Metamedia

Alessandra Lopez y Royo, Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture at the School of Arts, Roehampton University London, has launched her e-book exploring reconstructions of dance movements from the archaeological record.

"This online book brings together dance and archaeology, engaging with body knowledge, understanding archaeology as a corporeal way of knowing."

Dr. Lopez y Royo's work simultaneously engages with issues of cross-cultural interaction and the relocation of cultural and artistic practices, in the past and in the present. As she describes the project in the preface. "The dance past is fragmentary: dance reconstruction is based on reassemblages of fragments and traces of the dance past and interpretation of these. The dance past translates into a notion of dance heritage, often posited as both value and conflict–free, and predicated on authenticity and purity. Dance reconstruction involves engaging with issues of dance representation and documentation. The documentation of dance is itself a form of dance representation. The documentation of dance is inevitably partial and based on classifications which are not meant to reflect a definitive order of things, but are conceived as flexible tools of understanding. Representation changes its object, thus representing dance is not about capturing its ‘authentic essence’ but about transformation; documentation of dance is about capturing (and transforming, through interpretation) fragments of the dance experience."

Read more of Alessandra Lopez y Royo's book@Chiasme.soft.books here.

The e-book medium of the project merges the rich content of the book, an analysis of how dance is re-presented in contemporary performance and media, with a form capable of offering multi-media examples and interactivity. As Dr. Lopez y Royo states in the preface: "For a number of reasons: this is work in progress and I wish to start making it available as I am writing it, hoping to reach as wide a readership as possible (the global community of internet users keeps on growing by the minute). I also wish to complement the writing with images, video-clips and web links to interesting sites, something that would lack immediacy if it were done on paper. ."

Posted by Timothy Webmoor at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Matt Edgeworth, of the School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, has released an on-line, soft book: Acts of Discovery: An Ethnography of Archaeological Practice. An important movement in archaeology has been to turn reflexive attention to the process of field excavation and survey. Yet most archaeologists have restricted such awareness to the end products or results of research; generally the site report or other textual manifestation. Matt has done a great service in reminding archaeologists that we are, in spite of the close disciplinary ties (especially in the States), our own poor ethnographers. We forget to notice the complex exchanges which occur between archaeologists and the material minutiae that constitute 'the stuff' of doing archaeology. Lending an observant and anthropological eye to what these exchanges are when we do archaeology, Matt has made the familiar strange.

As has summed it up himself: Turning the outward-looking gaze back on the treasure-house of material items of equipment stored in the tool-shed and the planning-hut is a strategy that is likely to cause surprise. Such implements are rarely if ever constituted as the objects of attention in themselves; they are used to work upon other objects, and it is those objects being worked that occupy attention. Tools such as trowels, spades, brushes, cameras, scales, theodolites and planning-frames are the mundane things of everyday life for archaeologists working out in the field. Yet these are the implements through which the objects of knowledge are brought to light, manipulated, meaningfully-constituted and transformed into textual data. It is precisely these mundane articles that mediate the subject-object and culture-nature transactions that characterise the production of archaeological knowledge. Any general (i.e. reflexive) theory of material culture should start here. More of Matt's on-line writing projects can found at his site.

Posted by Timothy Webmoor at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)