Over the past fortnight we’ve been surveying Material Witness participants about their experience of the programme, what they like, and how they think it could be improved. We also asked what they think about the programme’s future: we want the programme to continue beyond this pilot year, but do the participants? And if so, what kinds of things would they want to see? The feedback has been illuminating and inspiring. Some of the first respondents said: how about a blog? This gave me the needed spur to get materialwitness.me started: our blog is now ten days old, and it has been really wonderful to see how willing our first guest bloggers have been to share their thoughts and experiences, and  amazing (if worryingly compulsive…) to watch the little map on the ‘stats’  page light up as people tune in from all around the world.

There have been some fabulous ideas for future themes and events. Lots of participants especially value hands-on ‘making’ sessions: participants want to work with clay, timber, glass, and other materials. This year’s programme includes a two-day drawing course for humanities researchers, led by my polymathic colleague Michael Newall: it will be interesting to see how this works, and to use the experience to plan future sessions working with other media. Other participants want to explore the connections between the material and the immaterial – also a theme in Puck Fletcher’s recent blog post – with a few commenting that they want to see sound on the agenda.

Next month, the OU’s Helen Coffey is putting on a session with Nicolas Bell, the BL’s lead curator for western music, at the British Library on sound as a printed artefact. So, sound is emerging as a priority for our 2014/15 programme. Speaking of senses: I think there is also mileage in smell. This sensation is pretty hard to digitise (though presumably not impossible), and seems insubstantial though I suppose as molecules hit our nasal sensors it is really sublimated (subliminal?) matter. Anyone up for odour…?

Meanwhile, I’ve been talking to colleagues within and beyond CHASE about what they might contribute next year. Without wanting to count chickens pre-hatch, I’m excited (tbh, overexcited) about how the programme is shaping up. Watch this space.

And finally: a plug for the next plenary session. On 31 May, we’re putting on a one-day symposium at King’s College London called ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction.’ Needless to say we will be using Walter Benjamin’s classic essay of 1935 as a framework for thinking about how digital possibilities relate to the past and how they are shaping the present. This event is being organised in partnership with KCL’s Andrew Prescott and through Andrew we’ve got additional support from the AHRC Digital Transformations theme. Andrew and I have been talking about how Benjamin’s formulation seems to be coming full circle: from mechanical reproduction, to digital reproduction, and now back to mechanical repro through 3D printing and other technologies. Back to the future? The programme will be unveiled in a post shortly.

Alixe Bovey

University of Kent