Metamedia

Matt Ratto, Michael Shanks and Christopher Witmore organized a session at the Society for Social Studies of Science conference in Pasadena, CA this past weekend (October 20-22). The conference focus was on “The Representation of Controversial Objects: New Methods of Displaying the Unruly and the Anomalous in Science and Technology Studies.”

Here is the abstract from our session “The Past: What an Unruly Thing!” :

Archaeology as a discipline has always had to play a dangerous game, working both to explain and contain the past through scientific means and, at the same time, seeking to explore and manifest history as an interpretive and hermeneutic object. In this sense, Archaeology stretches over the divide (marked even more clearly by the “science wars”,) between science and the humanities, with archaeologists recognizing that they often have to play both sides.

One recent response to this has been the incorporation of new means of representing and engaging with the past; traditional archaeological tools such as the map, the photograph, the scale model, and the material archive have been supplemented by computation simulations, visual models, new forms of performance and other modes of engaging with and articulating history. This work takes many forms and draws upon such diverse fields as economics, physics, and computer science, as well as architecture, literature, cultural and theater studies. As such, much of it sits in a complex relationship to modernist epistemics, and works to balance probablistic theories of the past with possibilistic and interpretive stances.

This panel attempts to describe and explore recent developments in archaeology as a way of reflecting on the issue of representation and the “unruly object.” In the discussion that follows, we will reflect on the relationship between STS and archaeology.

Michael and Chris were able to highlight a number of Metamedia projects oriented toward manifesting qualities of the material world otherwise sieved away by conventional forms of documentation.

Our message: archaeology's strained position stetched across the divide between the humanities and sciences is of interest to science studies.

Michael pointed to "three agendas or trends emerging in archaeology that lend force to archaeology's uniqueness:

• an understanding of archaeology as mode of cultural production – a scientific practice working on what is left of the past, archaeology is not a discovery of the past per se;

• archaeology seen as a science of relations between people and things;

• archaeology as mediating practice - translating materiality and mediating past and present in future-oriented projects."

Michael suggested "that these developments are of significant interest to science studies not least because they invoke:

• radically new ways of understanding cultural materiality;

• a new history and genealogy of humans and (cultural) artifacts (to include a pragmatogony);

• reevaluation of cultural heritage – the intimate relationship between tradition, the remains of history and contemporary cultural values and identities."

In complementing Michael's piece, Chris suggested "archaeology, unlike other sciences, actively transforms its fields of study. Archaeology transforms material/event contexts of practice into a combination of displaced things and media (plans, maps, diagrams, text, images, etc.). In this regard, archaeology always returns to a material world permanently transformed.

This transformative aspect of archaeology's practice means we can only get one shot to manifest the material world sufficiently. Though we may not always be sure how the unruly qualities of the material past can make a difference in our practices now, we have to consider how archaeologists or an interested public will engage with the remnants of the material past 10, 50, 100 or more years from now. In this regard, we can only anticipate for future generations by giving something of our practice over to multiplicities, presences and ambiguities."

Beyond programs of action science studies has yet to sufficienctly grasp the richness of things. Archaeology has much to contribute in terms of how it attends to issues of material presence, experience and multiplicity. Fortunately researchers and philosophers of science such as Matt Ratto, Laura Watts and Don Ihde are listening.

Posted by Christopher Witmore at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Metamedia announces a new collaboratory in historical and contemporary archaeology which focuses on the city of Bath in southwest England. The project is under the direction of Dr Dan Hicks of the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, the University of Bristol.

According to Dan:

"The project explores the complexities of the city's Iron Age, Romano-British, medieval and post-medeival pasts, and how they are enacted in the present through a diversity of contemporary activities - tourist, everyday, archaeological. It will explore the many contemporary walks and tours of the city. How everyday contemporary practices - shopping, for instance - take place in relation to the historical built environment How antiquarian and archaeological practices have engaged with the city's material remains since the eighteenth century - at the Roman Baths in particular. This is a project in the contemporary archaeology of a world heritage site - http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/428"

Posted by Christopher Witmore at 11:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The first meeting of the Critical Studies in New Media workshop for 2005 was held today on the fourth floor of the Stanford Humanities Lab. Organized by Michael Shanks, Fred Turner and Sebastian De Vivo this year's workshop examines and debates "cutting edge thinking around this topic of the politics of presence."

According to the organizers:

"The group will, as before in this workshop, be one that radically crosses the conventional boundaries between different approaches to media. It will combine media practice, perspectives from media industries and institutions, and socio-political critique.

Intellectual edge and cutting across conventional fields of understanding and practice - this is what distinguishes our workshop from other courses and seminars in media at Stanford and makes it unique.

Objectives - to convene the group commited to exploring key issues every two weeks during quarter; to organize two weekend colloquia in February and June (2006); to manifest this interest in an on-line collaboratory."

They articulate the notion of "presence" as:

"Presence is a contested aspect of social and cultural experience. Notions of presence hinge on the relationship between the live and mediated, on notions of immediacy, authenticity and originality. Presence prompts questions of the character of self-awareness, of the presentation of self. Interaction is implicated — presence implies being in someone's presence. And agency - one's ability to effect such representation and relationship. Location too — to be present is to be somewhere. Hence presence also directs us outside the self into the social and spatial. And also, of course, presence directs us into temporality — a fulcrum is tense and the relationship between past and present.

An aspect of presence is representation - both mimesis and political representation. Hence presence fundamentally implicates the communicative relationship between what or who is represented and how. At the heart of presence is politics and the polis.

We propose that the workshop focuses on this theme of the politics of presence - matters of power, agency, and identity in the ways that media experiences generate and manage presence.

Key questions and fields revolve around agency, site/location and the body.

Agency.

How do infrastructures (of any kind - social, political, material) shape the ability of the individual to have political presence?

What are we to make of the increasing expression of politics as media experience?

How are media companies, political agencies and/or other organizations using media to shape the experience of presence in culturally or institutionally determined ways?

What's the difference between presence, agency and representation?

What happens when media generate mixed realities that subvert the distinction between real and represented, original and simulated?

These questions raise the topic of "virtual communities" and socio-media, new forms of (political) association.

Site/location.

Media and mediation are always located. Media technologies always connect with place. They are mediating forms, between people and structures/institutions.

How are media implicated in politically charged locations?

Surveillance and mutual monitoring are relevant here.

How do we think about immersive environments - fused intermedia as well multiple media ensembles - in relation to presence, identity and agency?

How are media involved in the generation of corporate presence beyond the individual in places like department stores, malls and airports?

Body.

How are the truth and knowledge of one's self and being shaped by mediating forms/technologies?

What happens when there isn't an individual to be present anymore, because they are dispersed through multiple media?

What happens when the individual is dispersed through mediating forms such that the absolute distinction between self and representation is less relevant than notions of iterative remediating processes?

What happens when the enviornment within which we're present finds its home inside our bodies, when media and bodies merge? Key issues here are immersive media environments, cyborg bodies and emerging nano technologies.

Change and history.

Agency, site/location and body need to be understood in historical perspective.

How should we think about presence in the present in relation to presence in the past?

What about immersive environments and other media management of presence in the past?

Media history - what is new about new media and its relation to presence?

Are these really issues of "new" media?"

The next meeting will be held on Friday 28 Oct at 10 Wallenberg Hall 4th Floor. The workshop will focus on Geoffrey Bowker's and Susan Leigh Star's wonderful book "Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences," MIT, 2000.

Posted by Christopher Witmore at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)