Welcome to the post-digital world, an exhilarating return to civility – via Facebook and Lady Gaga.

The point – our contemporary world is a mixed reality – witness the growing importance (again) of “live events”, even as we are more connected digitally:

A week in California and a finger in the recessionary wind has shown me where the smart money is moving. It is from online towards “live experience”.

The example of the music business is already well-known. Earnings from recordings have been plummeting for a decade, while from live they are rising ever faster. Warner Brothers release albums free online to publicise forthcoming concerts. In Britain HMV is closing 40 shops while tickets for a Rihanna concert can cost £330, and for Coldplay £180. A seat for Madonna is more expensive than her entire recorded output. A top American performer would reckon to earn between 80% and 90% of revenue from live performance. In the US alone, touring revenue that grossed $1bn in 1995 rose to $4.6bn last year. The big money, goes the catchphrase, “is now at the gate”. Nor is this just a youth phenomenon. On the American music circuit, 96% of singers were reportedly over 40 and almost half were over 60.

The potency of experience extends far beyond the realm of music. The upsurge in live comedy began in the mid-90s with tours by Robert Newman and David Baddiel, but now has Michael McIntyre and others appearing weekly, with back-up teams that would staff a circus. Performers such as Stephen Fry have taken to reading their books in public, Dickens-style, and simulcasting to hundreds of local cinemas. Close to a million people worldwide watch the Met Opera live in cinemas.

The most carefully researched audience activity, American politics, has swung from advertising and staged events to the archaic political form of active debate. The Republican primary campaign has seen 23 debates, winning unprecedented television audiences of 5-6 million …

The issue is the convergence of authenticity and mediation in what Joe Pine calls the experience economy. People matter in the world of (industrial) design and cultural production in a way that we haven’t seen for a long while. As I was recently commenting [link], the values at the heart of this human-centered design ultimately come down to relationships between people, their artifacts, and, crucially, both in the context of what Jenkins calls “civility”. (Recall the etymology – this is the world of the civis, the citizen – what I am calling res publica.)

Jenkins only comments on the significance of authenticity, of presence, of liveness. He doesn’t delve into the workings. A forthcoming book edited with Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye does just this kind of exploration with some performance artists and academics.

Presence, trace, record, media, document, archive … it is one of the culminations of our five year long “presence project”:

[Link] – Amazon

Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces,

that presence is filled with the past,

that the future is not constructed with innovation per se, but is an ongoing project of working on what is left of the past, and on what will become the past

(those iterative acts at the heart of design thinking).

Bamburgh Hall, Northumberland UK, a village that was once the capital heart of Celtic Christianity, setting for Walter Besant’s historical novel of 1884 Dorothy Forster, set in the Jacobin uprising of 1715

This is something of an antithesis to historiography, that the writing of history establishes events, sequence, date, agency, causation. Instead Laurent celebrates Walter Benjamin’s attack on such historicism with his messianic time of the now – Jetztzeit, and takes up Henri Bergson’s metaphysics of duration.

There are four key components to this argument.

1) The temporality of archaeology, our most intimate human experience of the past, is not date and event, but what I term actuality – conjuncture, the articulation of past and present, rooted in the way the past can endure, albeit changed. Actulaity is the Greek kairos – a moment of re-connection, re-collection, when something prompts a link between past and present (hence Laurent sees this as memory practice).

2) There is in this articulation a melancholic paradox – the past’s material decay is the condition of its persistence. The past is gone, and, though we may wish to revisit, we can do so only on the basis of remains that must have changed. Forever now beyond experience, we can only know the past because it has changed, has become trace and vestige, and is thus with us now.

The present must decay. Immortality is not an option. Transiency is our condition of being, of the existence of the past in the present. Ruin and decay mean that the past can be a potential subject of experience and knowledge. Things can endure, through their material resistance to decay and ruin, and because we can care and protect, attend to old things.

3) This is a geneaological perspective, focused on chains of connection reaching back into time immemorial. Its main features are not plot and event (the drama of historicism), but everyday matters, the quotidian, material textures of life. Most of the past in the present is trivial and superficial.

I think of the fictions of Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet, indeed those too of Walter Scott, and how they foreground texture and indeterminacy. Consider how photography is a superb witness of precisely the superficial and everyday, mostly irrelevant noise against which we may wish to see event and drama in the gap between the moment of picture taking and viewing – the actuality of the photograph, the temporal gulf bridged by its materiality.

4) The past needs work, the present contains latent pasts ready to be re-activitaed, re-collected, re-articulated, re-presented in creative work – the craft of archaeology. In this geneaological perspective there are necessary breaks with the past, because memory depends upon forgetting. Memory does not hold onto the currency of the ongoing present, but is conjuncture – when something prompts a connection to be made with what had until then been forgotten, latent or dormant. The past returns in such creative acts, such hauntings that may appear quite uncanny, precisley because of the breaks in the flow of time.

See my book Experiencing the Past (1992) [Link]
The Archaeological Imagination (2012) [Link]
Archive 3.0 [Link]
Archaeography.com [Link]
Archaeographer.com [Link]
Ruin Memories [Link]

Daguerreotype, c 1850

PhotoGraphy from ShiKai Tseng on Vimeo.

(An artifact is placed inside a pinhole camera that records a 360 degree panorama onto its surface.)

Further focus on medium as mode of engagement, as much as signal and communication; the camera as architecture, here theater and prop.

Exploring the Borders with Gary (Devore).

Jedburgh Abbey – an extraordinary building.

In the footsteps of Roloph Beny – remarkable photographer, remarkable and misguided snob.

Here is his photo from the lavish Thames and Hudson edition of Rose Macualay’s “Pleasure of Ruins” (1962).

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

Start-up company Box dot Net – preparing for its move to new offices.

I usually prefer the term “design studies” over “material culture studies” – the term typically used in cultural anthropology for a focus upon humanity’s material accoutrement. I don’t think the distinction between material and immaterial or intangible is always that useful (isn’t all culture in some way material, even if it is the intangible of the cultural imaginary?).

Here, however, we are truly in the realm of material culture …

Brussels.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Everyday detritus – Roman – the indeterminate quotidian

Today I ran a session about archaeology and design. (A tighter focus than my recent case for pragmatology and pragmatogony – [Link])

I think I took on too much, tried to say too much. There’s so much ground work that needs to be laid before we can communicate across the spaces that separate the likes of industrial design and archaeology. I decided to pull together some rather abstract points.

Here they are, with something of a case study (an ancient Corinthian perfume jar).

1. Archaeology is as much a design process itself as it is the study of the history of design – archaeologists work with what is left of the past to make knowledges, experiences, narratives … . This is not a superficial observation; it involves the pragmatic methodologies and disposition of archaeology, captured in the concept of abductive reasoning.

2. Archaeology best understands things through a pragmatic methodology, both analytic and interpretive, of immersion in medias res. Like design thinking.

3. The key concept of assemblage. The thing as a gathering. The primacy of dispersal and distribution. You have to do a look of work to understand needs and functions.

4. The ubiquitous character of human innovation and creativity. Rooted in the duality of structure, that society is both the medium and outcome of human practice. Every action reproduces society, and simultaneously holds the potential of change.

5. Innovation and creativity cannot be understood without relation to the active processes of tradition. Given the creativity of human practice, tradition is the active management and suppression of change.

6. Fallacies of expression and context. Things are active and don’t just express something else like society or culture of the intentions of their maker. Making things makes people. Focus on processes – not objects with attributes. [Link]

7. Indeterminacy and underdetermination. Making is underdetermined by the designer’s intentions and knowledge of the world and of people. Our human lifeworlds are not reducible to causal and determinate systems.

Much of what I have to say can be found summarized in a piece I wrote called “Nine archaeological theses on design” – [Link] Included are two detailed case studies.

Here is one. I know I am off the central point of our class- to share the process of design thinking directed at changing behavior. But our mission is also to cross borders and pull together diverse approaches to our world of things. There’s a lot of ground work to be laid. We have to take diversions to get to our goal. I hope this one is worthwhile. It describes research I did in the 1990s. It is kind of a reverse-engineering of an ancient perfume jar.

It is about the work that things can perform in changing the world. Things connect; and the task of a designer is to manage these articulations.

The Macmillan aryballos – a perfume jar

Art and material culture have long been seen as direct evidence of the cultural miracle of ancient Greece. Corinth, on the isthmus of Greece, in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, was one notable place in this time of urbanization, as city states crystallized across the Mediterranean, and within only a few decades. Conventional accounts place the Corinthians at the heart of this process of innovation. This has been seen as finding expression in material culture: the potters of Corinth produced high quality goods for an export market (even if we question the existence then of a fully functioning international market, the fine wares do certainly travel far and wide). Corinthians have also been seen to be at the forefront of the developments in political economy, with their early centralized tyranny. And a vanguard in the fine arts: since the late eighteenth century ancient Greek ceramics has been treated as fine art. The Corinthians led the way with a resurgence of figurative design, drawing on Near Eastern forms and schemata.

This research project of mine aimed to understand the design of ceramics at what has been taken as a pivotal historical juncture—the beginnings of classical Greek art.

By 750 BCE the walls of a typical wine cup made in Corinth were eggshell thin, pale buff and covered with ruled black lines, reserved spaces for triangles, outlined lozenges, schematic water birds lined in soldier files. It was a tight and terse visual vocabulary. The firing process, to effect dark on light surface, required careful manipulation of kiln atmosphere. With regulated techniques, expert kiln management and using multiple brushes and a turntable, the potters had the making of ceramics well worked out—risk and experiment minimized in producing the finest wares of their time.

And then, within a generation, the potters did something radically new. First, they made miniatures a specialty, particularly the famous perfume jars (aryballoi) that were sent all over the Mediterranean to be dedicated as gifts to gods in temple sanctuaries, and to be laid down with the dead in so many colonial and provincial cemeteries. Second, they began painting polychrome figures free hand and with details incised through the paint. At risk of messing up the design with the slip of the super-fine brush dipped in clay slip, the potters made daring displays of technical facility in tiny scenes of animals, monsters, men fighting, stylized flowers. In the terms of David Pye, they shifted from a workmanship of certainty to one of risk.

The changes

This is conventionally termed Protocorinthian pottery. The ubiquity of the Protocorinthian perfume jar, the aryballos, makes it a type fossil and chronological index for much of the Mediterranean in the mid first millennium BCE. Find an aryballos and its distinctive style will give you the date of the find spot.

Previous study has been almost entirely within an art historical tradition, with Protocorinthian positioned in the developmental sequence of Greek art as a new inception of figurative design. Most of this work has aimed to identify chronological sequence through the comparison of stylistic traits. Protocorinthian is thus phased as early, middle and late, and takes special position in the traditional ancient Greek design sequence of geometric, orientalizing, archaic, and classical, as geometric receives external inspiration on the way to classical florescence. The figurative scenes have attracted iconographic interpretation—attempts to identify characters and narratives, especially from Greek myth, through comparative examples. This has assumed a separation of iconography and decoration, certain scenes bearing meaning, others, especially the floral patterns, treated as devoid of meaning—”decorative”. Following paradigms of nineteenth century connoisseurship, attempts have also been made to relate the stylistic sequence to individual artists; the orthodox art historical narrative here is one of the genius of Greek artists reconfiguring the stylistic vocabularies of the stagnant and despotic Near East.

I started my research with the stylistic sequence. Unfortunately I found the fine chronologies suspect due to a lack of independent stratigraphical substantiation (a problem of context), and because the phasing was dependent upon a presupposition of stylistic development (early, mature, late) handed down from the kind of eighteenth century art history popularized by Winckelmann and others. Understanding design in orthodox archaeological treatment of classical ceramics is dependent upon iconology and a model of art workshops commonly associated with post renaissance art history, as well as Beazley’s Classical archaeological connoisseurship in the tradition of Morelli. I proposed that the conventional categorization of Protocorinthian be abandoned and the iconology be recognized as useful but narrow. Another argument against classical art history concerned the inadequacy of the distinction between meaningful iconography and meaningless decoration—was meaning only to be found in attribution of narrative and character?

Archaeological approaches to understanding style and design, in the project of what has come to be called social archaeology, have long stressed the importance of context and quantification. This was the next major component of my research. I studied a sample of 2000 aryballoi found in over 90 locations. The project was a contextual treatment in that it addressed processes of origination, manufacture, distribution, consumption and discard in these times of the development of the city state. I tracked the lifecycle of these pots, from manufacture to discard, connecting particularly with political economy, the consolidation of a citizen body of yeoman farmers.

Were the great changes in Greek society responsible for the changes in the production of pottery? If so, how? What were the motivations of the potters? What incentives lay behind the changes? Were the means of distribution a relevant factor in the design of the ceramics? How attuned to patterns of consumption were the potters? And yes—was it down to the genius of the Greeks, both to invent the city state and also the wonders of figurative Greek art? Are we encountering a manifestation of an archaic Greek kunstwollen?

So I presented the context for the design and production of these pots in the way of a narrative of the development of a particular polity form, the Corinthian polis. This was a systemic model of design in such an early state form, with the motivations of producers and consumers related to class culture, and with ceramics produced in a reshaping of class definitions, ideologies and identities. I connected the miniature jars with their use in new kinds of sanctuaries and for the dead, showing scenes from the ideological world of the new state.

But the typical categories, in this argument, of rank, wealth and resources, trade, state formation, urbanization, market and manufacture I found too connected with long standing tendencies to emplot archaeological material in standardized metanarratives (here of the expansion of certain kinds of polity associated with the city state and as a component of an ancient Mediterranean ecology). These interpretive and analytical categories for understanding the context of production of items such as these aryballoi are just too broad and too blunt (on this see my book “Social Theory and Archaeology”). This connected with an old tendency to subsume histories of material culture beneath those established by textual sources, features of the context of production being defined by textual sources. Archaeology has often been seen as “the handmaiden of history” and this period of history is dominated by narratives developed by that nineteenth century historiography normally labelled altertumswissenschaft.

So I adopted another methodology. I started again with simply one vessel and followed lines of investigation arising from its particular life cycle. Instead of treating the aryballos as a discrete artifact, I focused on practice and process, opening, as it were, the black box that is an artifact to see what work is being performing, that is, what connections are established by its attributes and contexts of origination, manufacture, distribution and consumption. I attempted to let the pot lead me into its world, following networks of empirical, statistical, metaphorical, narrative, conceptual, causal, systemic association; it was a project of re-articulation.

It would go like this: a scene of monsters of combined animal, bird and human parts, lion and soldier citizen (hoplite) raised themes figure of the partible body, and, through an opposed figure of a hoplite, a contrast with the armored body, that is one encased in metal. Animal metaphors of experience are also a topic— the hero seen as lion, for example. The probability that this was a jar of perfumed oil (somewhat substantiated by trace element analysis of other aryballoi), and the deposition of aryballoi in graves, led to further questions of the material body in the early city state, its grooming, trauma and decay, in relation to the citizen male and the experience of fighting as individual, or as a member of the citizen body in phalanx formation. Floral decoration, stylized designs from the east, brought in themes of cultural affiliation with other states and class groups … .

So, in addition to a model of household production and changing definitions of class identity, the material led me into a quite different, but clearly complementary story of animals, corporeality, faces, potters’ wheels and brushes, physical and imagined mobility, flowers, food and consumption, sanctuary dining rooms, sovereignty, gender, ships, clothing.

Let me give a flavor of this.

Dining and the sanctuary. To be a sovereign member of the community of the city state of Corinth, a citizen, was to take the boat across the gulf to the sanctuary of the goddess Hera at Perachora for the annual festival. There to eat in style—dining was a principle cult activity; and, perhaps, to leave as gift for the divinity a perfume jar painted with eastern designs and images of the soldier citizen.

The soldier citizen and the hoplite body. To be a member of the community was to bear arms—80 pounds of bronze, iron and leather. A cuirass was often molded as torso; it accompanied shield, stabbing spear, helmet. Beaten from a single sheet of bronze, the Corinthian helmet is a remarkable achievement of the metalworkers’ craft. All have attachments for crests of display. Encasing the head, the helmet gives protection at the expense of hearing and visibility. The face becomes a system of holes and slits. Cheek pieces frame the nose guard between eyes cut out from the sheet metal. Illustrations of this new form of fighting first appear on these pots. Hoplites, anonymous in helmets, apart from shield devices, sometimes lined up in phalanx formation, fight each other, as well as monsters and animals; there are also birds and flowers, robed figures. There are virtually no women painted on the pots.

The importance of the eyes: a late eighth century grave in Argos excavated in 1971 contained a bronze helmet with two extra eyes embossed upon the forehead. Faces are modeled on some aryballoi, and are painted on shields.

Lined up fellow citizen hoplites in the standardized equipment all look alike on the summer field chosen for battle. They stare at each other over the rims of shields: the experience of fighting is focused upon this gaze—the only mark of the individual, apart from shield devices and things done that mark out the doer as special. There is pushing and jostling; the spears come over or below the shields. Typical wounds are to the neck, face and groin. And afterwards, the bodies lay hours or even days in the sun before they are recovered. Disfigured by the wounds to the face and with bloated bodies cooked in the cuirass, there were always problems of identification.

Proxemics and the body. The miniature jar—suitable for transport, containing oil for dressing the body, a suitable gift for divinity or for the dead, displaying figures in tiny scenes, a fraction of an inch high, of grand events, to be held and scrutinized in the palm of your hand.

Sites of innovation: standing close in the phalanx. The new shield is called Argive, the new helmet Corinthian. It has long been clear that the cites of Argos and Corinth in the north east Peloponnese were at the center of innovation in warfare in these times. But it is more than just warfare.

In a scene upon a perfume jar found at Perachora, soldiers fight to the accompaniment of a piper. The Spartan poet Alkman (Davies 41) describes it like this: “counterbalanced against the iron of the spear is sweet lyre-playing”. Archilochus, a traveling mercenary in the seventh century, connects his life with the way one should eat and drink: “By spear is kneaded the bread I eat, by spear my Ismaric wine is won, which I drink, leaning upon my spear” (West 2). The word he uses for leaning (upon his spear) is the same as that used for reclining (on a couch to eat). He says: “I would as soon fight with you as drink when I’m thirsty” (West 125). War is his lifestyle. For a man to bear arms is to claim civic representation, to have the right of participation in cult, to eat and drink in the way one should.

Wine cups carried such pictures too. And at about this time it became the style to recline on couches to eat, an eastern custom.

The deportment of the leisured citizen: to walk and stand in public. They showed it in the scenes upon the pots—in about 650 there is a change of fashion when the sword disappears as an item of civilian dress. A new type of cloak, the himation, appears, men carry spears, and swords are reserved for battle. The himation is not pinned and requires constant attention, hitching it up and holding it in place. It is an item that prevents much activity—except watching, listening, talking, and taking decisions. The cloak enforces and proclaims leisure—you are not a slave or artisan, but a landowning soldier citizen.

Perfumed, embalmed bodies. A few aryballoi, with heads modeled upon the top, are distinctively like canopic jars from New Kingdom Egypt and after that contained the intestines and inner organs of the deceased. The modeled hairstyles too are eastern, seen also on some of the paintings—a layered coiffure that German scholars called Etagenperücke. We know from contemporary poetry that there was something of a style war between those who flaunted their wealth with eastern flair and perfumed hair, and those who saw such habrosune (an aesthete’s fondness for fine goods) as decadent and superficial.

The topology of design. The making and illustration harks backwards and forwards, folded into the life of forms and processes. Notoriously it prefigures, literally, the achievements of classical Greek figurative art. But the iconography has an ancient genealogy. Iconographic elements can be traced through the Near East back for centuries and even millennia (lions, geometrics. lotus and palmette). The slip and oxide paint combined with skilled manipulation of kiln atmosphere (alternating reducing and oxidizing) was also an ancient process. This is why I use the term topology—to emphasize the percolation of forms and techniques, rather than their linear development.

These are just indications of the kinds of association and translation running through the artifact and configured in this rhizomatic method. Connect them with the city of Corinth at its beginnings. Here are some components of a materialist narrative.

My research was to track and rearticulate this distributed networking. Following the connections suggested to me that it is not enough to conceive of the design of an aryballos as representing something else, such as a change in economy, in ways of fighting, or of legends and myths. Nor can the design be simply understood as a relay carrying a message from potter to buyer, or between consumers. Such views treat the aryballos as a secondary representation or expression of something more primary, or real, or material. Instead we can treat the design of an aryballos as located within the work of potter, acts of exchange and consumption, rituals of death and dedication. The design is a material part of what it may be showing us. Archaic Corinthian society, its ideologies, aspirations of potters or citizens, are not experienced directly and in-themselves, for what would that reality be? They appear sphinx-like in the riddles of the object seen as a bundle of such processes. These are its design.

I have been working on a portfolio of photos I had put to one side. They are of the old covered markets in Thessaloniki. I was visiting Kostas Kotsakis in April 2006.

More at archaeographer.com

Daguerreotype c 1850. Oblique view.

See the project Ghosts in the machine.

UK National Museums Get New Powers To Return Human Remains

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

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

Culture Minister David Lammy said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But is it that simple?

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

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

And that it is 1000 years old seems irrelevant.

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.

I never got to finish my comment on Derrida who died last week. [BBC Link]

The obituaries were largely stifled by misunderstanding, outrage, horror and incredulity – have a look at the Guradian’s lamentable list – [Link]

Mark Taylor was better in the NYT – [Link]

Jacques Derrida

Flying back to the US today I see that Time Magazine (issue Dec 27 – Jan 3) includes Derrida in its review of the year.

But he does not appear in the on-line issue. Embarrassment? Whatever.

I want to point out how profoundly archaeological is Derrida’s thinking.

Begin with a key point about our (archaeological) understanding of the past – that it has been crippled by a series of radical oppositions in our thinking, our research, values and understanding, and where one pole is privileged over the other

Presence/absence, materiality/inscription, past/present, those we are interested in/our attempts to understand, what happened/what is left over, life/death, fullness of cultural experience/loss and repetition.

We are meant to think of how absurd it would be to challenge these distinctions – that somehow the traces of the past could hold something the past itself did not possess – that we might suspect the past did not actually happen the way it did, that the past is not internal to itself, but somehow extends beyond its present, genealogically, into its past and into its subsequent history,

But this is just what Derrida does – puts to one side these privileged terms and treats the pairs symmetrically.

With good reason.

For archaeology, and archaeology is the material cornerstone of history and our sense of history, the past is, of course, here with us, living again as we make it our own. And who, arrogantly, will dare to claim they know what really is happening, now or back then? Who will lay claim to the time machine that will reveal the secrets of the past?

We know that all we actually do have are traces, that we only work on flimsy remains, betwen past and present.

Derrida worked on ways of dealing in this undecidability.

The archaeology of zombies.

And this is the first key term – undecidability. Uncertain spaces between. Short circuits. Zombies, vampires – alive AND dead; neither dead nor alive. Secrets we must refuse to believe, even if they are true. Undecidables threaten because they poison the comforting sense that we inhabit a world governed by decidable categories. Undecidability – the horror of indeterminacy. The failure of the life/death presemce/absence opposition. And what threatens and transgresses its category fascinates us.

Tactic – don’t decide. Play both sides. Dis-place past and present, original and trace.

The trace – an undecidable, the past displaced into what remains, both present and absent. The undecidable trace is the origin of the meaning of the past – both present to us, but lost too.

Think too of authentic and original against counterfeit, fake. The signature or seal, representing one’s authentic presence and identity, has to be repeatable, iterable. Like the past. It has to be repeated. Otherwise it wouldn’t be recognisable. Faking it is a necessary part of authenticity. And we are fascinated by forgery.

The past keeps returning, but different, in the new associations of the traces and remains, our hindsight. This is the necessary iteration of the past – it will never be pinned down, there is no bottom line on what happened in the past, because the remains are a return of the past, the same but different (this is the distinction between repetition and iteration).

Ironically perhaps the past is constantly deferred into the future – we will never know, though we may work upon the remains. Deferment.

Strategy. Don’t explain the past – unfix it.

I see an essential honesty and humility in all this, and one that is in sharp contrast to those grand designs of so many of my colleagues to organize and control the evidence, to supposedly get to the truth, to find out what supposedly really happened – which is actually only what they want you to think because it suits them to have it so.

This is all at the heart of what we are calling a symmetrical archaeology.

Performed lectures – raising the level of expressive demands upon presenter and audience with intellectual content uncompromised – intermedia presentation dealing in the textures of archaeology and the past, what meaning cannot convey.

These were where we worked out our ideas for Theatre/Archaeology. We struggled with the irony that not one conference venue could cope with our requests for anything more than a slide projector and screen, even though academic gatherings might be thought to be gatherings of specialists in the arts of communication.

One rather wonderful moment in Riga when we adapted ourselves to a tiny soviet-era projector, a painted wall and no blackout to hide the views out over the city square.

Stanford Cantor Arts Center 2001

In the end I gave up trying to do anything that demanded more than a laptop and video projector (that I usually took with me). And then even abandoned these most of the time – imagery is too low resolution – I now lug around a medium format projector. Unless precise needs can be met. Here in Glasgow I relied upon the conference to meet my modest need of showing some QuickTime movies. Typically, of course, the Wintel machine I was required to use couldn’t deal with them. My fault entirely for expecting anything different. This is what the media industry is all about – forcing your hand.

But it was encouraging to see so many very well prepared and presented papers at TAG. Their average quality far surpassed that of even the better graduate students here in the US – and they can be superb. And they were radically challenging the way we deal with the archaeological past. Truly professional

I say papers – because it is not a surprise that they were all wrapped up in academic language. This is a heartfeld criticism – it was what I was accused of – though I always though it arose through my obsession with precision. It can also easily be part of an aspiration to sound right – and there was a little too much talking the right talk in Glasgow.

And what a depressing venue – a 1960s high rise lecture block. Dank and musty even on a sparkling sharp frosty morning.

Presentation posters and poetry in litter-ridden corridors.

How can anyone be expected to develop a new archaeological poetics in these circumstances? Unless you work with the sad decay of such academic fabric!

This is how Bruce Sterling and Richard Kadrey put it in their modest proposal

Think of it this way. How long will it be before the much-touted World Wide Web interface is itself a dead medium? And what will become of all those billions of thoughts, words, images and expressions poured onto the Internet? Won’t they vanish just like the vile lacquered smoke from a burning pile of junked Victrolas? As a net.person, doesn’t this stark realization fill you with a certain deep misgiving, a peculiarly postmodern remorse, an almost Heian Japanese sense of the pathos of lost things? If it doesn’t, why doesn’t it? It ought to.

Speaking of dead media and mono no aware – what about those little poems that Lady Murasaki used to write and stick inside cleft sticks? To be carried by foot- messager to the bamboo-shrouded estate of some lucky admirer after a night’s erotic tryst? That was a medium. That medium was very alive once, a mainstay of one of the most artistically advanced cultures on earth. And isn’t it dead? What are we doing today that is the functional equivalent of the cleft sticks of Murasaki Shikibu, the world’s first novelist? If we ignore her historical experience, how will we learn from our own?

Listen to the following, all you digital hipsters. This is Jaqueline Goddard speaking in January 1995. Jacqueline was born in 1911, and she was one of the 20th century’s great icons of bohemian femininity. Man Ray photographed her in Paris in 1930, and if we can manage it without being sued by the Juliet Man Ray Trust, we’re gonna put brother Man Ray’s knock-you-down-and-stomp-you- gorgeous image of Jacqueline up on our vaporware Website someday. She may be the patron saint of this effort.

Jacqueline testifies: “After a day of work, the artists wanted to get away from their studios, and get away from what they were creating. They all met in the cafes to argue about this and that, to discuss their work, politics and philosophy…. We went to the bar of La Coupole. Bob, the barman, was a terrible nice chap… As there was no telephone in those days everybody used him to leave messages. At the Dome we also had a little place behind the door for messages. The telephone was the death of Montparnasse.”

“The telephone was the death of Montparnasse.” Mull that Surrealist testimony over a little while, all you cafe-society modemites …

One of my interests is the way we use databases to organise and administer the collections that are at the core of our archaeological lives. (And have played a crucial role in state society since ancient Mesopotamia.)

Databases – sounds dull and tedious? Have a look then at a new exhibition at the Banff Center – Database Imaginary – a suite of works exploring the intersection of everyday experience and databases.

Databases drive culture. 33 artists take us on an imaginative and subversive ride. The artists presented in Database Imaginary use databases to comment on their uses and to imagine unknown uses. The term database was only coined in the 1970s with the rise of automated office procedures, but the 23 projects in this exhibition – which includes wooden sculptures, movies and telephone user-generated guides to the local area – deploy databases in imaginative ways to comment on everyday life in the 21st century. Using newly inflected forms of visual display arising from computerized databases, the works seem to raise questions about authorship, agency, audience participation, control and identity.

I like “How I Learned”, by Jennifer and Kevin McCoy.

They asked the question, “what would you know about the world if the only thing you saw were episodes of Kung Fu?”. They exhaustively catalogued all the individual shots from all of the episodes of the 1970s television show Kung Fu and recompiled the shots according to genres (see the arist’s statement for a complete listing – [Link]). The clips are exhibited on over 100 CDs which are colour-coded and from which the viewer can choose to watch lessons about “Nature and Society”, “Religion”, “Capitalism” and “Filmmaking”. Within these groupings, one can select discs with titles such as “How I learned to complain about my job” and “How to walk ceremoniously” among dozens of other categories.

The art of accountancy in ancient Egypt

He talked to our New Media Workshop about recent work of his, and then to the Archaeology Center about his research into what really went on in the expeditions to the Antarctic back in the early 1900s.

Both were provocative.

In Carrying Lyn, Mike and John Rowley carried Lyn Levett through the streets of Cardiff. Lyn, who was Dave, is a quadriplegic actress. As Dave she played King Arthur in Brith Gof’s Arturius Rex. Mike and John were dressed in smart dark suits and ties, Lyn similarly formal in dress and heels. Polaroid photographs were taken and video was made of performers and audience/witnesses (who often became co-performers); South Wales Police obliged with footage from their surveillance cameras.

Polis was another urban piece, an exercise in reconstituting experience. Audience and performers were sent out with instructions to visit, witness events indeterminately staged or spontaneous, gather evidence in the form of video, make reports back at the point of origin, where everything was (re)constituted, or rather where sense was sought in the media fragments. Narratives were framed, connections and coincidences noted, some designed, others happenstance.

Both – theater and performance meeting urban experience in a combination of situationist derive, modernist flanerie and the search for a temporary autonomous zone escaping anomie and state supervision, and all under the watchful eye of the surveillance camera overseeing the street that has literally become Benjamin’s scene of crime.

Provocative – Lyn Levett, being carried, being dropped by Mike with a sickening thud as she hit the ground – someone who is “dead” weight because of their quadriplegia. Who were the performers, who the audience? Just what was going on in such a simple walk across a city on a busy weekend afternoon? And the status of the record – the photographs, reports, video. Above all the question is raised of the status of theater itself. We are used now to notions of performance and performativity being used to understand social and cultural experience – we are all performers. The concepts help us make sense of things. And theater has become intimate with the nation and the state, not least in notions of national theater that confirm our relation to where we belong with its sites (theaters and sets), familiar characters and stories. The comforting world of entertainment. But Mike is working in a different historical space, one that asks theater and performance to retain or recover a disruptive role - an ethics of worlds turned upside down.

So too in Polar Theater. An archaeology of science and heroism. Mike has been uncovering the evidence for the daily lives of those on the early expeditions under the likes of Shackelton, Scott and Amundsen that explored Antarctica. The usual story is one of heroism in the face of the forces of nature. All the expeditions had a scientific purpose, supposedly, behind them. Extreme science, at the edge of things. But here they are in the photos Mike has found in Cambridge and New Zealand performing in drag and black-face, with repurposed scenery and costume, and according to scripts later found dog chewed in the ice.

In some ways this is a simple exercise in archaeology. The camps are now designated heritage sites and so much is left perfectly preserved in the polar ice. But how should the huts be reconstructed? As sites of scientific heroism – neatly ordered spaces with desks, instruments and supplies? Or as theaters? – what took up so much of their time. Mike tracked the instrumentality of the expeditions – the way they worked with animals (pets, tools, food), the repurposing of equipment, the improvisations around science, acting the hero, and acting the fool. And the class and cultural relationships of officers and other ranks, in expeditions of Britain’s Royal Navy to the ends of the earth.

At the meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists a couple of years ago in Thessaloniki Doug Baliey and I ran a session on critical heresy in archaeology. Mike presented a video about Polar Theater. The night before the Berkeley team excavating Çatal Höyük had presented their own video on the life of their project; it included their own amateur dramatics in the evenings after the day’s work of painstaking observation and record. The connection was not lost on the audience. And this, of course, is how real science works. It is not some uncanny communion with the mysteries and forces of nature, of evidence, of archaeological sources. Stories of heroic discovery are glosses on the mundanity of even extreme science. What scientists really get up to in their daily lives is often seen as irrelevant to the science, to the great grand story, or as instrumentality, or it is simply overlooked. But the everyday needs to be (archaeologically) uncovered, because it is where science actually occurs.

Theater archaeology is an ethnography of science. Just as archaeology is the performance of the past.

Steeple Jack turned uncanny acolyte of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, he knocked down chimney remnants of Victorian industrial England with a style and passion matched only by his love of steam engines. Now industrial archaeology is dogged by rather geekinsh character types who love brass fittings and steel pistons, or even just the hum of a diesel electric engine, over life itself. (I still have a small manual entitled “British Motive Power” that I found in one of my archaeological trenches at the castle in Newcastle UK. The top of the still-standing keep overlooking the Central Station is a favorite vantage point for train spotters. The manual listed the serial numbers of all engines run by British Rail. Well over half of the thousands of numbers were lovingly struck out by a finely ruled line of a ball-point pen.) Fred was not of this type. He managed to communicate the very aura of industrial steam power and engineering – something that is at the root of a fascination for industrial archaeology. The matter and materiality of a bygone Victorian hey-day. He made great TV.

In recent years he had clashed somewhat with his neighbors in Bolton, Lancashire. Not content with a steam traction engine, he had begun sinking a mine shaft in his back garden!

How would the new species be treated? If it is such a close relative, would we give these people the vote?

The discovery of homo floresiensis reiterates what anthropologists have been saying for a long while – that we are not unique as humans.

All living creatures may have a soul, but to what extent are we different? What is the character of humanity?

We are certainly a biological species. So is it that humans are conscious of their world? Many animals are clearly conscious and communicate their awareness. Maybe we have a higher order of self-awareness above this primary consciousness? Or maybe we are intentional beings. Again, many animals display what can be interpreted as intentional behavior.

How about this as a way to think of these questions -

The notion of species is too centered upon the characteristics of the individual biolgical organism.

Australopithecus Afarensis – reconstruction from Johanson and Edgar From Lucy to Language

What makes a species is also its ecology. And modern humans have a peculiarly cultural ecology (for at least 35 thousand years). This makes our identity and self awareness distributed phenomena – to be found outside the individual in cultural networks.

Don’t look for the soul inside the human being but outside.

An argument from my new book project.