This is one of Michael Shanks's sites.
It is about the way with think and write - archaeologically.
This is Traumwerk version 3.
Version 1 was a classroom space for building site reports and is now offline. A report will soon be available here - Traumwerk 1.0
Version 2 is a more personal authoring space - [link] - and is gradually being replaced by this version 3.
Traumwerk, like the other collaboratories at Metamedia (Stanford), is a wiki - a web-based authoring environment that enables the collaborative, fast and easy building of hypertext and hypermedia - linked pages of text, images, indeed any kind of digital content.
content. You could say that Traumwerk Version 4 is what has become of the webspace of my Metamedia Lab - >45k pages and >400 contributors.
Like all hypertext or hypermedia, Traumwerk is about browsing through links.
Traumwerk means dreamwork - following connections, as in a dream. This can be fascinating and enlightening.
And, like dreamwork, the experience can also be disorienting.
Traumwerk is a project of the Metamedia Lab - closely affiliated with Stanford Humanities Lab and part of Stanford's Archaeology Center - specializing in the archaeological materiality of media, in the mediation, the documentation of remains of the past.
Disorienting - even more so given this subject of Traumwerk - ruined bits of the past, archaeological materials and experiences, entropy, detritus.
Even more so - like all archaeology and like all web sites, Traumwerk is a process rather than a product. It is always being re-constructed. Traumwerk is never more than work in progress. It tends to entropy and chaos. Layers of edits, versions, reworkings.
Some thoughts on the character of non-linear, topological documentation
>> Design philosophy - heretical empirics
Two projects:
Sicily - 33 archaeological moments - a contemporary archaeological field project.
Three rooms - an archaeological scenography that deals with presence and performance.
An earlier experiment of a site report - Knossos 1921 - included work on the categories at the heart of our understanding of place - [link]
Microlecture - writing archaeological history
