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

Camera c 1947.

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

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.

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]

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

For some time I have been promoting collaborative information building and sharing.

Philip put me on to Flickr - a photo store and share site. You can upload your pictures from camera phone or computer and organize them, keep them private or share them with others. You can “tag” them or part of an image with labels - and this is where it gets very interesting.

Thomas Vander Wal coined the term “folksonomy” - a conflation of “folk” and “taxonomy”, to refer to the “bottom-up” organisational categories that emerge when individuals tag or describe information and images and those tags are pooled.

Clay Shirky and others have argued that folksonomies that use tags - “user-created metadata” - are the only cost-effective way to generate order in large dynamic systems such as the net. Critics insist this will never yield the clarity of controlled classifications administered by professionals. Each approach has strengths. Folksonomies bring structure to the chaos of the net, but you’d probably be happier if your doctor used a more controlled database when it came to figuring out if you had a life threatening disease.

The folksonomy discussion inspired David Sifry, founder and chief executive of blog aggregator/search site Technorati to launch its “Tags” service. Searching on a particular tag (eg China) calls up all links loaded under that tag on del.icio.us, all photos using it from Flickr and all blog posts categorised under that word. Sifry admits that categories that bloggers choose for their posts are broader than tags. But users can add tags to their posts on top of their categories, and he suggests that people might start to change the way they categorise blog posts to take advantage of Technorati Tags. For example, an Irish blogger has suggested that if his compatriots all tagged their posts with “irish blog”, it would generate an Irish group blog on the relevant Technorati page, without anyone having to do anything more.

[Guardian Link]

Bottom-up self-organizing networks.

Archaeological relevance -

Too much top-down organizing of data, for example in the use of standardized forms for recording things found, tends to pre-determine what is found. This art of anticipation means you end up finding what you were looking for.

Consider instead the possibility of systems like Flickr - load stuff up and see what people make of it all. Do it right and all sorts of unxpected patterning/connection/order will emerge and, as important, will change as more gets added.

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.

I wound up a fine conference at Stanford today - Seeing the Past - Building knowledge of the past through acts of seeing. Congratulations to the organizers - Stacey Camp, Sarah Levin-Richardson and Lela Urquhart.

All the papers are on line and available for comment - [Link]. It is a high quality collection and worth a look - not least for what it shows of some cutting edge thought in academic archaeology.

There were papers that explored visual culture in the past - Celtic coins, sex scenes at Pompeii, the Mausoleam of the emperor Augustus, Greek drinking parties. Criticism of the distorting uses of imagery in archaeology, how ways of seeing direct attention to certain aspects of the past rather than others - aerial photography, for example, or simply a predisposition to look rather than use all available senses in exploring the past (Ruth Tringham was at her best on an immersive exploration of that amazing early farming settlement at Catal Hoyuk in Turkey).

My points?

Work on the irony at the heart of our seeing the past. That we can never see what happened - it is gone. Yet it is all round us to see - in its remains and in what it has become for us now. This is a classic “undecidable”, in Derrida’s sense - [Link]

So put to one side the usual distinction between the real past and its representation, the authentic past and its secondary representation. This is not the way I see images of the past at all.

Photos, drawings and diagrams aren’t so much representations of our archaeological data - pots, sites, any other kind of facts - so much as acts of inscription - ways we deal with the past. The are part of the way we engage with the past and others who have an interest - colleagues, or anyone else with an interest in the archaeological past.

Key term - intermedia - this referes to the fungibility that we are so familiar with now as one traditional medium merges into another - because a medium is no longer to be defined by its material or substance - paint, film, magnetic tape. My iPod deals in sound, radio programs, voice memos, snapshots, lecture presentations, calendar items, my address book. All can be interchanged and combined because of digital computation.

Key term - mixed realities. Rather than separate reality and representation, think of how we live in a world of subtle gradations from the hard reality of mortality through to wild unrealized utopias - and there are all sorts of inscriptions along the way.

Working on the fungibility of image and text - here an experiment in layout and typography dealing with the deep mapping of three archaeological encounters in Wales UK, Sicily and California - a Visual Primer for the Three Landscapes Project (Stanford 2001 -).

Key term - sensorium. By this I mean that we should treat sight as part of a particular array of all the senses (this is what I mean by sensorium). A way of seeing is connected with ways of hearing, touching, feeling. Nowadays we tend to value rich photographic verisimilitude and are less attuned to the subtle difference of feel of material surfaces, for example. What then of past soundscapes ( a new area of interest and research in archaeology)? Or the smell of the past? - archaeologists have researched the olfactory cityscape of Novgorod (tanning factories within the city walls stinking out the whole place). Chris Witmore did a great presentation on ancient and modern Greek soundscapes.

Key term - manifestation. It’s not just cause and effect or making sense of an ancient temple that matter. Simply manifesting the past to people is a good thing - letting them experience what is left of the past in all its richness.

An exhortation. Too many talk about what’s wrong with imagery and representation in archaeology. Cut down on talking about seeing and get on with the looking and imaging. Practice as the best form of critique.

An example of good practice - architects like Daniel Libeskind who have pioneered new ways of seeing building, embodied in the way they draw and plan as well as the buildings themselves. Architectural drawing here not as a “representation” but as a crucial part of architectural practice - from visionary beginnings though concept definition, persuasion of client, through engineering calculation to the logistics of building. None of these plans, diagrams, renderings are simply “representation”.

A few traditional aphorisms and gestures.

Adorno - the best magnifying glass is a splinter in the eye. [Link]

Bertold Brecht’s gesture of verfremdung - interrupting the illusion of a theatrical performance - stopping the flow of “representation” and the storyline with comments directly engaging the audience.

Walter Benjamin reflecting on the Nazi expertise in new mass media - political progress is now intimately and inextricably intertwined with technical facility. If we want to reach out to people with enlightening stories of the archaeological past we have to go one better than Disney. [Link]

Seeing the past? I want archaeologists to help us all to see it freshly. Not as another hackneyed image.

And I think these are some ways of achieving that goal.

Last Friday Bill Cockayne (Stanford Humanities Lab Assoc. Director) and I (also in my role as co-Director of Stanford Humanities Lab) were at the local office of DaimlerChrysler - RTNA (Research and Technology North America).

In response to their request, we were proposing a project to research the future of car culture, with a focus on a particular interest of RTNA in IT and interiors.

Our pitch was to look at the big picture of contemporary cultural innovation - to draw on ethnography, sociology, material culture studies, design studies, economic forecasting, whatever field necessary. But not to predict. Instead to sketch possible scenarios. Stories of what it might be like in five to ten to fifteen years time to use information technology in a car.

Sam (Schillace) is also part of this - with his expertise in Agile Development - a key to the success of the local software industry here. We were proposing to bring this design methodology to bear on such questions as - what will people want in their cars in ten years time?

Managing complexity.

We were arguing that it is not possible to establish user needs and desires, now and in ten years time, and use this knowledge to deliver a new piece of car interior that answers those needs and desires.

Many, probably most technology projects fail. Most which succeed are rated poorly by the end user. This is largely due to the complexity of technical products. Most companies and projects respond to this complexity by building large processes and teams. But this only makes the situation harder to manage. More people and more milestones means more communication, more complexity, and more distance between the user and the design, making it less likely to succeed.

Some companies approach this problem by having “talented” designers make guesses about what the user might want. In a complex environment, though, these guesses are more likely to be wrong than right. Further, this technique is only likely to refine existing solutions, not to discover new ones.

After-market customer survey is a very blunt tool for understanding what people need and want. People may well not be able to express what they like. Usability studies can focus on people’s interactions with things, and ethnography can help understand the crucial intangible and subjective factors of car culture and experience. But it remains very difficult to make predictions about complex systems.

So don’t try to predict.

Archaeological futures?

Instead Agile Development works on rapid prototypes, tries them out with people, modifies, then modifies again and again - because this is the best way to understand how people might get on with things. You can’t predict. Work through conversation and collaboration.

The importance of iteration.

Instead, research not the local and particular, but the big picture - understand possible trends and use these to put the local more precisely in context. Our take on the very familiar “think global - act local”.

But it also poses the question of just what is the long term and the bigger picture. And here I see a fundamental and unique role for what archaeology and anthropology could become - the only research environments that can deal with people’s relationships with things over the long term. OK I am presuming a lot of both disciplines. Material Culture Studies - as a disciplinary field focused on stuff and goods - is in its infancy and hardly recognized by most of my colleagues in both archaeology and anthropology.

The importance of the long term.

But who else can deliver a big picture of the history of design? Of innovation and social change? Of anything? Only archaeologists. Everyone else is squinting at things through a pinhole.

(This has become my epic project - Origins, my latest book, is a study of more than 45 thousand years of design and innovation.)

Now we were up against frog design and IDEO - two of the 400 pound gorillas of the design world.

They are marvellous at designing lovely boxes. Black boxes of all kinds - whether they call them - services, interactions, emotions, brands, whatever.

Today we found out that DaimlerChrysler are going with frog.

Well, it was quite something to be up against them.

But we are coming across this need to understand the bigger picture more and more. I have commented upon it in my review of the archaeological year 2004 [Link]. And we have had conversations these last few months, coincidentally perhaps not, with both BMW and VW about the same question - what is going on in people’s relationships with things like cars? How do we understand it all? Because these very sophisticated companies don’t get it.

VW are even founding a university to change their company car culture. And more - to rethink our understanding of people and things.

I began my career over 20years ago with a highly controversial argument that it was the politics of the past that really mattered in archaeology, its intersection with contemporary interest. Here is the latest iteration of that idea -

Archaeology is actually one of the keys to getting a hold on the future.

Bill’s great concept to encompass this need for the bigger picture is foresight.

So a spin off of our Humanities Lab is to be an Institute for Foresight.

Archaeology as part of research into the contemporary big picture.

And we already have courses, events and projects running - watch this space.

From Christine in Rome.

>> Go to her diary - an archaeologist in Rome.

Archaeography - the new archaeology photoblog from Metamedia at Stanford - is up and running.

[Link]

This is how we describe the project

Archaeography is a photoblog that explores the connections between photography and archaeology.

This is not some quirky juxtaposition - we are convinced that photography is profoundly archaeological, and that archaeography is about a hybrid experience at the heart of contemporary culture. Archaeography faces a challenge of how to work with the chaos of fragmented traces, remains and documents of the past that forms the substance of so much of everyday life today.

Proposition. We are all archaeologists, even if we don’t realize it. An archaeological sensibility - working on what is left of the past, heritage, museums, collecting culture, antiques, retro styling, family genealogy, local history, tourists visiting the past - is a vital part of the contemporary zeitgeist.

Proposition. Photography is profoundly archaeological. Photographs are like archaeological traces of the moments they capture. Photowork raises a question faced by all archaeologists - how do we document events? But neither photowork nor archaeology create transparent windows on the past, though many think they do.

Proposition. Media are material matters. The materialities of media and instruments need to be essential concerns of both photography and archaeology - photographers and archaeologists need to deal with the way their tools and instruments affect what it is they are looking at. Cameras are clocks for making images that are traces of the past. The photograph itself, computer screen, negative, paper or transparency, is an integral and material part of engaging with what is pictured. The archaeological trowel, spade and surveying instrument sculpt the past into different documentary forms we can comprehend.

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