evidence about the object, as follows:\nTitle; object type; maker; date and place of manufacture; materials; marks and labels; dimensions.\nProvenance and publication history.\nPhysical description, describing the arrangement of materials and its construction, with a focus on alterations.\nFinally, the commentary gives a full history of the piece, including an assessment of its importance, which might include its stylistic attributes, such as an advanced type of neoclassical ornament in the cast, chased and gilded brass decoration to a commode, or its place in the development of a particular form, for example, noting the first known integration of an inkwell into the drawer of a writing desk.\nThe catalogue entries will be supported by over 800 photographs, taken at various stages during the research, often while the objects were dismantled. They include views of the entire object and its marks, and extend to details of construction and evidence of alteration and transformation.\n\nThis catalogue project won a Getty Foundation grant of approx. $182,000, which paid for the research of the applicant, a research assistant, a conservator, and consultant reports from a clock historian, wood identification specialists, an expert in stones, and a report from the British Museum on the material composition of over twenty porcelain plaques used to decorate the exterior of some of the furniture. This proved that, contrary to the opinions expressed by several experts on Sevres porcelain, all of these plaques were in fact soft-paste, probably dating from the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Most of them were cut down and re-decorated in the nineteenth century to add value to French furniture on the London art market.\n\nThe V&A will publish this volume, and volume II, on the carved and gilded furniture collection, which will be completed by another author by September 2007. Both will appear in 2009. The V&A is seeking funds to subside the large number of illustrations (over 800). £10,000 has been pledged, and the V&A will apply to grant-giving and commercial bodies for further grants.

How can we bring digital technology, performance and curatorial practice together to give young people a sense of creative agency when encountering a historical object? This interdisciplinary, visitor-focused project draws together the curatorial, theatrical, design and technological expertise of three leading partners: the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the UK's national museum of art, design and performance; Punchdrunk Enrichment, pioneers of educational and community-based immersive theatre; and award-winning creative technology studio, The Workers. Together, the partners intend to prototype a mixed reality environment for the display of archive material - in this case the handwritten manuscripts of Charles Dickens - that will give young people aged 15-18 a sense of creative agency when encountering an historical object. The manuscripts are the best evidence we have of the creative process of one of the UK's most important and renowned authors, whose work has continuing relevance for young people today. Dickens was an observer of urban material culture and life in a period of rapid technological innovation and widespread financial insecurity, a writer who explored themes that still resonate today. However, the act of writing and redrafting on paper is becoming an increasingly rare (perhaps even obsolete) creative practice. The manuscripts might show us how an author revises and imaginatively iterates - but that process needs to be unlocked for visitors. By prototyping an immersive experience, centred on the manuscript, we will explore how digital technologies can augment immersive theatre techniques to create a performative environment, one that does not necessarily rely on performers. We will answer the following questions: How can the interactions between people and objects within a digital and a physical space drive a narrative in a museum context? How can digital technologies put the museum object at the heart of an immersive experience? How can the museum object become part of a performance? Through discovering and understanding Dickens's creative process, we aim to inspire self-expression - an important strand of Punchdrunk Enrichment's projects. We intend for this experience to have a life beyond museum for the children involved - that it will make a lasting appeal to their creative spirit. Getting children to talk about their experiences, encouraging them to write stories, discuss them and expand their vocabulary have been important motivations in Punchdrunk Enrichment's work to date. This research will be of future creative and commercial value by potentially informing the development of a major exhibition on Charles Dickens at the Museum (2020) and the future display of the V&A's nineteenth-century collections, as well as inform practice beyond the museum itself, and is of institutional significance because it will allow us to not only interrogate the latest technologies, but also to help shape and drive innovation in this area with our peers in the creative and technological industries. We will gauge how methodologies identified through the project will help forge new creative practice, within the museum and beyond, and consolidate our findings in a case study and preliminary toolkit. The research will help deepen links between creative industries and research sectors by presenting a case study and toolkit to understand, experiment with and exploit immersive technologies to create new experiences. It will help show how the next generation of digital content and services can be conceptualised, produced and exploited within the UK creative economy.