[Link] [Link] [Link]

Ben Cullen thought beyond conventional distinctions under a fresh evolutionary notion of humanity as deeply hybrid – material and immaterial, personhood and artifact, species and thing. Humanity: an undecidable, in Derrida’s sense. The lens through which he approached such questions – viral phenomena, beyond the biological.

This is such a refreshing and vital perspective for those interested in the future of the (academic) Humanities, when a growing crisis about their scope and character is centered precisely upon how we conceive of human being and its study – see my recent entry on declining numbers of students in the Humanities – [Link] also, more generally – [Link]. Too many want to retrench the Humanities in letters and the arts, in (high) culture, emphasizing the old distinctions between the Humanities and Sciences, worlds of people versus nature, culture versus technology. Repeated is the old and simple exhortation: read books, because they delve the depths of the human condition. OK, but so limiting.

This year I finished, with Bjørnar Olsen, Tim Webmoor and Christopher Witmore, our book Archaeology: the Discipline of Things (University of California Press), and my own The Archaeological Imagination (Left Coast Press). Both follow Ben’s suspicion of Cartesian dualisms and treat human being as distributed through rich and indeterminate networks of people-and-things. This doesn’t square with our current disciplines and questions the very validity of the Humanities, but in a positive way – because a new Humanities focused upon hybrid human being will be central to any address to real-world issues that includes people, which means just about any issue that matters. I have commented much about human-centered design thinking, as practiced in our d.school, as a manifestation of such a new Humanities [Link]. Ironically perhaps, and as we point out in our book, the corollary of human-centered engineering is thing-centered Humanities that understands our materiality.

The Archaeological Imagination explores the world of eighteenth-century antiquarians in the Borders between England and Scotland before radical distinctions set in between disciplines in the Humanities and Sciences – mélanges of memories and material remains, human landscapes and physical geologies, natural histories of local plants and animals, family genealogies, collections of manuscripts and artifacts, itineraries through pasts-in-presents. Even in what became something of homage to Walter Scott, the antiquarian inventor of the historical novel, I couldn’t help but think of Ben, and the book is dedicated to him.

Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and other Pieces of our earlier Poets, (Chiefly of the Lyric kind.) Together with some few of later Date. London: Printed for J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall. First Edition, 1765. Ex Libris Michael Shanks.

The title page: “the work of poets endures”. It is, ironically, the voice and music’s notes that carry history; buildings fall into ruin and our writings disperse on the wind. And when the poet is vates, prophet and visionary, reading signs, past and present, of what is to come.

A great antiquarian debate in the eighteenth century concerned the essential role of poetic conjecture in what we now call scientific modeling – and this included historical reconstruction.

Visiting with Bianca (Carpeneti).

As pure a contrast between the Classical and Gothic Romantic as can be imagined.

Here is something I have written to appear in my forthcoming book “The Archaeological Imagination” – to my embarrassment and frustration still in (final) revision.

Sir Charles Monck decided not to restore his family castle of Belsay in the south east of Northumberland. This very fine fourteenth century tower was extended with a Jacobean wing after the union of the crowns in the early seventeenth century and was the home of the Middleton family. Monck inherited in 1795 together with another estate from his maternal grandfather (which prompted his change of name from Middleton to Monck). In 1804 he set off on a two year honeymoon that included a tour through Germany and a long stay in Greece. He had had a traditional classical education at Rugby school and clearly got caught up in the current enthusiasm for all things ancient and Greek: his sketched various new neo-Classical buildings in Germany, and in Athens fell in with William Gell at the time of his publication of his Topography of Troy and when he was working on what was to be his Itinerary of Greece. The experience was revelatory: on his return to Belsay Monck set about designing a new house inspired by his first hand experience of Classical Greek architecture. Ten years of building produced one of the most consistent applications of contemporary understanding of the geometry of ancient Greek architecture to a modern residence.

The two hundred and more drawings for the project that still remain — the plans and ideas that lay behind the house — show that this was very much a personal project. One architectural drawing for the hall was by Gell, though Monck’s zeal for accuracy led to something quite different to the optical consistency I have discussed in Gell’s topography. The theme is the Doric order, very much interpreted in what is almost a meditation on proportion and geometry. The house is exactly one hundred feet square. Exactly — Monck insisted that the proportional ratios of the design were calculated to three decimal places, forcing masons to abandon their conventional measurements in eighths of an inch.There are few direct quotations from the original Greek, though the Tower of the Winds appears at Belsay as the octagonal lantern on the stables. This is more a rationalist reworking of what people like Monck and Gell (and William Wilkins, another antiquary and architect friend) thought that Greek architecture represented. The fronts of the house are exceptionally severe, wholly plain apart from the fluted Doric columns at the entrance and the pilasters: the emphasis is simply on proportion, line and surface; the roof was low-pitched so as to be invisible from ground level, kept from intruding upon the rectangular geometry. There is even evidence that the library bookcases echo the proportions of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens, as measured by Monck.

The nearby village was demolished and the site turned over to being a quarry for building stone; the locals were rehoused in a model village on the main road between Newcastle and Jedburgh. Monck abandoned the castle and old house, turning them into a ruin. The quarry was then converted into a garden, connecting the new house with the ruin: it looks like a painting by Salvator Rosa, on the wild side of the picturesque, tumble-down grottoes, seating niches by springs in the rock faces, and a look of natural abandon in the ferns and undergrowth. Formal gardens immediately around the house become parkland in the manner of Capability Brown and Repton, as at Alnwick, with much use of ha-has that open up views across the estate, and to the hillside opposite, forested with exotic conifers, Scot’s Pine and native hardwoods. Monck’s variation on the Theseion in Athens, his temple to rational system, is a focus of human order in a landscape that was less cultivated and more suggestive of chaos and decay the further it was from the house, just as the modern finds new life in the ancient, and the ruin of history becomes a charming after-dinner walk through the picturesque.

The theme in the archaeological imagination given different inflection in these building projects is one of the possibility, feasibility and, crucially, the desirability of rebuilding the past, making good the loss of time and ruin. A key archaeological task is to sort through the debris of history. And then what? To witness the loss by consolidating ruins as just that, ruins in a new landscape. To rebuild and restore, to fill in the gaps. To replicate exactly. Or to build again, incorporating the past into the present. Does authenticity lie in the original fragment, the broken stone statue itself, or in the principles of proportion and order of an ancient culture? Or even in a sentiment such as baronial splendor?

The walk through the quarry garden

Original painted plaster in the great hall of the medieval tower

The text is nearly 500 pages long and full of detail, backed by a long guide to further reading. The story is indeed all-too-familiar and rather melodramatic: powerful rulers lording their way through history, plotting and scheming, indulging their whims and desires, against a background of threat, oppression and poverty.

Amenhotep III wearing the khepresh, or Blue Crown, New Kingdom, Eighteenth Dynasty 1391-1353 BCE

This last weekend I posted a comment on the exhibition of Olmec art at the de Young in San Francisco – [Link] In contrast to the extraordinary things on display, I find fault with their presentation as “ART”, when that notion is embedded in a very elitist set of practices and institutions that serve the interests not of humanity in general, but of commodified contemporary cultural property in the hands of a few. I am disappointed when I witness academic colleagues acting as gatekeepers to this world of ART, offering what seems like transparent description and account, in labels and catalogues, when actually that very language is shutting down options, telling you what you are seeing, indicating how authorities write about the past and other societies, about creativity and making, and therefore how the educated, but non-expert, viewer should see and talk. My point, one that I feel the need to regularly reassert, is that we may miss the opportunity to learn about ourselves and others, when the story of history is presented as basically already known, only requiring repetition and transmission to new generations by knowledgeable experts.

In the de Young exhibition the story was that of the artistic creativity of an ancient civilization – a universal story of rare human talent. Nevertheless, much on show was quite strange, and witnessed a very fragmentary record of Olmec times. In spite of my criticism of the simple frame applied to Olmec art in the exhibition, the things broke that frame – there was a tension between the familiarity of the human and animal physiognomy of the figurative art, the expressions, the postures, the props and accoutrement of power and divinity, and the sense that there was a lot more going on that we had little access to (and, not least, because the archaeologists and art historians were reluctant to take us there.)

Let me say a little more about this tension.

Tomb of Khnemomosi, Eighteenth Dynasty, c1370 BCE

Toby Wilkinson’s account of three thousand years of ancient Egypt is a universal story of the rise and fall of infamy, power and aggrandized kings.

Ancient Egypt has too often been portrayed as exotic, a distant and strange world obsessed with opulence and death. Toby Wilkinson would have us believe that it was far more familiar, and in a rather wearisome way – his imbroglio of political struggles that reads like a political history of the last hundred years, where the rule of the notorious and “heretical” pharaoh Amenhotep IV, Akhenaten, can be likened to that of North Korea today. I can find no strangeness in his story at all.

The clear scholarly language of the Olmec exhibition catalogue and labels is quite precise and descriptive, but stops short of a strong narrative frame, other than that of archaeologists discovering stuff in Mexico and arguing about it. Wilkinson’s formulaic narrative is delivered, very successfully, in chatty and journalistic prose, definitive (“this is the way it happened”), few ifs or buts. It is in that style so familiar from the narrative non-fiction of the contemporary book trade and media industries today. This is no doubt because his editor at Random House has an eye on the market.

I think we are here looking at a failure of the archaeological imagination

It is, I believe, a failure of scholarship to impose the present on the past, to find our own reflection in the rich experiences of others living in different societies. Yes, we do have to translate ancient worlds into terms we understand, but that also forces us to question our own terms of understanding. This is the actuality of archaeology – the way that both past and present change when they are brought together in something like an archaeological encounter. The best accounts are those that let both past and present be what they are as they also offer new insights into the past and into the way we look at our own potential and future.

This also involves witnessing loss, that the past is left in pieces (was it ever a coherent whole?) by refusing a definitive account. The challenge is to weave together loss and reparation, fragments and filling the gaps with account and narrative – exploring the constant tensions between the familiar and the strange.

It is not really appropriate for me to compare Toby Wilkinson’s book with Jan Assmann’s cultural history The Mind of Egypt. Assmann’s book is an academic monograph, though it has appealed to a wider audience. But it does interweave the familiar and strange in the way I have described, avoiding easy formulae and stock narrative, offering a translation of the remains of a lost world, its metamorphosis under the never-ending challenge we all face to watch and listen carefully, as we make sense of the rich and different human experiences of others.

This time – Anselm Keifer and his remarkable workings with memory, materiality, guilt and landscape.

I’m waiting for the fog to clear at Heathrow. Lovely winter views out over the Tyne. (Photos taken on the new iPhone with Pro HDR)

Two new books add depth to my long-running ruminations on the character of things.

Nonobject, by Branko Lukic and Barry Katz, was published this week by MIT Press [Link]

It’s a rather beautiful book about Branko’s design work. Barry (and Bill Moggridge in his foreword) provide fascinating commentary.

The nonobject is inbetween, relational, interstitial, combinatory. What if the designer started not from technical and economic viability in the world of industrial manufacture, nor from people’s needs and desires (in what is commonly called human-centered design), but from the space between? This design work on the nonobject would be about how people get on with things.

Branko’s nonobjects are presented in the book as artifacts, though most are imaginary or “conceptual” (for example, made from “thinium” – the perfect material). Many are ironic – a light switch becomes a philosophical gesture (let there be light!); a toilet is made of cut-crystal; here is a collection of clocks that don’t tell the time (at least don’t perform as chronometers); an umbrella that doesn’t deflect but captures rain.

Oxymoronic one-legged chairs attest to controlled imperfection. Exaggeration – cutlery with infinitely thin handles. Metaphor (an assertion of identity in difference): books that are fluid – quenching our mind’s thirst. Some are quite cynical, defiant: there’s a collection of artifacts designed entirely according to an aesthetic of 90 degree form – a rectilinear bicycle (though without square wheels!).

Shades everywhere of surrealism – “ceci n’est pas un pipe”.

Irony, metaphor, exaggeration, oxymoron: these all are, of course, tropes. Design here is truly a field of rhetoric: an argument for … Well what? I’m not sure really.

Many pose questions of the form “what if …?” If biodiversity were applied to consumer electronics … . They are counterfactuals. (I posted some comments on fakes, authenticity and counterfactuals in this blog – [Link] [Link]). I do like this. There is indeed alterity implicit in any form (we can even invoke Adorno’s negation of the negation!) Barry’s commentary revels in these kind of references.

I have some concerns, because the irony wears thin. The book is really quite elitist and sometimes almost arrogant in the eclipse of any kind of politics of industrial design (just who is all this for?). All the (non)objects are photographed according to that clean minimalist aesthetic that focuses attention precisely upon the object made aesthetic. There’s a meta-irony here – here is a book about nonobjects that presents us with a beautifully fetishized collection of utterly alienated beautiful objects, museum pieces in the cool clean light of the vitrine, looking like the great icons of modern design.

But I am left with a fascination for the argument of this rhetoric of things – that we should think not of objects, but of fields, of connection, of mediation, of in-between, of tangible intangibles, where figure and ground collude in the forensic doubting that asks – just what are we dealing with here? [Link] [Link]; see also my recent remarks on Kenya Hara’s Ku (Emptiness) [Link]. And yes – the very notion of human-centered design raises the key question of just what we understand by humanity. Human and object are not so distinct as commonly held.

This comes across also in the book of the exhibition – Unearthed – edited by Doug Bailey, Andrew Cochrane, and Jean Zambelli for the Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts [Link]

Prehistoric figurines – just what are they?

Again – we are presented not with objects, but with possibilities, questions, arguments, connections, processes. Interminglings through material, making, metaphor. Toys, dolls, miniatures, models, fetishes … . The book ranges far and wide in its associations.

Both these books about objects are collections. They are wonderful experiments in pragmatology – explorations of objects as “things” – collectives, gatherings, assemblages.

Superb performance last night from Gorillaz at Oakland Arena.

Their latest, Plastic Beach, has an environmentalist theme, but avoids trite treatment of such a common and pressing matter of concern. (The contrast with the likes of movie Avatar is stark.)

Human concern –

- Damon Albarn, graphic artist Jamie Hewlett, the 2D virtual members of the group (the 3D holograms weren’t here in Oakland), and their various musical collaborators (including Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of the Clash; and Bobby Womack – powerfully and uncannily present) wove a dense collection of metaphors, media allusions, narrative clips, through a syncretic and surrealist multimedia mélange that prompted all manner of reflection and reaction on this latest manifestation of

the human condition – real merging with the imaginary, the everyday with the spectral, flesh with machinery, utopian idyll and abject garbage …

Not so much human impacts on the environment as co-evolutionary entanglement in an out-of-control shared world.

I do see archaeology everywhere; it’s a neurosis of mine (and that’s what this blog is about ). The Halloween accent – zombie flesheater backing vocals, everyone in living-dead gothic horror – highlighted what I call the archaeological – the grubby mess that remains of human aspiration, the collusion of sentiment and fabrication, the fabulous assemblage of people and our “things”, our decaying thing-like material constitution that makes us all precisely human -

- the object of archaeological interest

No easy happy-ending stories, hopes of a sunny outlook …

Superfast Jellyfish – fastfood goes toxic nuclear -

Martin Parr – the luminous abject

Seed magazine brings together a unique gathering of prominent scientists, artists, novelists, philosophers + other thinkers who are tearing down the wall between science + culture.

We are on the cusp of a twenty-first-century scientific renaissance. Science is driving our culture and conversation unlike ever before, transforming the social, political, economic, aesthetic, and intellectual landscape of our time. Today, science is culture. As global issues—like energy and health—become increasingly interconnected, and as our curiosities—like how the mind works or why the universe is expanding—become more complex, we need a new way of looking at the world that blurs the lines between scientific disciplines and the borders between the sciences and the arts and humanities. In this spirit, the award-winning science magazine Seed has paired scientists with nonscientists to explore ideas of common interest to us all. This book is the result of these illuminating Seed Salon conversations, edited and with an introduction by Seed founder and editor in chief Adam Bly.

[Link - Amazon]

[Link - my site]

[Link - Seed Magazine Issue 12 - with video]

Wonderful comment this morning from Victoria Bellotti (PARC) – that archaeology is dethnography

Absolutely – (d)ethnography – d.ethnography – the intermingling of dreams and mortality, utopia and the realities of material constraints, the angel of death whispering in the ear of aspiration. What is more human?

Death at the heart of living; negative entropy as a life force. Very Gothic. Very Heidegger. Very Benjamin.

And a great excuse to post another example of haunted media! (Ethnographers in industry like to show lots of photographs of their subjects – but should beware of the politics of the fetishistic gaze )

Daguerreotype. c1850. Digitally restored. [Link]

I am at the Getty Center today at a symposium organized by Alain Schnapp. Some very distinguished experts brought together to discuss antiquarians.

Antiquarians?

Those fascinated, often passionate, about the collection, description, classification of the remains of the past. Artifacts and monuments, landscapes even, as evidence connecting us with the past.

Antiquarianism sounds arcane. It is. Not least because it got such a bad press. By the nineteenth century, calling someone an antiquarian was an insult, inferring they were an amateurish scholar at best, bookish, myopic, neurotically obsessed with dry and dusty relics of no interest to anyone else.

But a major reevaluation is taking place. This symposium is part of a deep rethinking of the history of antiquarian thought. The topic is nothing less than people’s attitudes towards the past, and particularly the presence of the past with us here now, and how we might deal with the remains. There’ll be a book later, backed by the Getty, a comparative history, comparing and contrasting antiquarians across different cultures.

Broadly we are dealing with people’s attachment to things and places, relationships with the life of things. It’s about memory, personal and collective, the way things make us who we are, traces and vestiges of times gone past, ruin and decay, entropy and mortality. Sarah Morris identified three key components: relics, reverence, revival. Collecting, organizing, caring for things, restoring and reviving. Major matters of common human concern.

My contribution is called “An antiquarian and his dog: Walter Scott in Pompeii”, looking at how all this was worked out in the Scottish borders at the end of the eighteenth century.

Here’s how I started:

Pompeii, February 16 1832.

Walter Scott, poet, literary antiquarian, magistrate, collector, best-selling inventor of the historical novel, was visiting the excavations in the company of William Gell, antiquarian, topographer, and representative of the Society of Dilettanti of London. Gell was in pain with his gout. Scott was dying and had to pushed around the ruins in a wheelchair.

Gell’s diary (reported by Lockhart, Scott’s biographer) contains the following entry:

“… I was sometimes enabled to call his attention to such objects as were the most worthy of remark. To these
observations, however, he seemed generally nearly insensible, viewing the whole and not the parts, with the eye, not of an antiquary, but a poet, and exclaiming frequently—” The City of the Dead,” without any other remark.”

Pompeii was, of course, newly excavated: the spectacular, tangible and evocative remains of catastrophe, trauma, and aftermath.

Scott talked more about Gell’s dog – it reminded him of his own back at Abbotsford on the Tweed in Scotland.

Why was it simply the city of the dead to Scott?

Rather than pursue any interest in Roman antiquities, Scott, again according to Lockhart and his own diary, feverishly collected local manuscripts and started writing a novel about bandits!

Why was Scott, whose antiquarian imagination fired up a generation of readers at the beginning of the nineteenth century, not interested in the most spectacular of archaeological ruins?

You can find my answer here –

For me antiquarian thought is distinctively contemporary. We can see this argument made so well by Walter Benjamin, his take on the figure of the collector, the ruin of history in modernity, his great final project, the Passagenwerk, to create an (antiquarian) history of Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, composed as an archival commentary on a cultural miscellany.

I came to work on antiquaries because of my fieldwork in the borders, centered on our new excavations of the Roman town of Binchester (VINOVIVM.org). Put to one side the caricatures and, in antiquarianism, you find the most intelligent and creative of approaches to studying a region – addressing questions of how you represent a region, handling sources, remains, texts, memories, echoes, mortality, people’s impacts on the land and on history, stories and narratives.

Peter Miller (see his superb study of Peiresc) summed up with a very astute point that the academic marginalization of antiquarian study in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is precisely that, a particular partisan exclusion from the academy of certain interests, attitudes and practices. Antiquarianism didn’t go away. It wasn’t a pre-modern and inferior precursor to archaeology, geography and cultural studies. Antiquarianism is more alive than ever. Just we don’t call it antiquarianism.

Actually, I think I’m a neo-antiquarian.

“I was seeing layers of typography, paint, colour – and combined with the texture of the crumbling and flaking materials, many of them were appealing to me as contemporary pieces of design in the vein of work by Ray Gun magazine.”

Manhattan

(see also archaeography.com)

Steam-powered computer mice, clockwork hearts, brass goggles, and the latest state-of-the-art eye-pod?

Enter “steampunk”. Subject of an exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, UK.

My daughter Molly is familiar with all this – “The Subtle Knife” was one of her favorite novels.

Think too of Jules Verne, and the way he imagined the future.

Counterfactuals combined with the futurology of earlier times. Retro futures. Anachronistic utopias. When archaeological materialities meet science fiction.

Here is the museum’s introduction to the fabulous exhibition of contemporary art.

Exhibition blog – [Link]

A wonderful talk this evening from Alain Schnapp in our Archaeology Center.

It was about “ruin” as an intellectual artifact.

Through a kaleidoscope of quotes and vignettes about ruin from antiquity to modernity, Alain reflected upon broad human experiences at the heart of our sense of history, memory practices, collection, temporality.

Goethe among the ruins of humanity’s childhood

I was tempted to synthesize, from this mélange, some elements of a theory of ruin.

Vectors

Articulation Between past and present; flows and continuities, also interruptions. Actuality, as the conjunction of past/present. Temporal topology, the non-linear folding of pasts and presents. Presences, and absences, voids.

Materialization Artifacts and architectures as the metonymic and metaphoric materialization of past in the present.

Inscription Epigraphy, engraving, iconography as a particular presence of the past. Token or icon? Textual sources as ruins. The contrast between inscription and mute relics.

Categorization Catalogs of things. Attributions to date, place, to the makers in systems of order that make sense of entropic ruins and fragments.

Quantification Just how much remains? Can there be too much memory? Ruin and letting go of the past.

Collection Gatherings of ruins and fragments. The collection as microcosm.

Authentication Is the relic genuine, or a fake? What is such authenticity?

Historicity The power to preserve, to commit to memory, to narrative; active processes of recovery, conservation and destruction or elimination. Historicity as our sense of place in historical narrative. The role of hindsight. Agency – the ability to articulate past and present, to (re)construct, to repair the ruin.

Reflection Self consciousness of time and entropy. The ruin as memento mori.

Theatre/archaeology – the re-articulation of fragments of the past as real-time event – from Brith Gof Theatre – Tri Bywyd (Three Lives) 1995 – [Link]

[Link] - The Bibliotheca Universalis Antiquaria – my project with Alain and colleagues.

Some years ago Sam (Schillace) put me onto a Russian photographer, Sergey Larenkov, who combines old and new photographs of Leningrad/St Petersburg, then – WWII, and now.

They have haunted me ever since.

It’s not difficult to find the photos on the web; it only took me a few moments to find them again – [Link]

“Then and now” “This happened here” – an aspect of the archaeological imagination.

(James Cameron did something similar with Ghosts of the Abyss – Titanic “then and now”)

I made a visit to IDEO last week, the design consultancy with its head office in downtown Palo Alto, by Stanford. I’m teaching a class next term with one of its founders, Bill Moggridge. It’s called “Transformative Design” and is run through the Hasso-Plattner Institute for Design at Stanford – the d.school. Bernie Roth from Mechanical Engineering is with us as one of the original teaching team. I am joining this year with Megghan Dryer, also of IDEO.

The d.school’s mission is quite clear – to promote “design thinking” – the process of human-centered design at the heart of IDEO’s very successful consultancy. I am fascinated with this juxtaposition – IDEO’s distillation of design practice with the interpretive understanding and analytics at the core of archaeological and anthropological approaches to material culture.

[Link to class website]

David Kelley, Tom Kelley, Tim Brown and Bill himself have written much about IDEO’s method, the use of ethnographic observation, brainstorming, prototyping and narrative. I’ll be elaborating on all this through the course of the class.

[Link] – Bill’s book – “Designing Interactions”

[Link] – Tim Brown’s blog on design thinking

My line is that archaeologists offer unique insights into both creativity and innovation in the history of design, and, as modernity’s key memory practice, archaeology is itself a design practice, working on what is left of the past, crafting and modeling.

[Link] – archaeology as design in contemporary “risk society”.

An insight came straight out of this recent visit.

I picked up a couple of books in the IDEO collection. “Thoughtless Acts” is a photographic documentary of intuitive everyday “design” – when people adapt things and environments to needs and desires often unforeseen.

Improvization.

IDEO people have also produced two travel guides – on London and New York.

They are called “eyes open” and celebrate experience, ambience and character, rather than overdramatized tourist “attractions”.

There is so much value in making manifest what is tacit, overlooked, assumed.

The quotidian – the everyday, the unnoticed, the ambient – is at the heart of human experience. The quotidian constitutes our sense of “presence”, of really being there. The quotidian is a core of an archaeological imagination.

For me, the flow of everyday experience always and already implies a question of attention, about “what matters” – on what should we focus, what is really happening? It is the question of the relationship between signal and noise, figure and ground.

More notes – Figure and Ground

Standish vinyard – tasting room in an old apple barn.

Testimony to the dying orchards of the valley, the fast-growing shift to wine production.

Standish – the old connection with the Pilgrim Fathers. One of the Pinot Noirs is named “Mayflower”.

Gallery – Link

Don’t you often wonder about what museums keep in their store rooms, but rarely manage to display? The hidden, perhaps forgotten, treasures of “The Archive”

Last year, between March 2007 and April 2008, in a small gallery off the main stair well in our Cantor Arts Center at Stanford stood a locked steel cage full of art works … still in their protective storage boxes, half-opened to let you peek in.

a project in “animating the archive” – Archive 3.0

The artifacts were the main part of a collection I made from the store rooms of the Cantor — 52 artifacts, one for each week of the year, randomly selected from the museum’s vast database.

By the cage was a computer and an invitation to make a comment on the exhibition’s web site. To say something about what you could see in the cage, what you might imagine about the store rooms, what treasures lay down there, cared for, but unseen.

I had been asked by the Cantor to be part of their “Faculty Choice” program — to deliver a reaction to the collections, as a member of Stanford’s faculty. Others have given tours of the galleries or presented lectures on their interests in the rather marvelous holdings. I asked to be let into the basement, through the locked door into the store rooms, to see what lay within. I couldn’t expect to see everything, so I developed a simple way of making a random sample of the museum’s collection – random numbers taken from the radioactive decay of Caesium 137 applied to the museum’s digital data base. (OK this may sound wacky – but have a look here at my thinking [Link])

I wanted to share my fascination with museum store rooms. I love the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. I had spent many months exploring the depths of collections of Greek pottery across Europe and the Mediterranean in my 10 year study of ancient Corinthian perfume jars [Link]) So I built a web site, a wiki, that would let anyone view the artifacts dredged from the store rooms, alongside available information about them, and then add comment or reaction. I worked with a team of high school and college students who did just this and presented their own personal collection of art works, together with stories and researches.

This had worked well for an exhibition of the photography of Edward Burtynsky held in 2005. The accompanying wiki attracted over 70,000 interactions and delivered some very interesting discussions – [Link]

I planned a series of additions to the exhibition with the high school students — images and clippings in a collage on the gallery wall, and perhaps some more artifacts, everyday items, placed alongside the cage.

But the project stalled. After the first contributions from the students I let the web site rest. I have hesitated to share the reasons, but there are some very interesting dilemmas at the core of my experience.

What is to be done with collections in museums of artifacts about which we know very little?

Though the Cantor Art Center has developed a focus upon the arts over the last ten years and more, since the museum was redesigned after the ’89 earthquake, its storerooms are still dominated by the original Stanford Family collections and a cascade of donations made since. Jane and Leland junior were quite eclectic and even promiscuous in their buying. Other donations are very mixed in their character and quality. Most are not the kind of thing you would put in a conventional gallery exhibition.

My encounter with these collections in the store rooms was based upon an exploration of the database, though it was far more fascinating to simply open drawers at random to see what was within. The Cantor is a well-resourced and well-run establishment. Its storerooms are state of the art in their organization and protection offered to the artifacts.

Nevertheless, of the 52 artifacts chosen at random from the database, 5 were found to be missing. And none had any significant detailed information concerning where they came from. There were some beautiful items, and some quite strange. The old pistol in the cigar box was rather evocative. But all the information about the artifacts was circumstantial and incidental, usually concerning the donor.

I had anticipated this. The project was designed to evoke and provoke. The involvement of the students and the accompanying web site were designed to add context, of whatever kind, to the artifacts.

Here is how I put it:

Animating the archive

Archives – the collections at the heart of our experience of history – need to be brought alive. As well as looking after the remains of the past for the future, we might make something of the past in the present.

Opening up the importance of context

A crucial issue is context . Artifacts become tautologies if we don’t know where they came from, the circumstances of their making, use, exchange and discard, who cared for them, what became of them, their life history. Tautology – because we only confirm what we already know when we assign an artifact to a class simply on the basis of what its form tells us and through reference of form and attributes to a standard catalogue or art history. This Corinthian perfume jar is … a Corinthian perfume jar! Albeit a beautiful/ugly/different/regular one.

Connecting collection with storytelling

Collections and archives come to life when we tell stories about them. When we connect things to contexts in this way.

Revealing value

This project asks questions about the character of collection. Why do some things fascinate? What values lie behind collection?

Things are collected when they are seen to have some value. The art museum is often interested in aesthetic value, how an artifact is a testament to an artist’s skills, and to the taste of the collector in acquiring such a fine example.

How interesting is this? There are many different kinds of value – ways of finding interest in an artifact because of how it speaks to you, of its qualities and experiences, how these connect with your own.

This project encourages us to explore different kinds of value through the members of a collection.

Revealing the personal

Value always also has a personal dimension. It is how ”’you”’ connect with a thing, how ”’you”’ find it of value.

This project is about exploring such personal responses.

Richer accounts – challenging the standard stories

Much collection and exhibition starts and ends with familiar stories. The history of art; the story of an artist; the variety of a type of valued artifact; the history of a region.

This project begins with a random selection from items in store, not with a story or contribution to art history, nor with some intrinsic quality, though all of these may have originally led to an item joining the museum.

The project sets us the task of finding connections and weaving stories. Its emphasis is upon the process of building a collection.

This is quite a different basis to exhibition. We expect to generate richer experiences and stories.

Redeming the past

Think of all this as a kind of rescue or salvage archaeology, an animation of the cultural archive that is a museum, a redemption of the loss inherent in the ruin that is history, making good the gaps, the missing pieces.

So what went wrong?

Nothing really. Except that the responses revealed the inherent poverty of collections like this Or, more precisely, the complexity, the contradictions at the heart of notions of cultural value. The students struggled, quite appropriately, to reconcile the expectation that they would learn from the artifacts (about the ancient past, Asian arts, archaeology) with the reality that the collection only came to life when connected with quite subjective aspects of their own experience that actually said nothing much at all about the artifacts (the students produced some fascinating micro-narratives of their lives, hopes, interests).

Paradox – the poverty of such collections in terms of historical and archaeological value is only revealed through the attention and engagement of “collectors” – those fascinated with archives and museums. This runs deep into the values contested in the market for ancient art and antiquities. Collectors love the things for their qualities; for art historians and archaeologists and those of like mind, the things are located in much broader and richer contexts.

So the web site was showing conspicuously that the collection of a great and well-run museum such as that at Stanford is actually not all that rich as a resource for learning.

Perhaps this is not such a bad thing?

Tom Seligman, Director of the Cantor Arts Center, has pioneered the radical evolution from “museum” to “arts center”, emphasizing active and very explicit development of the university’s holdings of art, very conscious of these issues of value. This issue of the pedagogical and cultural value of collections needs airing. A university collection is a good place to start.

I do think also that people need to know about a connected scandal, little known to most. Well-organized and well-managed collections, such as that at Stanford, are the exception. I have seen vast collections of fabulous works lying rotting and undocumented in so many museum store rooms across the world.

More information – [Link]

Gallery – [Link]

On museum futures – [Link]

Life Squared – web link and gallery link.

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?

Camera c 1947.

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

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

The aim – to open up the exhibited apace to the visitors – animating the encounter with commentary and conversation.

PS the exhibition ended in September – an archive of the site is available at Burtynsky.stanford.edu

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.