Life Squared [link], our installation in the online world Second Life, is currently part of the exhibition The Art of Participation 1950 - Now at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Life Squared - [web link] and [gallery].

More links - Linden Lab/Second Life and Wired magazine

The exhibition, curated by Rudolf Frieling, is a bold and inspiring collection of works of conceptual, performance and media arts. It tracks the theme of participation in contemporary art.

(Conventional artwork - on a wall in a gallery, to be contemplated. Interactive art - the museum visitor presses a button and something happens to the artwork. Participatory art - the involvement of the visitor/viewer/audience/witness is a key component of the work of the artist).

There is a catalogue from Thames and Hudson to accompany the show - good essays from Rudolf and Lev Manovich - [Link to Amazon]

Interview with Rudolf - [Link]

John Cage’s notorious 4′33″ - the pianist sits for four minutes and 33 seconds and plays no notes. This is not about silence, but about musical interval and ambient noise that actually constitutes music - the gaps between the notes and the environmental noise against which a conventional musical composition stands out. 4′33″ directed the audience’s attention to the figure-ground relationships at the heart of music. (See my evolving notes on “figure and ground” - [Link])

Other notable works for me in the exhibition include Janet Cardiff’s “Telephone Call” - an immersive itinerary through the museum taken by a visitor with a camcorder prepared by Cardiff - literally a soundtrack, together with screened imagery, on the viewfinder. The visitor experiences the mismatch between what is before them and what is represented to them in the staging of Janet Cardiff’s absence from the walk she makes with them round SFMOMA.

Ant Farm - a series of related works from 1971 - “Media Van” 1971 - nomadic truckitecture as Ant Farm made their way across the US in a Chevy van, staging lectures and events along the way; “Citizens Time Capsule” 1975-2000 - burying a 1968 Oldsmobile Vistacruiser with a collection of community-donated artifacts in up-state New York; culminating now in “Ant Farm Media Van v.08″ - a 1972 Chevy C10 van converted again into a time capsule, this time containing analog and digital media, some from the original 1971 roadtrip, others, in the form of digital photos and music, donated by museum visitors to SFMOMA.

Rejecting a naturalistic aesthetic - extruding 3D from 2D (old photographs)

“Life Squared”, our work with Lynn Hershman Leeson, a major contemporary artist working in the Bay Area, is an installation in the online world Second Life. We have regenerated a work of hers in the Dante Hotel, San Francisco, 1972 on the basis of the records of the work, what remains of it and its locale. This is a project in what Henry Lowood and I call “Archive 3.0 - animating the archive”. Henry is a curator in Stanford Libraries and one of the world’s leading experts on new gaming technologies.

For me, it had started back in 2004 with the Presence Project. Lynn Hershman is one of the artists working with the project to explore and research liveness and mediation, presence and absence in new media and the arts. Lynn’s work, as part of a distinctive current in contemporary art, has been a consistent address to questions of how our identities and senses of self are so dispersed in our prosthetic world through all sorts of material forms and mediations: clothes, lifestyles, financial and legal information, imagery, medical history, personal memory …

From Henry I found out that Stanford had acquired 90 odd boxes of her archive: papers, photos, videos, reviews. Lynn didn’t want it all to sit in the Special Collections in the library and molder. She did indeed want to animate her archive.

This was music to my ears. And so began the project Life Squared, an archaeology of a work of Lynn’s — the installation made with Eleanor Coppola in a room in the Dante Hotel. In 2006 our team from Stanford Humanities Lab reworked the fragmentary remains of this event, experience, and performance as a facility and encounter in the online world Second Life.

Key members, other than Lynn and the SHL leadership, were Jeff Aldrich, Henrik Bennetsen, and Henry Segerman.

I said Lynn’s aspiration to animate her archive was music to my ears. Precisely because I am an archaeologist, fascinated by what’s left of the past, its presence with us now, and what we do with it. An aside: many think that archaeologists discover the past. They don’t. They work on what remains. Archaeology is another kind of memory practice, where past is turned into present. We are all archaeologists now - [Link].

One site where such work happens is the museum or archive. With Henry, I see us moving into a new archival era. Because we live in Silicon Valley, we thought this should be called Archive 3.0 - [Link].

Archive 3.0 — new prosthetic architectures for the production and sharing of archival resources – the animated archive.

What is involved in bringing archives alive? What are signs of this shift?

Remix, rich engagement, co-creative regeneration

These signs are there in in the reterritorialization of information resources associated with a variety of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 initiatives like Wikipedia and Flickr, with new institutional efforts of libraries and museums to diversify and reach out to users with vast information resources and intelligent customizable search facilities like Google Books. Clear in the vast and growing heritage industry of museums and sites for us to visit is a reemphasis on personal affective engagement with cultural memory. There is a recognition of the importance of developing rich modes of engagement with archival, historical and cultural resources. New interfaces involve processes of recollection, regeneration, reworking, remixing in sophisticated visualizations and customized interactive and participatory experiences. We visit Colonial Williamsburg or Jorvik Viking Center in the UK and the past speaks to us.

The Life Squared project, to animate part of the Hershman archive in the online world Second Life, is an address to the question of the future of the library and museum in the context associated with Archive 3.0 — when collections are no longer primarily of books on shelves, paintings on walls, objects in vitrines, but include immaterial forms, intangible experiences, mixed analog and digital forms. When collections are dynamically sensitive to the interests of audience, viewers, those engage with art works, and when curation becomes co-creation of new works through remixing of the components of collections and archives as they are given over to much more open access.

Avatar radars - tracking their movements and interactions

Life Squared has been a very rewarding experience, working with Lynn, truly collaborative, participatory - have a look at the documentation in our wiki and blog - [link].

See also various talks and links - [menu]

SFMOMA is changing its agenda, or rather augmenting the primary focus upon its collections Accompanying the exhibition is the inauguration of “D-Space” - a new facility in the museum and a program to reach out to the community. Dominic Willsdon has joined from Tate Modern, London, where he pioneered outreach through institutional alliances, between museums and cognate institutions, to share art-work, the work of cultural production associated with the world of the artist, art collector and museum. Dominic has precipitated an experiment involving SFMOMA, Stanford University and California College of the Arts (CCA) — developing a hybrid learning experience in the arts. It started with the idea of a kind of “summer school” for a diverse and permeable student and community group working with artists in and beyond the space of the museum. This term, Fall 2008, Peggy Phelan of Stanford and Brian Conley of CCA have been sharing a class between their institutions and devoted to the ways artists have treated their work as an educational or pedagogical project (think of Joseph Beuys’s political agenda).

With Jeffrey Schnapp , my co-director of Stanford Humanities Lab, I have outlined how such initiatives can be part of a radically new practice-oriented curriculum for arts and humanities education in the North American university. We started with our experience of practice/project/performance based research and teaching in Stanford Humanities Lab and my own Metamedia Lab in Stanford Archaeology Center.

Link - Artereality - rethinking art as craft in a knowledge economy

In the broadest way I see all this as a shift from a primarily custodial model for the art museum to a coproductive or cocreative model of designing and making culture. Conventionally, artworks are to be cherished and curated, their qualities and achievement to be broadcast in art museums, colleges and universities.

But we are also increasingly witnessing the vitality and power of popular participation and cultural creation, enabled by information technology, its ubiquity and low cost. All those videos on YouTube, all the blogs worldwide, all the self-publishing on the web.

Participation and co-creation, user-generated content - and a deep recognition of the creative energies inherent in even the most mundane of everyday experiences.

BUT …

You will have perhaps guessed that something like this was coming …

There is a colossal irony and contradiction at the heart of this exhibition devoted to participation in contemporary art.

Above all else, the exhibition celebrates the names of the artists that are attached to the works on show.

In spite of their essential presence to this exhibition, the other “participants” in this art are quite absent. They are at best the supplement to the artists. Let me explain.

There are no names, other than “artists”. Well, perhaps half a dozen.

There are not even any demographic categories. Who are the “participants”? Are they working class, African-American, middle-class, minority? At best we have “the public”, “people”, “audience”. Yet again, and it wearies me to point it out, we are presented with the crowd, the mass, as material for the artist to manipulate. Robert Atkins, in his essay in the catalog, comes across as an elitist critic sneering at popular “mass” culture, while telling us about participation in the arts (try page 63).

Felix Gonzalez-Torres has us picking up rather unexceptional monochrome posters, beautifully stacked, as our act of participation in his work. Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Mike Bennett, in an award winning artwork, have us bumped off an email list because we are one too many - [Link].

Who does all this enlighten? The catalogue does its utmost to connect Gonzales-Torres to reciprocity (the power of giving - Marcel Mauss’s great idea, though not cited here) and to trauma (Aids). Brucker-Cohen and Bennett are, we are told, reflecting on the dot com crash a few years back.

Do we really have to have this pointed out? Is it convincing? Who benefits from these associations?

We can easily and appropriately appreciate an artist’s critique of the anonymity of contemporary anomie. It might be called consciousness raising. Artists can be good at this kind of thing. Making us look critically at the way we live.

But this exhibition, for me, is so much more for the benefit of “the artists”, or rather their collecting patrons. Why? Because the kudos for dreaming up so-called participatory artwork is awarded entirely to the genius of the artists. They are the ones who dreamed all this up, we are told. There are no other names here, no real people.

The exhibition has the gall to claim that contemporary participatory culture has been anticipated by such a bunch of artists (main website - [Link]).

I am not a geek, but count many among my friends, living, as my family does, in Silicon Valley. It was their gorgeous engineering that brought about the participatory and cocreative web, Web 2.0 — and tied most often to utopian hope and vision.

Such vital hope and vision is NOT present in most of these works. They are much more gestural, incidental, even parasitic upon the work of others. Like Fred Turner, we can indeed trace the fascinating connections between the arts, new technology and libertarian political ideologies. Fred precisely tracks the subtle networks of association. We can indeed connect art and popular creativity and politics. But the connection is not one of inspired artistic geniuses precipitating cultural and political change (see Fred’s superbly nuanced research and beautifully written work on counter-culture and cyber-culture - [Link]).

And just stand back a couple of steps and consider where participation started. Participatory art, Web 2.0 and all the rest we hear so much of today are current manifestations of a long genealogy of participatory creative production stretching back millennia. Palaeolithic cave art and the medieval cathedrals of Europe were all about participation. No, more than this, I hold that it is the everyday actions of ordinary people that reproduce society as we know it, its highest achievements included. Innovation is far more than thinking up new ideas. New ideas are commonplace.

This exhibition seems to say that we need an elite to show and tell us what is actually at the heart of our everyday experience. At the heart of politics. Actually, most of us, who haven’t invested in this hype, don’t need this self-appointed elite.

Just ask - who does it benefit to hold that these are prescient singular individuals, these artists?

I am actually not really criticizing many of the artists, but rather the art world, the discourse, the business, the market, those who buy art for their collections. Have a look at the new edition of Howard Becker’s classic book “Art Worlds” - [Link].

I am a great supporter of contemporary art. I believe that creativity needs to be at the heart of our schools and colleges. Shared, and yes, participatory. I actually have a place in this exhibition. But I am feeling alienated and excluded. I do wonder then about the reaction of those who have no investment in this kind of work.

The art market needs “artists” because they are the supposed source of value — individual genius and creativity manifested in a distinctive body of work that is given significance by the way art historians and critics write the work into the history of art.

So what about those other than the moneyed collectors wishing to enhance the status of the artist in whose individual genius they have invested? I suggest the exhibition is as much a betrayal of the radical libertarian intention of some of the works on show, as it is a celebration of participation in the arts.

The great moneyed and institutional interests of the Italian renaissance reinvented the Graeco-Roman figure of the vates — the inspired artistic genius — the creative individual. The institutionalization of modern art has pursued this elitist individualism with fervor, because it fuels the investment prices of an art market.

Just what has changed since the days of the banking Medicis and the Borgias?

Press release from the Ministry of Culture in the UK

UK National Museums Get New Powers To Return Human Remains

Nine national UK museums, including the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, have this week acquired powers to move human remains out of their collections as the Government brought section 47 of the Human Tissue Act 2004 into force.

The nine national museums listed in section 47 now have the power to move out of their collections human remains which are reasonably believed to be under 1,000 years in age. This means that these national museums can respond to claims for the return of human remains by indigenous communities.

Culture Minister David Lammy said:

“This announcement is the right response to the claims of indigenous peoples, particularly in Australia, for the return of ancestral remains. It fulfils the terms of the joint declaration made by Tony Blair and John Howard.

“We have established a fair and equitable framework for the holding of human remains in UK museums, and for museums to consider claims for their repatriation. I hope that this will lead to renewed and mutually beneficial relations between our major institutions and claimant groups.”

The guidelines are sound on ethics and the responsibility owed to human remains.

The 1000 year guideline for when repatriation is supposed to become an issue got me thinking.

Saxon (?) - before the Normans arrived, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 11th century

Back at the beginning of my career in 1980 I was an archaeological fieldworker in the NE of England. Our work at the Castle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne revealed for the first time the remains of the Roman fort and a pre-Norman community. I dug, drew and photographed scores of Christian graves. It was a much-used cemetery and many interments had been cut through by later. This was one skull that had lost the rest of its body. The policy was to focus on complete burials, and many fragmentary remains were discarded. I hung on to the remains of the skull and pieced them back together.

The community had been completely lost to history. Though we are very aware of the early medieval north of England, the building of the Norman castle in the wake of conquest had obliterated the earlier community and its church, buried under six feet of clay laid down as foundation.

I have been fascinated by this material trace of someone who was lost to history and has returned to look at us again. I felt I had rescued something, someone who had been lost.

But is it that simple?

In the last twenty years we have become much more sensitive to the associations and connections of human remains and I feel distinctly awkward about having this skull as part of a small teaching collection.

“Part of a collection”, to be taken as a memento of the loss at the heart of history, as a prompt to think of that community wiped away by history; its scientific value as an access to ancient demography, disease, whatever, is minimal. Should I be feeling so guilty about these uses of someone’s mortal remains?

And that it is 1000 years old seems irrelevant.

It has taken me too long to get round to reading Charles Redman’s great book Human Impact on Ancient Environments - Arizona, 1999.

I came to the book because of the upcoming exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, of the photographs of Edward Burtynsky - they foreground massive environmental impacts. [Link]

We need a long term view to fully understand the growing environmental crisis. This requires an archaeological perspective. And the message the book delivers fully justifies a reliance on long-term large-scale archaeological evidence to get the right message about the shape of recent relationships with the environment.

Here are Redman’s main points:

The current environmental crisis is only the latest in what is the pattern of human inhabitation

The main difference today is scale

Virtually all societies have developed practices that degrade the environment

And, here is an awkward point, many native American and south American societies were out of harmony with the environment (the evidence is very clear in the American SW, Maya lowlands and, increasingly in Amazonia) - there was no pre-Columbian eden

We have no evidence of a golden age when people lived harmoniously with nature - no conservationist eden

There never has been a paradise of a truly natural wilderness

Modern society’s technology, lifestyle and politics are only part of the problem

The main issue is the character of human decision making, apparently rational decision making, over the last few thousand years

Rousseau’s noble savage is truly a myth. And the modern world is not a radical break with history. This is a modernist myth of our contemporary uniqueness.

Jared Diamond has covered some of the same arguments in his recent book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Viking, 2004.

But I find Diamond’s archaeology is weak and he relies heavily on contemporary ethnographic and historical examples. Chuck Redman is far more convincing. But look at what Jared Diamond said to the Sierra Club (May/June issue 2005 page 45) (Thanks to Jonathan Greenberg for the reference):

Pat Joseph: Sierra Club Magazine - In “Collapse” you write that the world now finds itself in an “exponentially accelerating horse race” between environmental damage and environmental countermeasures. What gives you the hope that the race may turn out well?

Jared Diamond - Well, the main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia.

Also, we’ve got archaeologists. The Maya didn’t have archaeologists. We have at least the potential to learn from past societies. No other society in the world’s history has had that opportunity.

As I prepare for a month of fieldwork along Hadrian’s Wall in the UK and north into Walter Scott country, never mind the rock art and superbly preserved agricultural landscapes, I came across a new attraction at Alnwick Castle, the fabulous medieval border stronghold owned by the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland.

There’s a 75 million dollar project underway to create a walled garden in the grand style, with massive cascade, labyrinth, 65,000 plants, and now, the biggest treehouse in the world!

Swiss Family Robinson meets Hogwarts

The garden is quite spectacular - I have visited with friends a couple of years ago. It now gets half a million visitors a year. The castle is regularly used as a film location - Harry Potter learned to fly his broomstick in the outer bailey doubling as the grounds of Hogwarts. Fun stuff.

As might be expected the whole Alnwick project is presented as a great thing for local tourism and the economic health of the region. The garden is a charitable trust, patron Prince Charles, and has received significant public subsidy.

The castle itself is presented to the visitor as a family home - photos of the kids alongside Turner’s gorgeous painting of the temple of Aegina.

Canaletto’s Alnwick - before (!) the Gothic remodelling

Am I too grumpy to be very suspicious of all this? Too much a republican for sure - I have an instinctive aversion to the European aristocracy.

Marion Shoard, in her classic book ‘This Land is Our Land’€, targeted criticism against the vast Alnwick estate, Hulne Park, as one of the largest tracts of land in England kept for purely private pleasure, in spite of public rights of way. She points out that 20% of land in the UK is still in the hands of the families who arrived with William of Normandy in the eleventh century and took all by right of conquest.

Since then the aristocracy have regularly re-invented themselves. The British monarchy have become a media side show, of course.

Here is Richard Davenport Hines on Alnwick and the Percy family (from his book ‘Gothic’€, page 83 and after) -

A more flippant border fortress than the Brampton Bryan project is the Northumbrian Castle at Alnwick. This had been owned continuously by the Percy family since William de Percy came to England as part of the Norman conquest before dying on the First Crusade in 1096. A descendant was summoned to Parliament as a baron in 1299, and the fourth baron was created Earl of Northumberland at the coronation of King Richard II in 1377. This earl’s son, Harry Percy, nicknamed Hotspur, was a great military commander whose exploits were celebrated by Shakespeare in King Henry the Fourth, Part One. The male line of the family became extinct in 1670. The last earl’s heiress married the sixth Duke of Somerset, known as the Proud Duke. He was so inflated with rank and genealogy … that he insisted that his children always stand in his presence, and disinherited a daughter whom he discovered to have sat while he was asleep. The Proud Duke’s granddaughter married in 1740 Sir Hugh Smithson, a Yorkshire baronet, whose family had been ennobled as recently as 1660 on the basis of money originating from a haberdasher’s shop in Cheapside. Four years later her brother’s unexpected death transformed her into a great heiress. In 1749 the ancient Northumberland Earldom was revived for her father, with a special remainder so that it passed on his death in 1750 to Smithson, who took the name of Percy. In 1753 the reinvented Smithson became Lord-Lieutenant of Northumberland, and afterwards of Middlesex too; having been Viceroy of Ireland in 1763-65, he was created Duke of Northumberland in 1766.

…

The pretensions of these new Northumberlands as authentic Percys were much mocked. ‘That great vulgar Countess has been laid up with a hurt on her leg’, Horace Walpole gossiped in 1759: ‘The Duchess of Grafton asked if it were true that Lady Rebecca Poulett kicked her? - ‘Kicked me madam! When did you ever hear of a Percy that took a kick?’ … Lord March making them a visit this summer at Alnwick Castle, my Lord received him at the gate, and said, ‘I believe, my Lord, this is the first time that ever a Douglas and a Percy met here in friendship’ - think of this from a Smithson to a true Douglas.’

The building of Northumberland Avenue connecting Whitehall to the Thames led to her being teased in some newspapers as the ‘Duchess of Charing Cross’

The new Northumberlands began restoring their medieval properties soon after acquiring them - the grounds were landscaped by local Capability Brown and the town improved with fine stone houses and market, a gothic bridge and a lion atop a column.

The castle itself was decked out in gothic style with Robert Adam interiors.

Lady Holland in 1798 reported

‘Alnwick, on the outside, revives the recollection of all one has heard of baronial splendour, battlements, towers, gateways, portcullis, etc., immense courts, thick walls, and everything demonstrative of savage solitary, brutal power and magnitude. The late Duchess built the present fabric upon the site of the primitive castle, but much is from a traditional guess. The inside corresponds but feebly with the outward promise; the whole is fitted up in a tinsel, gingerbread taste rether adapted to a theatrical representation.’

The interiors were redone at a cost of £250k by the fourth Duke after 1854 - more accurately medieval, supposedly.

The British aristocracy have always loved building projects.

This is the latest in turning power into entertainment.

Great talk last night from Tim Webmoor at our New Media workshop at Stanford.

He is working at the fabulous site of Teotihuacan, Mexico, on different attitudes and understandings of the site - local and beyond. Teotihuacan has become emblematic of the Mexican state and Mexican heritage. I posted some comments last year from Meg Butler about the Wal-Mart controvery there - [Link]

Rather than study the site and people’s reception of it as a conventional anthropological object, he has set up a software network to enable the expression and publication of the different understandings. An active prompting and enabling.

He has done a great service in carefully outling one crucial context for this kind of work - a science that does not, as a guiding principle and premise, separate professional application of reason from vernacular understanding.

All this in pusuit of a way of holding on to different understandings of the past - the multivocality that is much discussed by more and more archaeologists.

Read more at Tim’s website - [Link]

A fascinating item today in the Guardian - History of modern man unravels as German scholar is exposed as fraud

Flamboyant anthropologist falsified dating of key discoveries

Luke Harding in Berlin

It appeared to be one of archaeology’s most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals.

This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull.

However, the professor’s 30-year-old academic career has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other “stone age” relics.

Yesterday his university in Frankfurt announced the professor had been forced to retire because of numerous “falsehoods and manipulations”.

Archaeological scientist, friend of Governor Arnie, studies the bones of Hitler and Eva Braun?

During their investigation, the university discovered that Prof Protsch, 65, a flamboyant figure with a fondness for gold watches, Porsches and Cuban cigars, was unable to work his own carbon-dating machine.

Instead, after returning from Germany to America, where he did his doctorate, and taking up a professorship, he had simply made things up.

…

German police began investigating the professor for fraud, following allegations that he had tried to sell the university’s 278 chimpanzee skulls for $70,000 to a US dealer.

…

Other details of the professor’s life also appeared to crumble under scrutiny. Before he disappeared from the university’s campus last year, Prof Protsch told his students he had examined Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s bones.

He also boasted of having flats in New York, Florida and California, where, he claimed, he hung out with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Steffi Graf. Even the professor’s aristocratic title, “von Zieten”, appears to be bogus.

Far from being the descendant of a dashing general in the hussars, the professor was the son of a Nazi MP, Wilhelm Protsch, Der Spiegel magazine revealed last October.

The university is investigating how thousands of documents lodged in the anthropology department relating to the Nazis’ gruesome scientific experiments in the 1930s were mysteriously shredded, allegedly under the professor’s instructions.

They also discovered that some of the 12,000 skeletons stored in the department’s “bone cellar” were missing their heads, apparently sold to friends of the professor in the US and sympathetic dentists.

Yesterday the university admitted that it should have discovered the professor’s fabrications far earlier. But it pointed out that, like all public servants in Germany, the high-profile anthropologist was virtually impossible to sack, and had also proved difficult to pin down.

…

Yesterday the professor, who lives in Mainz with his wife Angelina, didn’t respond to emails from the Guardian asking him to comment on the affair. But in earlier remarks to Der Spiegel he insisted that he was the victim of an “intrigue”.

“All the disputed fossils are my personal property,” he told the magazine.

Another case of intellectual property tied so intimately to personal identity? [Link]

In the light of my recent posts about creationism [Link], contemporary culture and the science wars [Link] and then the Barbie Doll Bronze Age [Link], Cornelius (Holtorf) has put me on to The Brick Testament.

Yes - the Bible in lego bricks …

The death of Jacob by The Reverend Brendan Powell Smith

Stringy Carter has put me on to an extraordinary web site - Minoan Culture, a Discussion by Frederick John Kluth of Kent, Ohio

Barbie as prehistoric matriarch

He has created a series of scenes from his reading of Minoan Crete using Barbie dolls …

not the usual gendered interpretation of Minoan culture and society!

But I suspect this has a lot in common with the way excavator Sir Arthur Evans thought of bronze age Crete.

Have a look at our rumagings through the site of Knossos [Link] and [Link]

Suzanne Goldenberg writes an informative summary today in the Guardian of the latest stage of the creationist debate in the US - Religious right fights science for the heart of America.

Classroom confrontations between God and science are under way in 17 states, according to the National Centre for Science Education. In Missouri, state legislators are drafting a bill laying down that science texts contain a chapter on so-called alternative theories to evolution. Textbooks in Arkansas and Alabama contain disclaimers on evolution, and in a Wisconsin school district, teachers are required to instruct their students in the “scientific strengths and weaknesses of evolutionary theory”. Last month, a judge in Georgia ordered a school district to remove stickers on school textbooks that warned: “This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things.”

…

Officially, the teaching of creationism has been outlawed since 1987 when the supreme court ruled that the inclusion of religious material in science classes in public teaching was unconstitutional. In recent years, however, opponents of evolution have regrouped, challenging science education with the doctrine of “intelligent design” which has been carefully stripped of all references to God and religion. Unlike traditional creationism, which posits that God created the earth in six days, proponents of intelligent design assert that the workings of this planet are too complex to be ascribed to evolution. There must have been a designer working to a plan - that is, a creator.

I regularly hold classes for incoming Stanford freshmen and in summer camps at Stanford for smart high school students. I usually use archaeological examples to explore the character of interdisciplinary science and cultural difference - the unfamiliarity of the archaeological past. In every class there is at least one student who raises an objection to archaeological accounts of prehistory on the grounds that they are based upon an unproven theory of evolution.

I have actually had one student tell me the world was created 6000 years ago. Another came out with the old one that we are not descended from monkeys, for why would they still be around today? (Once they get to Stanford I assume I no longer hear from these students because they avoid classes like archaeology that challenge their view of things.)

Australopithecus Afarensis: footprint left in the sand, Laetoli, east Africa, 3.6 million years ago. Or part of an archaeological record created to puzzle us with the rest of the universe 6000 years ago?

Intelligent design is another old theological idea meant originally as a proof of the existence of god. If you were to come across a complex mechanism, parsimony of explanation, the argument goes, would have you infer that it was made by a skilled and intelligent maker, rather than have you posit a long and involved process of mutation, selection and adaptation.

Life is complex. Evolutionary science cannot agree on the precise processes that govern the emergence and disappearance of life’s complexity. Surely a more parsimonious adherence to the wonder of the world is to believe in a skilled and intelligent maker?

The terms of the debate about evolution are changing. The argument is now about the character of science itself. And of the nature of humanity.

And there is much on the side of the creationists and intelligent designers - when the terms of the debate are no longer religious faith versus the supposed atheism of science.

I have mentioned in this blog a favorite thinker of mine - Daniel Dennett. [Link] His book “Freedom Evoloves” is a superb attempt to rethink determinism. Our history has a sense to it, involves causes and effects. This is nevertheless compatible with people being ethical beings who possess freedom of choice and are not determined by the impersonal forcesof nature and history. At the core of his thinking is an emphasis upon selection as the fundamental process that drives natural history. And though he does not emphasize it, his understanding of selection is that it is a process of design.

Last year in a class on the history of design that I ran with Barry Katz, we interviewed Ilan Kroo, who designs supersonic aircraft. He showed us the implications of genetic algorithms, processes of selection operating on random mutation, for the design of aircraft wings. Enabled by superior computer processing power NASA and Boeing engineers are generating many solutions to a particular design issue (a certain kind of lift, given constraints of certain materials and the purpose of the aircraft, for example), and repeating many times the process of constrained mutation and selection. They are coming up with some startling new designs that would not have come out of a traditional design process.

Just the other day I was talking about Agile Development, as employed in the software indusry, as a model of iterative design, analogous to these genetic algorithms. [Link]

No serious scientist is going to say that evolution is a fact. It is certainly the best way we have of rationally understanding natural history. But this does not make it a “fact”. There are problems with constructing a narrative of deep time - the fragmentary nature of the palaeontological and archaeologoical record is an argument for cladistics, a different kind of understanding of how the history of relationships between species might be understood. [Link]The mechnaisms of evolution are not fully understood.

The “truth” of “facts” is a matter for metaphysics, not science. So yes, this brings the truth of evolution into the same theological field as faith in creation.

Then there is the issue of human culture. Ideas of cultural evolution and the co-evolution of the human species and our social and cultural artifacts are rooted in seriously flawed nineteenth century ideas of how you classify people and stories of history that center upon economic success and measures of social complexity. I have always had serious misgivings about theories of cultural evolution, in spite of the tremendous archaeological reworking of ideas of cultural evolution in the 60s and 70s. And I am committed to the neo-Darwinian thinking found in the likes of Daniel Dennett.

What gets called postmodern relativism challenges ideas of absolute truth and reality. Whatever the excesses of some of this thinking, it is also now very clear from detailed historical and sociological studies of scientists that they are flawed humans like the rest of us, and science is something done in messy social circumstances. Real science is not some abstract confrontation of reason with the forces and forms of nature.

Creationists are smart and know science is flawed. But this is their argument for abandoning reason and taking us back to pre-enlightenment faith. They say - All science is flawed. We need universal truths. There can only be trust in faith and creation.

Is it as bad as this? Is it not just down to some wacky fundamentalists in the southern states of the US?

I wish I could invite you one of these classes when I confront smart young Americans who have had their minds closed by this very neat argument.

It is really about how we think of ourselves. This debate is all about human frailty, the desire to have some certainty when faced with the mess of history, the complexity of the world that threatens even our supremely successful science and technology. It is about how we get on with our world and with other species.

So much western economic success has been founded upon the notion that the world is god-given to be used by people, that societies who have not fully exploited what was there for the taking are in some way failures, or primitive and less complex, or less developed, or just non-western. People are in this way seen as a unique species that builds and develops. And possesses soul and consciousness.

To really tackle the creationists we need to stop saying that evolution is true and that science has the “answer”. That archaeologists can tell the story of “the real past”.

We need to accept that the world as we know it is messy. People have an imperfect hold on it, and much of history is lost. Science, history, evolutionary biology, archaeology are processes of dealing with these fundamental questions of what makes us who we are. Processes, not answers. And this smart reasoning that will change and adapt to the messiness of the world is the only hope we have.

Tate Modern London.

I am still reading today’€™s Arts section of the Guardian - this time Adrian Searle‒s preview of the Tate Modern’€™s new exhibition of Joseph Beuys [Link]

Beuys wasn’t being mischievous or disingenuous when he said there was nothing to understand (in his work). He may have been wrong to believe everyone could be an artist, but everyone can be a spectator. The mind wanders; connections come to us if we let them, and if we work at them, if we engage. But engagement comes at a price. The whole of his art is about coming to grips with something unmanageable. He once opened a talk with the following: —Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Once again, I should like to start with the wound.— And what wound might that be, Herr Beuys? The lecture was titled: —Talking about one’s country: Germany.—

Beuys and the history of 20th-century Germany are inextricable. One of his best-known works here, The End of the 20th Century, is a gallery filled with large, roughly hewn basalt stones, each about the size of a man. They lie strewn about, like so many bodies. Some attempt at order and alignment has been made, but it is kind of half-hearted. Some stones have fallen on to others, and have been left where they fell. Each stone has had a cone dug out of it, the missing part reinserted, the gaps plugged with felt and clay. An attempt at reanimation, then; a botched job, for all the effort.

It might be tempting to see Beuys as something of a Renaissance man: Beuys the utopian, Beuys the dandy, Beuys the self-mythologist, the performer, the spell-binding teacher, the green politician; Beuys the Hitler youth, the twice-wounded Luftwaffe volunteer, with two Iron Crosses to his name; Beuys the great German artist. His artistic and intellectual development was born out of disaster, and Beuys himself was deeply complicated, as well as implicated, like millions of other German servicemen and women of his generation (Beuys was born in 1921). He was open about his past, even if he mythologised it, often in darkly humorous ways, and unbelievable ways. His art, his intellectual and political stance and his serious depression in the mid-1950s are all evidence of how he came to terms with personal as well as national guilt.

How else to see the muck and the detritus and the filth-rimed tins, the bones and the agglomerations of unnamable objects in certain of Beuy™’s vitrines, which are arranged in angled rows and little groups in one large room? There are things here like amputated limbs, bound in string; clods of earth and roots that, much as they might lead us to think of Albrecht Durer‒s clumps of grass, might also make us think of blown-up German soil. Here is congealed hare’s blood, rancid batteries, lumps of fat, a cloth apron-pocket of hardened wax and tallow that sags like some wretched udder, iron and sulphur and razor blades, a little model house with missing walls and stairs leading nowhere, fat-spattered cardboard boxes, a bit of hardened blood-sausage like a lump of old shit. Everything here - the sutures, the coffee spoons, the crate of old beer bottles - is arranged with consummate care in these negative still-lives. Like the poetry of Paul Celan, this is what art comes to after Auschwitz.

A fabulous depiction of the archaeological. In all its political ramifications.