Fascinating website of photographs found undeveloped in old cameras - [Link - westfordcomp.com]

Camera c 1947.

(Thanks again to Sam (Schillace) for this link.)

The heavy metal umlaut

Now this entry is going to sound very esoteric to many of you. But please persevere and watch the linked movie.

This is about the future of cross-disciplinary collaborative research.

In the Metamedia Lab here at Stanford, we make much of the facility of our social software (like the Metamedia pages or Traumwerk) to track every change made to its pages. You can watch a bunch of us edit a collaboratively authored page on symmetrical archaeology, for example.

So what? - you might well ask.

Think of the teamwork that is archaeology.

A bunch of esoteric specialists in genetics, art history, taphonomy, trowelling, ceramics, soil science … and all the rest, working together to make sense of the remains of the past.

Wouldn’t it be instructive to watch how they might co-author a study of an archaeological site - comparing evidence and inference?

Here is how it might look - Jon Udell’s screen cast of a study of a page in Wikipedia on the heavy metal umlaut. (What a great philological topic!)

[Blog page link]

In Boing Boing today - found photos from the Arkansas State Prison 1915-1937 - [Link]

I liked the caption:

In 1975, documentary artist Bruce Jackson found a bunch of old prison photos in a drawer in the Arkansas penitentiary. The people being photographed have no interest in the photographs being made; the people making the photographs have no interest in the photographs they have made.

At the National Gallery in London with my sister and nephew.

I always try to make a visit when I pass through the UK.

Today I made a beeline for the Hoogstraten peepshow.

My fascination with realism, perspective, the camera, optical instrumentality and everyday interiors continues.

The peepshow is a box with a painted interior that you view through one of two peepholes to see a remarkable illusion of a room, with a dog.

It involves a quite unrealistic anamorphic distortion that disappears when you look at the room through the peepholes.

You might be in there.

Framing matters.

This is a follow-up on my thoughts about Peter Greenaway’s movies [blog link], and Vermeer - Philip Steadman’s fascinating book about Vermeer’s optics.

Gwen Lorraine in Stanford Humanites Center has made me a room in a cigar box, a reconstruction of a scene from Hemingway, a scene of crime - to appear in archaeography.

Lower Marsh, La Barca Restaurant with Alan Campbell

Media stars all over the walls - agents’ photos. A curious genre.

David Suchet - Hercule Poirot

Black and white, mannerist, smiley faces.

They say “we had dinner here and gave the restaurant our photo”.

But also these photos make me think of claims like “Henry VIII slept in this bed”.

Or, the photos, witnessing a dinner taken by someone in this very room where I too now eat, create a similar effect to the knowledge that something happened here - “a murder occured in this room”.

So these photos are another sort of archaeological media trace.

An example of located media too - a specific association of medium, place and event.

We eat at the Hayes Street Grill in San Francisco. Like La Barca, it is around the corner from theatres and concert halls and sports on its walls lots of agents’ photos of minor celebrities.

Alan and I were talking about the routes we have followed in the last twenty years from the North East of England to where we are now, Stanford and Westminster, and reflecting on Arnie in California and successors to Tony Blair in the UK.

Site specifics - it could hardly have been the same conversation in San Francisco, even if the words were the same.

Glasgow TAG

A highlight of the conference, for me, was Layla Renshaw talking about photographs of the excavation of remains of victims of the Spanish civil war.

The context is that of the growing application of forensic archaeology to investigate mass graves in Bosnia, Iraq, Argentine, Spain. To identify. To pursue justice. To achieve some closure for victims’ families.

Layla has been studying the way these investigations are being photographed - new genres, new iconographies of death and memory. A new genre of family protraiture.

A woman sits at a table facing the camera, looking directly at you. She gently touches a photograph with one finger. It is in black and white, of a man, taken in the 1930s. It is at an angle to the viewer and you can’t make out many details. The color of the photograph is raw, oversaturated - newspaper color. She remembers this man. It was her uncle.

When we were in Sicily in 1999, part of the excavations of Monte Polizzo, Cliff (McLucas) and I were fascinated by the images of victims of the 1968 Belice valley earthquake. The cemetery at Gibellina has a number of marble faced mausolea that record a name beneath a photograph. They seem to have been printed on the stone itself and were the most evocative of portraits.

Ruderi di Gibellina - in memory of the earthquake of 1968

Another image from Layla - of an archaeological trench and the excavation of a skeleton, and sitting at the back of the trench, a member of their family today, looking on …

Media archaeology - working on the traces of a medium.

Theatre/archaeology - the (re)articulation of traces of the past as real-time event.

10×10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris

10×10 (’ten by ten’) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The result is an often moving, sometimes shocking, occasionally frivolous, but always fitting snapshot of our world. Every hour, 10×10 collects the 100 words and pictures that matter most on a global scale, and presents them as a single image, taken to encapsulate that moment in time. Over the course of days, months, and years, 10×10 leaves a trail of these hourly statements which, stitched together side by side, form a continuous patchwork tapestry of human life.

10×10 is ever-changing, ever-growing, quietly observing the ways in which we live. It records our wars and crises, our triumphs and tragedies, our mistakes and milestones. When we make history, or at least the headlines, 10×10 takes note and remembers.

Each hour is presented as a picture postcard window, composed of 100 different frames, each of which holds the image of a single moment in time. Clicking on a single frame allows us to peer a bit deeper into the story that lies behind the image. In this way, we can dart in and out of the news, understanding both the individual stories and the ways in which they relate to each other.

I am not sure the blurb is that appropriate - too epic, too much hype.

10×10 is actually fascinating because of its mundanity - not because it is some kind of grand historical record. And, for me, this is also precisely its power - history is found in these media details that we turn into something else - stories of triumph, tragedy, milestones, mistakes …

The way the text works with the image is interesting too - how a caption, of course, changes what we are looking at.

More media archaeology - not sure why it has taken me so long to come across the Dead Media Project.

This is how Bruce Sterling and Richard Kadrey put it in their modest proposal

Think of it this way. How long will it be before the much-touted World Wide Web interface is itself a dead medium? And what will become of all those billions of thoughts, words, images and expressions poured onto the Internet? Won’t they vanish just like the vile lacquered smoke from a burning pile of junked Victrolas? As a net.person, doesn’t this stark realization fill you with a certain deep misgiving, a peculiarly postmodern remorse, an almost Heian Japanese sense of the pathos of lost things? If it doesn’t, why doesn’t it? It ought to.

Speaking of dead media and mono no aware – what about those little poems that Lady Murasaki used to write and stick inside cleft sticks? To be carried by foot- messager to the bamboo-shrouded estate of some lucky admirer after a night’s erotic tryst? That was a medium. That medium was very alive once, a mainstay of one of the most artistically advanced cultures on earth. And isn’t it dead? What are we doing today that is the functional equivalent of the cleft sticks of Murasaki Shikibu, the world’s first novelist? If we ignore her historical experience, how will we learn from our own?

Listen to the following, all you digital hipsters. This is Jaqueline Goddard speaking in January 1995. Jacqueline was born in 1911, and she was one of the 20th century’s great icons of bohemian femininity. Man Ray photographed her in Paris in 1930, and if we can manage it without being sued by the Juliet Man Ray Trust, we’re gonna put brother Man Ray’s knock-you-down-and-stomp-you- gorgeous image of Jacqueline up on our vaporware Website someday. She may be the patron saint of this effort.

Jacqueline testifies: “After a day of work, the artists wanted to get away from their studios, and get away from what they were creating. They all met in the cafes to argue about this and that, to discuss their work, politics and philosophy…. We went to the bar of La Coupole. Bob, the barman, was a terrible nice chap… As there was no telephone in those days everybody used him to leave messages. At the Dome we also had a little place behind the door for messages. The telephone was the death of Montparnasse.”

“The telephone was the death of Montparnasse.” Mull that Surrealist testimony over a little while, all you cafe-society modemites …

A new blog devoted to remix and sampling - Media trips

Here’s an entry of theirs from October 20 -

Check out the newly posted projects at the recently launched online exhibition Digital Recycling at The Stunned Net Art Open 2004, where one person’s trash is another’s treasure trove:

What’s more, you can participate by uploading or downloading all kinds of files, images, music, texts. My favorite tagline? The Dump is The Message:

Digitalrecycling aims to build a community of people who use discarded information as their medium. Users may log on to the “digitalrecycling operating system” and either upload or download their own or other peoples’ digital trash. “The point is not to deny privacy, but to rethink property.”

Thanks to Troels (Myrup) for spotting this one.

Mike Pearson, performance artist, was in Stanford this week. We wrote the book Theatre/Archaeology together.

He talked to our New Media Workshop about recent work of his, and then to the Archaeology Center about his research into what really went on in the expeditions to the Antarctic back in the early 1900s.

Both were provocative.

In Carrying Lyn, Mike and John Rowley carried Lyn Levett through the streets of Cardiff. Lyn, who was Dave, is a quadriplegic actress. As Dave she played King Arthur in Brith Gof’s Arturius Rex. Mike and John were dressed in smart dark suits and ties, Lyn similarly formal in dress and heels. Polaroid photographs were taken and video was made of performers and audience/witnesses (who often became co-performers); South Wales Police obliged with footage from their surveillance cameras.

Polis was another urban piece, an exercise in reconstituting experience. Audience and performers were sent out with instructions to visit, witness events indeterminately staged or spontaneous, gather evidence in the form of video, make reports back at the point of origin, where everything was (re)constituted, or rather where sense was sought in the media fragments. Narratives were framed, connections and coincidences noted, some designed, others happenstance.

Both - theater and performance meeting urban experience in a combination of situationist derive, modernist flanerie and the search for a temporary autonomous zone escaping anomie and state supervision, and all under the watchful eye of the surveillance camera overseeing the street that has literally become Benjamin’s scene of crime.

Provocative - Lyn Levett, being carried, being dropped by Mike with a sickening thud as she hit the ground - someone who is “dead” weight because of their quadriplegia. Who were the performers, who the audience? Just what was going on in such a simple walk across a city on a busy weekend afternoon? And the status of the record - the photographs, reports, video. Above all the question is raised of the status of theater itself. We are used now to notions of performance and performativity being used to understand social and cultural experience - we are all performers. The concepts help us make sense of things. And theater has become intimate with the nation and the state, not least in notions of national theater that confirm our relation to where we belong with its sites (theaters and sets), familiar characters and stories. The comforting world of entertainment. But Mike is working in a different historical space, one that asks theater and performance to retain or recover a disruptive role - an ethics of worlds turned upside down.

So too in Polar Theater. An archaeology of science and heroism. Mike has been uncovering the evidence for the daily lives of those on the early expeditions under the likes of Shackelton, Scott and Amundsen that explored Antarctica. The usual story is one of heroism in the face of the forces of nature. All the expeditions had a scientific purpose, supposedly, behind them. Extreme science, at the edge of things. But here they are in the photos Mike has found in Cambridge and New Zealand performing in drag and black-face, with repurposed scenery and costume, and according to scripts later found dog chewed in the ice.

In some ways this is a simple exercise in archaeology. The camps are now designated heritage sites and so much is left perfectly preserved in the polar ice. But how should the huts be reconstructed? As sites of scientific heroism - neatly ordered spaces with desks, instruments and supplies? Or as theaters? - what took up so much of their time. Mike tracked the instrumentality of the expeditions - the way they worked with animals (pets, tools, food), the repurposing of equipment, the improvisations around science, acting the hero, and acting the fool. And the class and cultural relationships of officers and other ranks, in expeditions of Britain’s Royal Navy to the ends of the earth.

At the meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists a couple of years ago in Thessaloniki Doug Baliey and I ran a session on critical heresy in archaeology. Mike presented a video about Polar Theater. The night before the Berkeley team excavating Çatal Höyük had presented their own video on the life of their project; it included their own amateur dramatics in the evenings after the day’s work of painstaking observation and record. The connection was not lost on the audience. And this, of course, is how real science works. It is not some uncanny communion with the mysteries and forces of nature, of evidence, of archaeological sources. Stories of heroic discovery are glosses on the mundanity of even extreme science. What scientists really get up to in their daily lives is often seen as irrelevant to the science, to the great grand story, or as instrumentality, or it is simply overlooked. But the everyday needs to be (archaeologically) uncovered, because it is where science actually occurs.

Mike’s theater archaeology is an ethnography of science. Just as archaeology is the performance of the past.