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Posted by Bradley Sekedat
Bradley M. Sekedat
Brown University
A growing number of recent studies seek new ways to engage with landscapes (see references). The Carrlands Project (www.carrlands.org.uk) fits aptly into this category as it explores the complexity of the Carrs in southeastern England through the combination of music, dialogue, and composed sound recordings. The format of this presentation is a website that hosts a series of 12 recordings divided among three specific portions of the Carrlands: Snitterby Carrs, Hibaldstow Carrs and Horkstow Carrs. Each recording is approximately 15 minutes long, treating the ‘historical,’ ‘cultural’ and ‘physical’ variations that make up this diverse region. The creators (Mike P. Pearson, John Hardy and Hugh Fowler) encourage users either to bring the recordings with them to the Carrs to enhance the interactivity of their engagement, or to listen to the audio clips at a distance, embracing the message of complexity inherent within them. This reviewer listened from his office in Providence, Rhode Island. I paid particular attention to the dominant themes that arise out of the scripted narrations and musical compositions that accompany the journey through the flat, marshy, industrial and agricultural terrain.
Continue reading "Landscape Complexity and New Media: a review of the Carrlands Project Website (Mike Pearson)." »
Posted by Yannis Hamilakis
Yannis Hamilakis
An ancient architectural fragment from the Erechtheion on the Acropolis with an 1805 inscription in Ottoman Arabic (Photo by Fotis Ifantidis; cf. Paton 1927: 7-72; Hamilakis 2007: 98-99).
During the course of a series of studies on the social and political lives of ruins in Greece (cf. Hamilakis 2007), I was, inevitably, often drawn on the most iconic specimen of Greek national imagination, the Athenian Acropolis. I thus soon became aware of two facts: the first is that most tourist guides and official presentations to the site still present to the nearly 2 million visitors per year a sanitized image, a partial, monumentalized façade of only one aspect of the rich social biography of the monument: a version of its classic life, broadly defined. The site was important before classical times, and it continued to be important subsequently, up to the present. Yet, very little of that richness reaches the visitors. Moreover, the site continues to be projected exclusively as a sight, a staged authenticity that is offered to the visitors for almost exclusively visual consumption and admiration. I have elsewhere explored this phenomenon by pointing to this ocularcentric monumentalisation as the outcome of the combined efforts of the photographic and the archaeological (Hamilakis 2001, 2008).
Continue reading "The Other Acropolis Project" »
Posted by Jonathan Edelman
There is a Chasidic teaching about the Mezuzah, a small container which encloses a parchment upon which several passages of the Torah are written. The Mezuzah is placed on the door posts of houses and gates. The teaching expands on the placement of the Mezuzah, a place between the inside and the outside. There is a moment when you are no longer inside, but not yet outside. In this in between state, you are gathered up into the G-d Head, the Ain Sof, and made anew. The philosophers in the mystical tradition explore this notion, and consider similar moments, such as when an egg contains a being that is no longer an egg and not yet a chicken. Here again, the Rabbis suggest that this is the moment that the being is brought into the Ain Sof, the Source of Undifferentiated Being, and reformed. According to this teaching, this gathering up may occur at the threshold between any set of polarities, any set of dualities (Omer-man, 2002).
Between the moment an idea for a new invention is conceived and the moment a manufactured product comes off the production line, all work done in design engineering is done through the agency of representation. Representation in the field of engineering design encompasses a broad range of media, including rough sketches, physical prototypes, photographs, engineering drawings, stories, lists, charts, descriptions, and numeric digital files. Given representations central role in design, it would seem that successful development of an engineered product may be largely due dependent on the careful management of the “media cascades” which drive the design process. What does a media cascade look like? What are the characteristics of an effective media cascade? What work, so to speak, does a media cascade do for a design engineer?
The work of the design engineer is to bring concepts into being. A design engineer begins with a notion of something with the potential of existing, and reaches a point when the thing actually exists. Thus, the design engineer plays between the poles of the potential and the actual. Contemporary design theory offers a useful analysis of making representations of the potential and the actual in the design process.
C.K. Theory (Hatchuel and Weil 2002) posits a set of dualities, Concepts and Knowledge in an attempt to fashion a unified Design theory, based on Set Theory. A “Concept” is defined as, “a notion or proposition without logical status”. A piece of “Knowledge” is “a proposition with a logical status for the designer of the person receiving the design.” By logical status, the authors mean something that exists.
Furthermore, Hatchuel and Weil posit a fundamental proposition “design reasoning must always make a distinction between two related spaces: the space of concepts and the space of knowledge.” These spaces are made in relation to one another; K is the precondition of C, and the contents of C can expand the set of K.
How does a design engineer cross the space in between C and K? What happens in the moments when the designer traverses the threshold between Concept space and Knowledge space?
The road to understanding what occurs in this space has several markers. The first I will consider is to be found in the science studies of Bruno Latour. In his seminal “We Have Never Been Modern”, Latour suggests that the quest of Modernism is the distillation of phenomena into dualities, the paradigm of which is seen in Kant’s model of the gulf between “things in themselves” and the “transcendental ego”. Language and objects are likewise separated by an un-bridgeable chasm, which keeps knowing and the objects of knowing at bay. Latour explains that we have never been modern, because we are actually in the work of making “hybrids”, entities which lay between the poles of duality. Our problem, Latour suggests, is that we either fool ourselves into thinking hybrids don’t exist, or we are seduced into believing our real work is the work of purification, that is to say making dualities (Latour, 1993).
(Circulating Reference cf. Latour 1999:73)
Continue reading "Between C and K: Archaeological Practices of Mediation in Engineering Design" »
Posted by Andrew Cochrane
By Andrew Cochrane (Cardiff University).
On Wednesday 17 October 2007, the auspicious Council Chamber of the Glamorgan Building at Cardiff University, played host for a workshop dedicated to the skill enhancement of graduate and part-time teachers and new lectures in archaeology and classics. Rather than rely on more traditional approaches to lecturing and presentation, this day-school sought to illuminate alternative modes of teaching and mediation.
Continue reading "Supporting Teaching and Learning in Archaeology and Classics: a day in the life of a day school" »
Posted by Krysta Ryzewski
The Greene Farm Archaeology Project (GFAP), in Warwick, Rhode Island, began in 2004 as a transdisciplinary and long-term project designed to facilitate research among a broad range of scholars and volunteers, using established and experimental archaeological methods. The central focus of the project is on researching 400 years of cultural and natural landscape transformations on one of the few remaining Providence Plantations (see project wiki http://proteus.brown.edu/greenefarm/Home).
Greene Farm landscape (2004).
In 2005, artist Lee Fearnside approached GFAP interested in filming a documentary called Telling Stories, focusing on how archaeologists create knowledge through discovering history. As archaeologists and historians having little knowledge or experience with filmmaking, we permitted Fearnside access to the project without considering how her work might affect our practices directly and indirectly. We were especially interested to see how Fearnside would translate and represent archaeology in her art, as she had no archaeological background except for having read Deetz’s In Small Things Forgotten. Over the course of two years, Fearnside filmed the field crew during excavations and in the laboratories. Though still a work in progress, I recently screened a rough cut of the film for the members of the Greene Farm field crew and gathered their response through a detailed survey and several discussions.
As an anthropologically trained archaeologist, I am particularly interested in examining the reception of the film by those whose work, voices, images, and interpretations appear in it. The field crew’s feedback and reactions are especially valuable in thinking about the many implications for relationships between artistic film/creative documentation and archaeology projects, and more importantly, the implications for how digital media affects archaeological practice. The following commentary focuses on an experiment stemming from the crews’ mixed reactions to the film. This is not an attempt to discuss the quality of the film (which is remarkable) or whether the filmmaker successfully captures the “creation of knowledge”. Instead, the purpose is to explore some of the questions and observations resulting from the intersection of the creative documentation and archaeological projects, as initially raised through the voices of the crew.
Continue reading "Creative Documentation and Archaeological Practice: Surveying Archaeologists on Film" »
Posted by Andrew Cochrane and Ian Russell
An artistic exploration of archaeological theory
Andrew Cochrane (Cardiff University) Ian Russell (Trinity College, Dublin)
The pieces in this exhibition seek to contest traditional mechanisms for representation and spectatorship by questioning the status that visual images occupy in archaeological discourse. Photomosaics of iconic archaeologists and archaeological objects are constructed through the manufacture of archives and archaeological records of public images available over internet search engines. This digital ‘excavation’ of what is traditionally an unarchived public space marks the beginnings of a digital archaeological practice.
Inspired by Joan Foncuberta's series of Googlegrams (2005), we call into question the ways in which archaeologists position themselves and their work within contemporary society. By juxtaposing the figures of archaeologists or archaeological artefacts with a collage of public images, the pieces reveal the manufacture of representations of archaeological identities (of archaeologists) and that of the artefacts and monuments with which they work. In addition, through the use of the world wide web and freeware, they also challenge the role that digital media are playing in the fabrication of collective archaeological visual memory, interpretation, and mediated information. Rather than merely engaging in the pasts as archaeology has previously presented them to us, views are disrupted, interrupted and displaced.
During digital ‘excavation’ records are kept of the location, context, and dimensions of each available image in order to produce an ‘archaeological record’ detailing the point in time when the search occurred. This seeks to enhance archaeological practice to confront a world which is rapidly becoming saturated by fluid and transient systems of information. In these works, Google Image searches are utilised to amass libraries of images by employing generalised search terms with no artistic intervention. These libraries are then fed through Easy Mosaic 2005 v1.2 to produce a pixel system which manufactures the original images of archaeologists and objects.
Each (in)dividual piece subverts and parodies notions of 'truth' in archaeology and the veracity of dominant images in the construction of the past and present, memory, identity, gender, emotion and agency. Such a reflexive approach generates connections between unfamiliar essences, resulting in ruptured and fragmented yet dynamic archaeologies, histories and representations.
This exhibition will be composed of between three to five 1m x 1.5m mounted images with accompanying titles cards and a separate poster introducing the exhibition.
Confirmed exhibitions include:
♦ EAA 2006. 19th - 24th September. IAE, Cracow, Poland
♦ CHAT 2006. 10th - 12th November. Bristol University
♦ TAG 2006. 15th - 17th December. University of Exeter
♦ Resisting Archaeology 2007. 17th -20th May. Uppsala University, Sweden
♦ WAC 2007. 20th -27th May. University of the West Indies, Jamaica
Full text version forthcoming with the Cambridge Archaeology Journal February 2007.
Posted by Timothy Webmoor
Archaeology took on Science Studies (again) at the collective (4S) Society for Social Studies of Science and the History of Science Society and Philosophy of Science Association Conference this past weekend (November 2-4, 2006) in Vancouver, BC, Canada. The working title for the conference this year was: "Silence, Suffering and Survival.” While there has been a long history of engagement between archaeology and philosophy of science, too often archaeologists have not taken active part in this inter-disciplinarian debate. Science studies opens a productive avenue for attending to pressing issues in the actual practice of the human sciences. Archaeology is emerging as a unique player in these studies, straddling as it does the natural sciences-humanities divide. And the discipline was well represented with an international assembly of archaeologists and philosophers.
The session was entitled “Silenced pasts: Archaeological practice and the politics of manifestation”. It was organized by Christopher Witmore, Matt Ratto and Michael Shanks. The session included:
Matt Ratto
The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences
The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Amsterdam
matt.ratto@vks.knaw.nl
“Epistemic commitments, virtual reality, and archaeological representation”
Michael Shanks
Stanford Humanities Lab, Metamedia Lab and The Archaeology Center
Stanford University
mshanks@stanford.edu
“Presence effects and archaeological media: case studies in performance arts”
Timothy Webmoor
Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, Metamedia Lab and The Archaeology Center
Stanford University
twebmoor@stanford.edu
“Open source archaeology? The politics of collaborative heritage”
Christopher Witmore
Post-Doctoral Research Associate
The Artemis A.W. Joukowsky and Martha Sharp Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World
Brown University
cwitmore@gmail.com
“Site-specific media, archaeology and collective (im)mortality”
Alison Wylie
Department of Philosophy
University of Washington
aw26@u.washington.edu
Discussant: intellectual boundary crossing and the legacy of archaeology and the study of science
Continue reading "Archaeology and Science Studies - round 2" »
Posted by Christopher Witmore
A thing.
While browsing the discount shelves at a bookstore in downtown, or rather ‘downcity’ (as the locals call it), Providence yesterday and I came across a peculiarly shaped book stamped:
BEIJING 10/2003
AI WEIWEI
Hard bound, covered in a grey paper, imprinted with a weave texture to give the appearance of cloth, the book has the dimensions of a brick, 11.1cm X 24.3cm X 5.9cm.
The first page along with each and every one of the next 862 pages contain two images side by side. Following these images are 2 pages containing 12 lines of Chinese followed by 2 pages containing 14 lines of English text, Arial Font. The text is white printed on a black background. The remainder of the work contains a map of Beijing which is then subdivided into a series of 16 maps by day over the following pages. It ends with the publisher’s credits: timezone 8.
The book is a document of Beijing.
Continue reading "“BEIJING 10/2003 AI WEIWEI”" »
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