The Hanttula DEPARTMENT OF FUTURE ANTIQUITIES serves to collect, catalog, preserve, and present items of notable beauty, curiosity, and enigmatic significance.
This glass vial, recently accessioned into the Department’s collection, contains the residual chads produced by a c.1939 International Business Machines (IBM) Scoring Stencil Punch. The punch, designed as an accessory to the IBM 805 Test Scoring Machine, perforated examination cards to facilitate automated tabulation. Each discarded disc of paper represents not only the mechanical record of an individual’s selected response, but also the tangible trace of intellectual endeavor, choice, and the imagined possibilities such decisions might have shaped.
