Nessglyph Encounters New Materialism in an Art/Archaeology Phygital Nexus

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Often beautiful, extraordinary, rare, or intriguing, artifacts grace galleries and museums in splendid isolation—curiosities, works of art, treasures, trophies, loot. Elevated on pedestals or decontextualised within soundless, empty, vitrines, they appear motionless, caught in a fixed moment. Supposed to speak for themselves, they barely whisper. They should resonate with many different traces of hands, gestures, tools, places, and times, including our own, each adding new patinas of metabolic potential that brought the object to its present being. Classical archaeology, traditionally grounded in empiricism and humanist narratives of control and extraction, has long domineered artifacts and assemblages into becoming passive mute registers available for decoding. This chapter offers a challenge to such epistemological scaffolding. It embraces an ontology in which cultural things do not wait to be interpreted but intra-act with us, co-producing knowledge, shaping affect, and complicating the temporal and material coordinates of interpretation.</jats:p>