Wallsend UK

Roman fort at the end of Hadrian’s Wall. I dug here in 1975; I was 15 and I loved fieldwork. I remember the town the most. The site is right by Swann Hunter Shipbuilders, one of the big firms on the Tyne. My dad worked here - late 60s. Most of the old heavy industry has, of course, gone now. Simpson?s Hotel was on the corner - notorious for its low life, they said. Swann Hunter still struggles on.

Th site is now an award winning museum with a nine storey viewing room overlooking what is left of the fort, and the river valley beyond. You can look at the lines to mark barrack foundations with an accompanying VR movie showing you what it might have looked like through the ages. Downstairs are the usual dioramas/reconstructions, here of the Commanding Officer’s house. I didn’t get to the reconstructed bath house at the other side of the site.

School parties look to be the main visitors - the site telling them the story of Roman Britain, with all the anecdotes I got as a child about central heating, communal latrines, wine that was like vinegar.

Very bleak - and it wasn’t the weather. Is it just me that is tired of this sort of place? It all looks the same the world over to me - the souvenir shop at the entrance, the same subdued lighting in the galleries, the same finish to the dioramas, the same lines of building foundations, the same look to the VR movies.

It is now a clichÈ - these sites of heritage industry develop in a climate of imperial decline. This kind of history is all there is left here.

I did like the ship models though.

Sam and I have been working on some ideas - in that space between archaeology, media studies, information science and software engineering.

Here they are in draft (and written jointly in Hydra)

Aims

to discuss and describe media in the abstract, that is as distinct from technical and material properties

to develop a set of terms and methodologies for proactive design of media forms - tools for ‘product design’

These terms will also function as components of a history of media and of (media) design.

Premise and timeliness - media in the light of the digital

Design is here seen as heterogeneous engineering (that is not presupposing any particular definitions of materiality, virtuality, the technical or the cultural)

The aims imply an analysis of the components of product design today in a digital world - creativity, collaboration, research, analysis, styles, and with the digital involving an erosion of conventional distance between ‘the real’ and ‘the virtual’.

The digitization of media removes artifacts from ‘material’ culture. This allows a more rigorous and abstract analysis of media forms and a more deliberate construction of them for specific tasks. The goal is to put forward a set of well-defined terms and methods for doing this analysis and construction.

Alternate way of expressing this: the digitization of media replaces the media artifacts of material culture with different artifacts of digital culture.

See also the Metamedia Lab discussion document

Definition of medium

A medium is a formalized method for conveying a specific kind of information to specific participants. The manner in which this happens is subject to control and negotiation. Usually there has to be some agreement over encoding and decryption. Historically the notion of medium has been intimately associated with and constrained by material and technology, e.g. paint, paper, etc. And also certain institutional forms that controlled the technology. Now it’s becoming less constrained because of the increasing digital nature of communication.

Conventional terms/definitions/components

Media Studies are well established as a branch of cultural studies. Topic - cultural production.

NB also theme of creativity - creating in a cultural sphere

And here culture is often oppposed to material infrastructures in that it is seen to consist of ideas, values, images/representations.

Components of such a cultural studies

technology - eg TV
tools as extensions of the person and the group
material form - paint, film, paper
rules and norms
qualifications for entry
archives/storage
gatekeepers
organisational architectures - TV studio, movie studio
groups, communities, producers, consumers, institutions, organizations
relations of cultural production
power relations - access, control
ideology critique - mass media as ideological state apparatuses

semiotics - communication - signifier-signified-referent
narratology and applications of literary theory/cultural theory

media history

Eigenvectors - media components/parameters

Latency

The delay from changing information to it’s being consumed by other participants. E.g. IM is extremely low latency, email has this weird asymmetric latency - it’s fast to respond but may be slow to read. Newspapers are very slow. Blogs are very fast. Most digital media has low latency. Except eg digital layout for conventional print media.

People notice latency.

Latency is often relative to expectations within the task at hand. A 10 second delay in the context of IM is noticeable and annoying, but in the context of web publishing, is nothing. Hydra is another good example of this.

Persistence

How robust the medium is, how long the data persist without active maintence. Email is fairly persistent, IM is not. Documents are mostly about persistence.

issue here of materiality and curation - in relation to archives
matter here of the archaeology of media

Redundancy

Persistence is related to redundancy. Digitization gives us the choice of how much redundancy we want, and this is an economic choice and we always choose the short-term most economically efficient path. So, we tend to have very ephemeral digital media, because there’s no (economically acceptable) way to choose robustness.

Richness

Raw email text may not be very rich - is very flat - a haiku may be very rich - layout may increase the richness of text

NB McLuhan’s hot and cold media

Complexity

In an information sense this is related to entropy (how much disorder is there?) eg a string of digits is non-entropic because it can be easily compressed - compression is about finding non-entropy/order - and high entropy looks like random noise

Digital media are more complex - they are more entropic - more difficult to compress

Encryption - compression is related to encryption (the encrypted form looks highly entropic)

a painting therefore doesn’t look very complex - eg digitally curating the Mona Lisa might result in a high res compressed file of 10MB - but this is not very redundant

One-to-many-ness

A broadcast factor (1-1, M-M, etc)

Computational accessability

Text vs video vs paint vs XML - eg trying to create semantic webs - semantic computation as a project that ignores (usually) the sociology, the culture

a new factor is available computing power - Google has lots of computing power

Structure/formalism

Programming language, HTML, vs raw text, etc - the degree to which it is parsable (and is therefore computationally accessible) Structure and CA, are often at odds with people. This can be solved, and is more and more, with additional computation. eg Google. Or, my ‘mood indicator’ on my email program, etc.

Lots to think about here with respect to grammar and formal anaylsis.

Temporal structure

The ability to capture, index, retrieve data over time.

- synchronous communication/concurrence - also NB speech and text

Transactional costs

- go down across the board with computation and digitization. E.g. painting with oil vs painting with Painter Pro. wet plaster v Epson printer - NB the sociology of this and matters of democratization/ status/prestige goods/media) WWW has low transactional costs v TV (with its studios, licenses, organizations)

Compatibility/social context

eg everyone uses Word, and hates it.
Also known as network effects.

We need some vectors with more social/political implications - control, accessibility, hierarchy.

and in heterogeneous engineering the iconography is embedded in the painting - there is always the specific location of the painting that is part of its being

NB cross linkages
persistence/robustness/archive - related to complexity, entropy

Examples, with their vectors

- email
- Hydra
- blogs
- video
- instant messaging
- google
- newsgroups

Analytical methodologies

Notes

is the term medium now obsolete?

event engineering - this is partly what the new ‘media’ do

and ‘media’ are now so evidently about social/cultural groups making themselves via things/interactions/information transfers - as they always were

what does it mean now to invent a new ‘medium’?
eg - is a blog a medium?

Inner city regeneration? Or what?

Barn Again @ The Biscuit Factory

Cultural heritage gone mad

I have held back on this one a while - not wanting to hammer the NE of England too much. But here goes anyway.

An ART warehouse, brand new interior, in an old food factory in Newcastle-upon-Tyne UK. Urban regeneration meets (aspiring) European city of culture.

“30,000 square feet on two floors … Britain’s biggest original art store … It?s a fun, relaxed place to buy original contemporary art in the heart of Newcastle upon Tyne. Entrance is free.”

Great. Well, maybe - some of the stuff on sale was shockingly bad (clichÈd). But it IS good to have challenging art available, accessible.

The warehouse has a restaurant - relocated, once called “The Barn”, and now “The Barn Again“.

We went for lunch, on a personal recommendation from a friend (and hence my reluctance to speak out) - this is, apparently, one of the places to eat in Newcastle.

The food was mediocre. Not my interest here.

No. Imagine this, instead. Old biscuit factory turned into gallery. Now has a mezzanine, is open plan, halogen spot lights everywhere.

Behind a hessian curtain - the restaurant. Decor (deco?) - contemporary gallery fittings; 50s and 60s retro features (tat - I remember the dreadful table lamps); yellow pine tables and chairs, from when yellow pine meant KNOTTY and YELLOW (here rustic, I guess); references to a wild west theme (cattle, horses, barn dances etc). But outrageously ill-fitting. Beyond kitsch. Retro - fusion - hybrid - and no design sense. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I can’t take this anymore. Maybe it is just SO sophisticated.

Then - the proprietor (well he is definitely the one in charge) is pacing up and down. It is London docklands, about 1988. As if fresh from commodity dealing, he wears a dark, buttoned up, pinstripe suit. And he has the attitude of Grant or Phil from Eastenders. In front of diners and with an outrageously affected local accent he tears a strip off a miserable waiter for being late. Boasts of telling a diner the night before - “you don’t like the food? - stick to your crappy business and I’ll stick to mine”.

Basil Fawlty turned Geordie entrepreneur.

this is a backdated post

Visiting Nick Kaye in the drama department to talk about his superb book on site specific art (and which features a piece by Cliff McLucas on Brith Gof’s work Tri Bywyd).

It again confirms, for me, that the contemporary fine arts are where the most interesting intellectual experiments are taking place (or have been taking place for several decades). Not least in questioning the shape of media.

And after all, what has archaeology to do with performance?

(Theatre/Archaeology - the [re]articulation of fragments of the past as real time event)

We want stories rather than things!

Just got the July/August issue of Archaeology Odyssey.

Cover - “Rape of an Iraqi museum”
Photo - a turbaned head rolling on the floor amidst scattered papers and debris.

A headline and image of crime and destruction.

We have heard a lot about this in the media since April - looters ransacking the National Museum in the wake of the fall of Baghdad, the loss of priceless treasures, the failure of the occupying forces to protect the museum and its collections. Here are three sites that cover the issue well.
Francis Deblauwe’s pages and links
Iraqcrisis - a moderated list
uggabugga blog

Yes - anyone with a sense of cultural value should be concerned. So much of what is left of thel past is disappearing because of urban development, new roads and civil engineering projects, but also because of the looting of sites to supply the art and antiquities markets. The MacDonald Institute at Cambridge and David Gill and Chris Chippindale pull together information and the issues. Third largest illegal business after drugs and organized crime, the trade in antiquities may amount to 4 billion dollars turnover a year (Neil Brodie at the MacDonald Institute). Cultural tourism - visiting landscapes, sites, museums, other cultures - is, after all, one of the biggest and fastest growing economic sectors in the world.

But note this is not just an open and shut case of contemporary barbarians trashing civilized culture.

The story in the background is one of old nineteenth-century ideas about cultural evolution.

Scenario. Iraq is presented as the cradle of civilization; western European nations are its descendants and heirs. Archaeologists discover the sites and treasures of the past. Museums are where many of these priceless items of cultural capital are held in safe-keeping. They need protection from the uneducated, the uncivilized, the unscrupulous, the poor, the criminal who would sell them to selfish private interests simply for monetary gain. They might even, in ignorance and in spite, destroy them.

The evolutionary ideas are those of the nineteenth century - that history is a story of progress, of the emergence of the civilized west out of barbarism. That archaeologists discover treasure is as old and discredited a story as the one that has history a story of the evolution of cultural excellence. Not much that archaeologists find is remotely treasure-like, and rather than discover the past, archaeologists actually simply work on the tatty remains of what is left, attempting to address some rather interesting questions (such as what it was it like in the past).

Look how this scenario is perfect for justifying western intervention in the Middle East. Oil is another international resource for all humanity and needs protecting. Police action is required to deal with threats to such resources. Not brutal war between nations, but surgical strikes and smart bombs targeted upon criminal elements. Against the powers of darkness and barbarism.

Hence the criticisms of occupying forces failing to act against the looting of a national museum have force. At least in this scenario, where protecting such civilized interests, values and resources was the whole point of the invasion.

Anyone with a passion for collecting, any archaeologist interested in understanding the past, has an insatiable hunger for information. You want to know where an item came from, what it was found with, where it has been. Was it from a dump, or a room in a home, or a temple, or a grave? For an archaeologist this kind of information is crucial when you want to reconstruct past lives. It makes for good stories. The richness is in the detail.

Just think of many museums where little information is presented to the visitor, little out of which to make stories that involve the things the visitor is looking at. Many museum artifacts are, of course, very beautiful. But like many others, I find museums tiring, even tedious, because the visitor is expected to bring knowledge along with them to help decode the things on display. So often, however, our reaction is simple, routine, and repetitive. Wow - a fine piece! Mmm yes, another sensitive piece. A great work of art. And another. Ah, that’s not so good … . Objects standing alone tell us very little. They don’t make for great stories.

Do I care about the treasures of the Baghdad Museum? As an archaeologist? Not really. But my answer needs qualification. I don’t really care because objects out of context, even so-called cultural treasures, tell us very little. Many of those in the museum have little information about where exactly they were found at a site, and with what, in what circumstances. What stories do they tell? What response do they evoke? Stories of the possessions of great kings. A beautiful piece of sculpture from the third dynasty. Another fine example of sculpture from the third dynasty. Not such a fine example from the third dynasty. There is often little more to say about these artifacts other than they are incredibly beautiful and accomplished (or not), and a testament to human skill and aesthetic sensibility (or not).

I have to stand against the model of archaeology and the past embodied in museums like that in Baghdad. Against these stories of the evolution of civilized culture that belongs to all humanity and yet is supposed to find its happiest home in those western imperialist powers that invented this story in the nineteenth century.

What is really wrong here? The idea that culture is property.

I think we want stories rather than things!

(have a look at an article in Critique of Anthropology back in 1994 (Volume 14(3) pages 263-284) - Susan Pollock and Catherine Lutz, “Archaeology deployed for the Gulf War”.)