Tim van der Heijden receives The PLANT Visiting Fellowship 2026 Grant

The fellowship offers him the opportunity to further develop his ideas regarding a 'digital experimental media archaeology'. Specifically, he will investigate how practices of 3D digitization and modeling can foster learning processes regarding media-historical objects and their user practices.

Digital Experimental Media Archaeology

This semester, he turns The PLANT: Playground and Laboratory for New Technologies at Maastricht University into a laboratory for 'digital experimental media archaeology': a playful and experimental space in which participants can thinker (a combination of thinking and tinkering) with media heritage objects and explore the value of 3D digitization and modelling technologies for documenting and enriching media heritage collections through digital storytelling practices.

Creating Digital Collections

As part of his fellowship, Van der Heijden is also working with Costas Papadopoulos and Anna Villarica to bring his media history expertise into the course Creating Digital Collections of the Master's Media Studies: Digital Cultures at the Maastricht University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Students are making annotated and multimodal 3D scholarly editions of various analogue film cameras, projectors and accessories, which together will form a digital collection on the topic of 'Amateur Cinema' for the PURE3D-platform. The objects have been kindly borrowed from the C2DH - Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History.

3D Scholarly Editions

Furthermore, the fellowship grant will be used to further developing two new 3D scholarly for the PURE3D project 'A Genealogy of Home Cinema'. In addition to the 3D editions on The Kinora and the Pathé Baby, he will be working on editions covering the Pathé KOK 28mm film projector (ca. 1912) and Ernemann Kinox 35mm projector (ca. 1920) as early-twentieth century home cinema technologies.