Look What Zaiba Jabbar Found at V&A East Storehouse

Curator, researcher and director of HERVISIONS, Zaiba Jabbar, has been searching through the collections at V&A East Storehouse as part of her 5-day Look What I Found residency. Zaiba used the Look What I Found residency to continue her research into “rewilding communications”. In a culture concerned with the faithful reproduction of signals, the care of listening reminds us that communication is not only technical but also ethical—a practice of attention, patience, and relation. Every system regulates itself through feedback. The body does this. Ecosystems do this. Technological systems do this too—though often in ways that serve the system rather than the person within it. Zaiba uses the term “rewilding communications” to address this gap and consider an approach to designing new technologies that centres systems of care that reflect our own internal regulation. Before arriving on the Look What I Found micro-residency, Zaiba had been scouring the online collections at V&A East Storehouse and found the Technophone, a popular mobile phone designed by Seymour Powell in 1986. Her research began here, exploring the relationship between the Technophone and the Technophobe, a term used to describe someone who fears or resists new technology, which “like parasitic and symbiotic organisms these technologies connect and distance us simultaneously, prompting questions about who gets to participate in digital futures. Whilst we wandered the collections hall at V&A East Storehouse on the first day of her micro-residency, Zaiba was struck by the juxtapositions of objects created a feeling of collapsing time. “One of the first things that struck me when I came into the Storehouse was how the collection – and the way it is presented – collapses time. Objects from radically different moments sit in proximity to each other, not organised by era or category, but held together in a kind of suspended simultaneity. You move through centuries in a few steps. You encounter things you recognise and things that have no immediate context for you, and somehow they are in conversation. That experience of collapsing time felt immediately connected to what I think about when I think about rewilding communications.” Call and Response “Long before the digital age, long before the information age, communities were encoding and transmitting language.” Zaiba’s research led her beyond the digital and towards analoguecommunication technologies like the West African Talking Drum, a drum that mimics the intonation of human voice to transmit language. Zaiba likens the Talking Drum to the WhatsApp of the past, describing both systems as “conveying complex, real-time and long-distance information within communities, blending spoken language with instant, widespread communication.”During the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the Talking Drum was banned.Raising questions about a history of communication methods that have been obscured and erased, Zaiba asks “Who gets to encode? Who gets to decode? Whose signals are received and whose are lost… the systems we call technological are never neutral, carrying within them the assumptions, exclusions, and hierarchies of the people who built them.” One of the many communication objects Zaiba encountered during the residency was this Girl Guides Test Card from 1931. “The Girl Guides test card is a female-coded system of survival knowledge passed quietly between generations. Passed through handbooks, local troops, and proficiency badges, these curricula provided girls with autonomous operational knowledge outside formal institutional schooling.” Nature-encoded design Spotting the bug-like shape of the FADA Model 115 Radio, or the antennas on the 1981 Capriani cocktail cabinet designed by Alessandro Mendini, the 1986 BT Bronze cellular phone and charging unit and the Technophone, we began speaking about how nature informs design and engineering – a process known as “biomimicry”. “When we talk about the antenna as anthropomorphism, we are acknowledging something that designers have always known: that the most sophisticated communication technologies are the ones that look to nature first. The antenna is a figure I keep returning to when thinking about rewilding communications. It sits at the intersection of the technological and the biological — the device and the creature. They are the same solution, arrived at twice. One by evolution, one by design.” Observing presence During her residency, Zaiba engaged with colleagues across the V&A’s Design and Digital collection to understand more about digital preservation. As part of this, she met with curators, researchers and conservators involved in the V&A’s recent acquisition of an early watch page of the video sharing platform YouTube and its first-ever video, ‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded on 23 April 2005. Personally, it was fascinating to be part of these conversations with questions around digital conservation and reconstructing digital artefacts aligning with my wider research of sonic technologiesin the V&A’s collection, particularly in the context of non-invasive collecting, and what it means to collect or recordwithout changing the material form or context of an artefact. Continuing along these lines, Zaiba found the , an audio recording device from 1901 that records sound vibrations as tiny grooves into a wax-coated cylindrical mould that can later be traced by a needle for playback. Transforming seemingly immeasurable forces into technologies that capture presence, for the first time, Zaiba observed the hidden codes imprinted throughout the collection. “Pressed into wax, made reproducible, made into a commodity… The wax cylinder is the moment nature gets encoded. It is where the extractive logic of the information age quietly begins.” As part of Zaiba’s event at the end of her residency, she collaborated with holistic voice practitioner, Manuela Barczewski, developing two participatory vocal healing and sound bath workshops centred around resonance and sound therapy. The method combines vowel sounds, overtone singing, and percussion to encourage deep relaxation and meditative states, inviting participants into an altered state of consciousness. Through resonance and embodied listening, the workshops explored non-technological ways of shifting perception, communication, and connection, echoing Zaiba’s research into alternative forms of communication beyond dominant technological systems. In the 2022 exhibition catalogue Drum Listens to Heart, Anthony Huberman suggests that music “began with early humans mimicking and externalising their own heartbeat, tapping it out with their hands or feet”. Immersed by objects and their resonance, Zaiba extends this, offering a reading of rewilding technologies formed around systems of care and reciprocity. “From African talking drums to morse code. From the wax cylinder to the worldwide web. From the first mobile phone to the device in your pocket right now… A genealogy that begins much earlier than the Information Age and begins elsewhere. It begins with every community that encoded knowledge into signal, into rhythm, into gesture, into pattern.” “Rewilding is not a rejection of technology. It is not nostalgia. It is not a return to an imagined past, but the imagination of what relationships with technology could be – symbiotic, reciprocal and attuned”. Over to you? Inspired to use Order-an-Object and begin your own research into our collections? It’s free and available 7 days a week, even during our evening openings on Thursdays and Saturdays. With over 340,000 objects to choose from, find out how to choose your first objects to have some 1:1 time with here Order an Object · V&A Special thanks to Nathalie Kane, Carmem Saito, Anna Mladentseva, Patrica Flacao, and Glenn Cumiskey for their insights into digital collections and conservation at V&A and credits to Sally Barton and Derya Adiyaman for producing Morses Code workshops in the Foyle Learning Centre.