The touring exhibition of the wonderful photographs of Edward Burtynsky reaches the Cantor Arts Center today and runs till September 18.

Nickel tailings #30 - Sudbury, Ontario

Like Gursky, [Link] Burtynsky works in large format - the pictures are up to 5 feet across. His subjects are envrionmental impacts. Great holes in the ground like open cast mines and quarries, Wasted landscapes - his series of rivers running blood red polluted with toxic mineral waste is extraordinary. Landfill sites - urban mines as he calls them. Sites of epic industrial spectacle - the beach shipbreakers of Bangladesh, oil refineries.

There is plenty of environmental politics here. As well as simply awesome pictures of huge holes in the ground.

Susan Cameron, Phil Dhingra, Annie Wyman, Erica Simmons, Bill Rathje and myself have started an accompanying web site exploring what we see as the contemporary sublime in Burtynsky’s archaeography - [Link] We are using Mark Roseman’s fabulous software ProjectForum - the same social software that we have enthusiastically adopted in the Metamedia Lab at Stanford.

Burtynsky at Stanford

PS the exhibition ended in September - an archive of the site will be available soon.

Rome

Risonanze Oscure
Dark Resonances

We are at the Colosseum, the Flavian Amphitheatre - me, Nick (Kaye) and Gabriella (Giannachi). It is 10pm.

Across the street beneath the temple of Venus we have been looking at flickering images of what look to me like archaeological sediments projected into the foundation arches, behind the protective iron grills.

They are part of a new work by Gary Hill, the Seattle/New York based video and performance artist. It is a work of site specific theatre/archaeology. Gary is one of the artists of our new project - “Performing presence: from the live to the simulated”

Here is my archaeological “reading” of the event.

Location

A ruin - spectacular, yes, but the surface of much of the Colosseum has been stripped away over the centuries - all the seating and the floor of the arena - conspicuously revealing the skeletal sub- structure, the labyrinth of passages for managing crowds, gladiators, victims, the underside of the monument. And, of course, the Colosseum is emblem of all the underside of Rome - crowds, mass media, violence as entertainment, bread and circuses, the barbarism at the heart of imperial civilization.

We find the gate, they look for us on “the list” (there are three), and we get into the Colosseum.

Characters

Rome’s media and arts crowd are here as the audience tonight.
There are performers, sounds, projected images, lights, props. Ghosts - Persephone, Pan, the witch Kirke, invoked in the event. And, of course, the audiences, performers and victims from long ago - neither present nor absent - non-absent.

Episodes

One. Interference and resonance.
Within several of the great supporting arches of the Colosseum have been sited speakers and video projectors. Intermittently, randomly (?), they sound out horns across the auditorium filled with tourists as faint images appear projected up within the brickwork. Ghostly images - we spot an “angel” walking back and forth with a great curved brass horn.

Images almost invisible. Echoes across the ruin. Horns announcing what? That the past is still going on?

Two. Surface sediment.
Outside the Colosseum at the Temple of Venus - flickering indistinct images of what look to me like excavated surfaces, with spoken commentary. Shown in arches beneath a monument that now exists only as an indication of where the columns and walls once stood - traces in the thin grass of early summer.

The indeterminacy of the trace of the past.

Our contact with the past is all about translations - mediations, like these videos of surface sediment - passages forced back and forth. Forced, because the material resists - we have to dig away and work on what is left. And it is all so indeterminate - what was and is going on?

Three. A face in the underworld.
The audience stands on the second tier looking down into the depths of the arena, actually at the passages and voids beneath. It is dark but we can make out activity in the shadows. Something is going on. On the temporary stage that replaces part of the missing floor of the arena there is a dimly lit structure. It looks like a face staring upwards.

Four. Clapping/flapping.
It begins with clapping, or is it a flapping of wings, white noise. It grows louder.

Is this an echo of crowds? Clamoring for bread and entertainment. Nourishment and numbing narcotic (pharmakon).

Five. Dreams of escape.
The first of the videos projected onto the monument - within the arena and up the sides of the auditorium. A contraption. A radio mast? It looks more like one of Leonardo’s flying machines - magical inventions that never flew except in the imagination. A dream of an escape.

Video recordings replayed on these ancient walls - reflexive spaces of difference.

Six. Word magic.
Strings of vowels appear projected up above the arena. They are voiced over and over again on the sound system. More clamoring. And resonance. We can detect no message, except in the performed enunciation, like a magical incantation. Mesmerizing magic - disorienting and misdirecting.

A classical location of dark magic is Kirke’s island at the edge of the known world, its name a palindrome of vowels - Aiaia. Where Odysseus’s men were turned to farm beasts, where he countered the witch’s magic with a drug given to him by Hermes, the god of mediation and interpretation, where he found how to travel to the underworld to speak with the seer Teiresias, to find his way home.

The palindrome comes and goes, works, reads, cuts both ways.

Seven. Goat in a field.
Another projected image. Not a lion or exotic beast. The calmness of country life and farming? Where bread comes from. But the Goat is also Pan - not a divinity but a disrupting force, of chaos, from a time even before the gods. Whose shout brings panic.

Eight. The dis-invented wheel.
A carriage crosses the arena in a transect back to the stage. It is a struggle to get it there because the wheels are triangular.

The carriage carries goddess Persephone on her way from sunshine and agricultural fertility (her mother is Demeter, goddess of harvest) to the world of the dead, in her cyclical return to the underworld and Hades.

Time and the past here are not an arrow of no return, but symmetrically cut both ways.

As Odysseus found out in his search for a nostos (homecoming), the trick is not finding Hades, but getting back - that needs magic.

Nine. A lament.
Voiced over the sound system.

A lament of what is missing - what never happened, but should have done.

Ten. Flights of fantasy.
A model aeroplane flies quietly round the auditorium in the dark, lands on the stage, takes off again. It carries little fairy lights. Then model gliders are launched from above and crash into the audience. No escape, again.

Augury - to read the future by interpreting the flight of birds. Here mechanical inventions of our intellect.

Remember , with Herakleitos, that Apollo, the god whose oracle of the future is at Delphi, neither reveals nor conceals the truth, but gives a sign.

Eleven. A ghost among us.
Persephone walks among the audience in a circuit around the auditorium, followed by a video cameraman.

Uncanny ghosts - with the uncanny as the return of the repressed, the return of what is no longer the same.

And a deparate attempt to record the unrecordable - how, on earth, is this all to be documented?

These encounters with the past are new to Gary Hill’s work. And though we are in the world of son-et-lumiere, this is no post-modern pastiche, but a circuit around the awkwardness of presence - a present past, more precisely non-absent.

No attempt is made to reconstruct a past - for what would that be other than superficiality of Hollywood CGI with its stock narratives like “Gladiator”, however spectacular.

There is a deep questioning here of the notion that sites like the Colosseum are somehow “sources”, somehow the origin of what is made of them, font of understanding the past. Instead the site, as a collocation of fragments, acts as a frame, parergon, supplement - an exterior that defines, has effect in its non-absence.

The site resists in its materiality and instead we deal in resonances and a geneaology of echoes and Chinese whispers through time.

Theatre/archaeology

PS I wrote this on the flight back home. Here are Gabriella’s outline and Charles Stein’s diary of the work’s creation.

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]

Randommedia, the UK based games/web design people, have a fascinating virtual world called Dreamdomain.

You design yourself a “drone” - a flying insect, with a “blindwatchmaker” genetic algorithm and then off you go to fly round some very weird landscapes.

The dots are messages - text, and video!

But you are not at all alone - there are others in there too - you can talk to them, leave messages, or, if you have a video camera attached to your machine, you can send in live video.

The new Presence Project “Preforming Presence: from the live to the simulated” has got me thinking of the issues of virtuality and what makes you commit to an environment such as this.

It certainly isn’t photographic verisimilitude!

Archaeological connection and relevance -

Think of archaeological landscapes - their fragmented folding - and their collective constitution - all those accreted stories that people know and retell. And that they are never complete - always being rebuilt as people make new stories and archaeologists find old remains. How might we deal in such topology, this ever-changing and percolating time.

Well, here is one attempt to re-present, to work with such experiences.

Thanks to Sam (Schillace) for this link.

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 …

I regularly post about the horror that lies just beneath the surface of things, everyday normality rooted in the uncanny secret lives of things - have a look at “Horror and disclosure - a scene of crime clings to its past”

Joe (Adler), my MetaMedia co-director and away in London at the moment, has just sent me word of Die Familie Schneider - An Art House Of Fear In Whitechapel. Do I wish I could see this!

The work is by Gregor Schneider and commissioned by Artangel.

Two apparently normal houses side by side.

Here is Camelia Gupta’s superb review on 24hourmuseum.org

I let myself in, wondering who I am to be letting myself into someone else’s house.

Shutting the door, I’m thus already a little nervous. The narrow corridors are claustrophobic. I hesitate in the doorway but my awareness that I only have 20 minutes to see both houses (one of several conditions of viewing) forces me on.

In the second house, I feel slightly braver. I wondered in the first house whether I was “allowed” to interact with the inhabitants of the houses but felt too oppressed. In an embarrassingly quavery and hesitant voice, I hail the woman in the kitchen. She ignores me. I’m not sure whether I want her to respond, as that would indicate that I belong in this world.

A world where violence seems to lurk at every edge. There’s the terrifying sexual graffiti in the attic, visible only through the keyhole of locked door with, most worryingly, a locked child-gate placed in front of it. Was a child kept here? Does this connect to the secret passage and its grim destination? On the other hand, being ignored has the effect of making me feel like a ghost, condemned to witness and absorb the horror but with no scope for action. Neither option appeals.

And in another related review -

There’s a woman in kitchen washing dishes endlessly, in a way that is reminiscent both of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and of Lady Macbeth’s “out damned spot”.

The 70s aesthetic of the bedroom is deeply unpleasant. The heat is suffocating, the carpet muffles my footsteps. I realise suddenly that there’s a body in a bag in the far corner. I feel faint for a second. It appears to be wearing a uniform and is small: child-sized.

Bathroom. A man masturbates in the shower, back turned and partially visible through curtains. I don’t know how to behave - and hover, while his pants and groans fill the small room. Needing distraction, I rummage through cupboards.

I’m glad that I have to write, I?m using it to anchor and ground myself, to remind myself that there’s a world beyond this one. I badly need the reminder right now. It’s hard to battle the sense that this awful space is all there is.

Deep breath, and onto the second house. Scared of what I’ll find. Another condition is that once you’ve left one house, you may not return to it.

On my god. It’s the same. But I’m different looking at it. I feel the need to look closely at the woman in the kitchen. As I say, I feel moved/able to speak to her. She’s exactly like the first one. (They’re twins.) In the bathroom, I’m moved to examine the wanking man to get closer. He seems louder than the first, but I cannot compare. Perhaps my mounting panic is heightening my senses?

I can’t know whether it’s the same, as I’m not allowed to go back and check.

Downstairs is also the same, and now I?m finding this sameness terrifying. What the hell is happening here? The repetition has varying effects; the carpeted room feels even more like a cell. I can hear nothing but my own, heavy, breathing. I’m scared - in the cellar, I’m reluctant to shut the door.

The archaeological sensibility says that we only ever have fragments to work upon, that every locale is a potential scene of crime where anything could be relevant, that there remains to much to be discovered beneath the surface of things, and much that we will not like, because the stories we have been told are meant to console and quieten us …

A talk and dinner tonight with Jan Assmann, the great Egyptologist - the topic - ancient monotheism. Fascinating.

Jan Assmann tonight

I am particularly interested in the early genealogy of religion, part of my Origins project.

What I came away with was Jan’s distinction between universalist and globalist monotheisms. The first centers upon an inherent deity and universal truth that is fundamentally exclusive. It is distinctively unheimlich - uncanny in its distance from the everyday and in its strangeness - the holy ghost in the machine, as it were. We are familiar with such a universalizing tendency in many exclusive and fundamentalist theologies and religions, even secular movements such as the scientific enlightenment and its legacy of one universal principle of reason.

The origins of ancient Near Eastern monotheism, in contrast, seem much more associated with a search to find a god that transcends local difference. Hence it was “globalist”, in contrast to universalist.

There are many Near Eastern diplomatic documents that translate local deities, one into the other, and ultimately according to a single principle of deity. The purpose is to establish legal force through the validity of oaths sworn by god(s) with different names. There is a clear association of divinity, of course, also with monarchy. It is there in the difficult relations between temple, monarchy and state in the early city states of Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley.

With the divine cosmos intimately associated with political power, the most powerful is that which is uncreated, or rather causa sui, independent, not subject to another. Its geneaology runs from the god-king through the paradox of the king’s two bodies to the still-current association of state and church. Monotheism allows the ultimate global translation. Its roots are regional diversity, socio-political extension, international relations and sovereignty.

Some crucial matters here for our current fundamentalist clash of civilizations. Monotheism began as a transcendance of local difference, translating through a deity removed from the everyday.

The discovery of remains of another species of homo that lived alongside modern humans only 18 or even 13 thousand years ago is everywhere today - Guardian Unlimited | Life | “From 18,000 years ago, the one metre-tall human that challenges history of evolution” - a new “hobbit” species found on the Indonesian island of Flores.

Why didn’t I believe it until I read the original report in Nature?

And I am still skeptical.

Too fantastic?

Did I need the sober language and measurements? Lots of graeco-latin biologisms?

Description of Homo floresiensis (MS - not the homo floresensis of many google searches)
Order Primates Linnaeus, 1758
Suborder Anthropoidea Mivart, 1864
Superfamily Hominoidea Gray, 1825
Family Hominidae Gray, 1825
Tribe Hominini Gray, 1825
Genus Homo Linnaeus, 1758
Homo floresiensis sp. nov.

Etymology. Recognizing that this species has only been identified on the island of Flores, and a prolonged period of isolation may have resulted in the evolution of an island endemic form.

Holotype. LB1 partial adult skeleton excavated in September 2003. Recovered skeletal elements include the cranium and mandible, femora, tibiae, fibulae and patellae, partial pelvis, incomplete hands and feet, and fragments of vertebrae, sacrum, ribs, scapulae and clavicles. The repository is the Centre for Archaeology, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Referred material. LB2 isolated left mandibular P3. The repository is the Centre for Archaeology, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Localities. Liang Bua is a limestone cave on Flores, in eastern Indonesia. The cave is located 14 km north of Ruteng, the provincial capital of Manggarai Province, at an altitude of 500 m above sea level and 25 km from the north coast. It occurs at the base of a limestone hill, on the southern edge of the Wae Racang river valley. The type locality is at 08° 31′ 50.4″ south latitude 120° 26′ 36.9″ east longitude.

Horizon. The type specimen LB1 was found at a depth of 5.9 m in Sector VII of the excavation at Liang Bua. It is associated with calibrated accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates of approximately 18 kyr and bracketed by luminescence dates of 35 4 kyr and 14 2 kyr. The referred isolated left P3 (LB2) was recovered just below a discomformity at 4.7 m in Sector IV, and bracketed by a U-series date of 37.7 0.2 kyr on flowstone, and 20 cm above an electron-spin resonance (ESR)/U-series date of 74 - 12 + 14 kyr on a Stegodon molar.

Diagnosis. Small-bodied bipedal hominin with endocranial volume and stature (body height) similar to, or smaller than, Australopithecus afarensis. Lacks masticatory adaptations present in Australopithecus and Paranthropus, with substantially reduced facial height and prognathism, smaller postcanine teeth, and posteriorly orientated infraorbital region. Cranial base flexed. Prominent maxillary canine juga form prominent pillars, laterally separated from nasal aperture. Petrous pyramid smooth, tubular and with low relief, styloid process absent, and without vaginal crest. Superior cranial vault bone thicker than Australopithecus and similar to H. erectus and H. sapiens. Supraorbital torus arches over each orbit and does not form a flat bar as in Javan H. erectus. Mandibular P3 with relatively large occlusal surface area, with prominent protoconid and broad talonid, and either bifurcated roots or a mesiodistally compressed Tomes root. Mandibular P4 also with Tomes root. First and second molar teeth of similar size. Mandibular coronoid process higher than condyle, and the ramus has a posterior orientation. Mandibular symphysis without chin and with a posterior inclination of the symphysial axis. Posteriorly inclined alveolar planum with superior and inferior transverse tori. Ilium with marked lateral flare. Femur neck long relative to head diameter, the shaft circular and without pilaster, and there is a high bicondylar angle. Long axis of tibia curved and the midshaft has an oval cross-section.

Many of the reports claim that the finds prompt a rewrite of human evolution. Well no - it has been clear for some time that there is no single evolutionary line that leads to modern humans and that for most of human history there have been more than one contemporary species of homo and australopithecine precursors.

Homo floresiensis in Nature, photo by Peter Brown

The fascination for me is the remote island setting and story. Homo floresiensis - remnants of homo erectus maybe, dwarfed by an island isolation and the forces of evolutionary selection. Not enough to eat? Wiped out by a volcano?

The island is home to the giant Komodo dragon lizards.

It is Conan Doyle’s “Lost World”

Eaten by dragons?

In class this morning I ran a google search for a picture of Mycenaean marine style pottery, and it turned up an obituary for Michael Casson, the studio potter. He was a giant in the world of craft pottery, a pioneer of 20th century studio ceramics, and a lovely man. He died last December. We hadn’t known.

I had a good deal of contact with him in the early 90s when he taught at Cardiff Art College. I was researching ancient Corinthian ceramics, was keen to get expert opinion on pottery manufacture and had heard about his interest in the history of ceramics from Helen, my wife, also a studio potter, whom he taught. We met several times when we discussed archaeology and pottery at length from his perspective and with his vast experience of all kinds of pottery making - industrial, studio, ethnographic. I particularly recall a lunch at St David’s Hall in Cardiff when I showed him several seventh century BC Corinthian aryballoi that Anthony Snodgrass at Cambridge had generously let me borrow from the university’s collection. He loved them. Key issues for Mick: the brushes for painting these exquisite miniatures - they must have been so refined; the clear evidence for using apprentices on the best wares - poorly applied handles; the trickiness of applying slip on slip - some of the perfume jars are multicolored; the clay - needing considerable preparation; and the speed with which they could have been made - a skilled thrower could run one off in 45 seconds or less. I incorporated this and more from him in my book on archaic Greek art.

photo - UK Potters

He was such an inexhaustible energy and a delight to talk with. A delight. He had an expert interest in everything to do with ceramics, craft, art history. And he could engage you because he listened. He crossed borders.

And sure enough - his salt-glazed stoneware shows his interest in Mycenaean pots. Simple beautiful things.

What a loss.

[Link] [Link]