Digital Incantations emerged from a residency at the Art Library and Materials Archive of Stiftung Sitterwerk, St. Gallen, Switzerland with artist, Sarah Colman.

The Art Library and Materials Archive, housed in a shared building are both classified with a RFID system (radio frequency identification system) that tracks each item’s shifting location. At the centre of this space is an interactive digital workbench that enables both collection’s books and material samples to coexist dynamically. Placing books and materials together on the workbench is a relational gesture—giving space to connections, conjuring gaps and echoes between references like ghosts and incantations. 

Often associated with surveillance, RFID technology is here reclaimed as a tool of emancipation—flattening knowledge into accessible data and enabling intuitive, serendipitous discovery.

Working with this interface, a collection was assembled shaped not by taxonomy but by resonance—formal and material affinities that unfold through a series of photograms. Composed through digital alchemy, reveal a living archive where presence and absence continually reconfigure each other.