Metamedia archaeologists featured in Archaeology Magazine
The summer issue of Archaeology Magazine features a story by Samir Patel discussing a non-academic collective of researchers and new media artists studying modern graffiti practices and their accretion through time at prominent tagging locations in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. The article features interviews with Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor and Christopher Witmore of the Metamedia Lab, Stanford University. With a readership of roughly half a million, the story on this unconventional archaeology of the contemporary past will draw professional and public attention to issues generally relegated to the insular realms of theoretical archaeology. The publication of this project in a popular venue is sure to bring attention to urgent questions regarding the definition of archaeology, the proper subject matter for the discipline, and the archaeological imaginary in the public realm.
Like other pioneering work in modern material culture studies and archaeology of the present, Graffiti Archaeology pushes the edges of what is considered properly archaeological. Principally, it resonants with the notion of an archaeological sensibility that foregoes defining the discipline upon subject matter criteria ('the remote past') and instead emphasizes what is unique to how archaeology understands our complex relationships to things. Attention to minutiae of the everyday; detailed documentation of change through time; the processes behind the accretion of an archaeological trace; the individual and creative acts of even 'marginalized' groups. This broader and bolder view of what is unique to archaeology takes action and practice over etymology and definition to contribute a specialized perspective to deep time and modern material practices. As a shared sensibility, rather than a parochial discipline, archaeology indeed has a place for the interesting and challenging work being done by the graffiti project and others who bring to the fore, if only for a question begging moment, our assumptions about the material world. The article concludes with a concise statement by Timothy Webmoor which candidly sums up the Graffiti Project: "It's not going to be traditionally archaeological, but damn if it's not fascinating."