A labour of love by a Belgian computer scientist, Frederic Cloth, is the basis of Kota: Digital Excavations in African Art, at St Louis’s Pulitzer Arts Foundation (16 October-19 March 2016). Cloth has spent ten years creating a database of more than 2,000 Kota reliquary figures, which come from Gabon in Central Africa. It includes photographs, detailed descriptions, provenance information, size and technical information, as well as publication, exhibition and auction details. “I’m interested in logging every possible detail that can be collected,” says Cloth, who has also written a series of algorithms that made previously unnoticed historical patterns more apparent.
