Abstract
This chapter examines art property in its digital manifestation. It interrogates Harvard's refusal to repatriate objects acquired through chattel slavery and looks at the differing approaches artists Carrie Mae Weems and Sasha Huber have taken in transfiguring daguerreotypes of enslaved persons collected by professor Louis Agassiz. Weems incorporated the daguerreotypes into her own photographic series; and Huber inserted her body into the sites of Agassiz's scientific travels to extend and alter his archive. Tamara Lanier, a descendant of one of the photographed subjects, has contested Harvard's ownership of the daguerreotypes. The arguments in the law suit make it clear that the digital object is at the center of Harvard's refusal of repatriation; the refusal protects the digital afterlife of what the university dispossessed from enslaved persons, while the physical object will soon become obsolete. The history of immaterial art and the aestheticization of property contextualize this uneasy transition into digital property.