Interview with Aleksandra Kaminska

Abstract

Aleksandra Kaminska is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the Universit e de Montr eal, Canada, where she also co-directs the Artefact Lab and the Bricolab. Her research is based in media studies and aesthetics, and the history of technology. She is currently preparing High-Tech Paper: Security Printing and the Aesthetics of Trust, a monograph that examines the making of authentic paper for circulation in secure systems and infrastructures. She situates security printing within media and printing histories, but also as it intersects with art, craft, and design. Her work on authentication devices includes the production of Nano-verses (nano-verses.com), an art-sci collaboration that explored how the technology of nano-optical authentication can be rethought as artistic media. The articles discussed in the following interview are: “Storing Authenticity at the Surface and into the Depths: Securing Paper with Humanand Machine-Readable Devices” (Interm edialit es, 2018); “‘Don’t Copy That’: Security Printing and the Making of High-Tech Paper” (Convergence, 2019); and “The Intrinsic Value of Valuable Paper: On the Infrastructural Work of Authentication Devices” (Theory, Culture & Society, 2020). She recently co-edited an issue of PUBLIC: Art/Culture/Ideas on “Biometrics: Mediating Bodies” (2020), and is currently finalizing a co-edited volume of the Canadian Journal of Communication on the theme of “Materials and Media of Infrastructure.” In 2020–2021 she is co-organizing the online series Paperology: A Reading and Activity Group on Knowing and Being with Paper. Your work centers on efforts to secure the authenticity and identity of things and highlights how material standards contribute to the ordering of the world. In much of your writings, you place focus on techniques for identifying analog objects such as money and documents/valuable paper but we have also found your work to be highly stimulating for thinking about efforts to identify digital content like moving images and sounds. In “Storing Authenticity at the Surface and into the Depths” you introduce the concept of “authentication devices” to discuss the role and function of identification techniques. Could you explain a bit more about what you mean by this concept and how/ why you think it is useful for thinking about strategies of identification?