graveyards and a sentimental education
I can’t help hanging around the dead. On a visit to Walter Scott’s grave in the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey. Some extraordinary gravestones. Late 18th century. I have been talking with Bianca (Carpeneti) and Chris (Lowman) about a true education of the sentiments – as envisaged by Rousseau – so much more appropriately contemporary than [...]
Steampunk at Oxford
What if the Victorians (with their steam engine industrial aesthetic) had had access to digital technologies? What if a Victorian design sensibility had not been eclipsed by modernism and its minimalist aesthetic? What if technologies such as dirigibles, analog computers, or digital mechanical computers (such as Charles Babbage’s Analytical engine) were still with us? Steam-powered [...]
Holmes 2009 – documenting the past?
It can’t really be called “period detail”. What impressed us about the new Sherlock Holmes movie [Link] was the way it handled the nineteenth century. It was the color space (very mannered, desaturated, toned) and the abraded, worn, littered look of the urban spaces. It just kind of felt like Victorian London. Of course, Victorian [...]
ghosts in the mirror 1
Spent a family Thanksgiving up in Boonville, Anderson Valley with Sam and Angela Schillace. As ever, the locality is, for me, one of few fragile traces of somewhat indeterminate and agricultural pasts, juxtaposed with major investment in business futures. An old (cultivated) apple tree in the nearby field, railway carriages in the town converted to [...]
Big Sur CA
One of those staged viewpoints. We are little different from the days of the Claude Glass – a tinted convex mirror through which the tourist or artist of the picturesque and sublime could see a composed and painterly image. Now we have the wide angle lens, saturated color (after Fuji Velvia), and the LCD of [...]
potsherd
Potsherd found in the ruins of the Stanford family mansion destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.
Found photos
Fascinating website of photographs found undeveloped in old cameras – [Link - westfordcomp.com] Camera c 1947. (Thanks again to Sam (Schillace) for this link.)
screen cast – media archaeology from Jon Udell
The heavy metal umlaut Now this entry is going to sound very esoteric to many of you. But please persevere and watch the linked movie. This is about the future of cross-disciplinary collaborative research. In the Metamedia Lab here at Stanford, we make much of the facility of our social software (like the Metamedia pages [...]
found photos – portraits and physiognomy
In Boing Boing today – found photos from the Arkansas State Prison 1915-1937 – [Link] I liked the caption: In 1975, documentary artist Bruce Jackson found a bunch of old prison photos in a drawer in the Arkansas penitentiary. The people being photographed have no interest in the photographs being made; the people making the [...]
media archaeology and cultural remix – a London experience
Lower Marsh, La Barca Restaurant with Alan Campbell Media stars all over the walls – agents’ photos. A curious genre. David Suchet – Hercule Poirot Black and white, mannerist, smiley faces. They say “we had dinner here and gave the restaurant our photo”. But also these photos make me think of claims like “Henry VIII [...]
media archaeology meets theatre/archaeology
Media archaeology – working on the traces of a medium. Theatre/archaeology – the (re)articulation of traces of the past as real-time event. 10×10 / 100 Words and Pictures that Define the Time / by Jonathan J. Harris 10×10 (’ten by ten’) is an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time. The [...]
dead media project
More media archaeology – not sure why it has taken me so long to come across the Dead Media Project. 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 [...]
Media trips – digital trash and garbology
A new blog devoted to remix and sampling – Media trips Here’s an entry of theirs from October 20 – Check out the newly posted projects at the recently launched online exhibition Digital Recycling at The Stunned Net Art Open 2004, where one person’s trash is another’s treasure trove: What’s more, you can participate by [...]
Mike Pearson and theatre/archaeology
Mike Pearson, performance artist, was in Stanford this week. We wrote the book Theatre/Archaeology together. 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. [...]
the aesthetics of the archive
Abram (Stern) was through at Stanford last night talking to our Mellon Workshop in New Media about net.art – here is the talk in his wiki – [link] There are many interesting matters for an archaeologist – net.art’s focus on broken bits of computer code, frequent nostalgia for older art forms, reuse of media fragments. [...]
Steve McQueen, San Francisco and the 2005 Ford Mustang
More media archaeology Chris (Witmore) put me onto this item in Yahoo! News – Mustang Ads Feature Late Steve McQueen. Ford is to resurrect Steve McQueen in its promotional campaign for the new 2005 Mustang. They did this in the UK a few years back – clever cuts of footage from Bullitt – the very [...]
Information is a verb (continued)
The beginnings of a digital dark age? Just came across this perceptive piece about digital archives in SAP INFO “Digital Information Will Never Survive by Accident” – an interview with Neil Beagrie of the British Library. (This came to me via the excellent blog – Stoa.org.) Here is an excerpt: Mr. Beagrie, in modern societies [...]
“I Found Some Of Your Life”
Philip has found this very interesting archaeological blog – [Link] – at least an “archaeological” blog in my sense of the term! Monday, July 26, 2004 Introduction In my possession is one (1) memory card from a digital camera. This memory card was found in a taxi in New York City. I have no idea [...]
early photography and archaeology – a matter of hygiene
Chris (Witmore) has sent me some comments about his fascinating research into early photography and archaeology – Conze at Samothrace Although photography had been used in the context of archaeological practice for some time, it was only with the Samothrace excavation volumes that photographs were placed directly into the publication (Conze, Hauser and Niemann 1875 [...]
the color of the past – technicolor and the physiognomy of nostalgia
The color of nostalgia? I mentioned last week our visit to Stanford Theatre and the showing of “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (and incidentally this movie appeared in my book “Experiencing the Past”). The technicolor print was stunning. Boonville September 2004 Of late, and in connection with my Metamedia Lab’s project to explore the metariality [...]
the archaeological imagination
Some years ago back in Lampeter Julian Thomas and I used to talk about something we called the archaeological imagination. We were close to a host of superb human geographers in the next corridor who were reshaping their field (Chris Philo, Ulf Stroymeyer, Catherine Nash, Ian Cook, Tim Cresswell, Hester Parr, Miles Ogborn, Joe Painter, [...]
Graflex Speed Graphic 1947 – media archaeology
I have decided our lab needs to take seriously the materiality of media. Not just the picture – but its texture, style, feel, ambience, aura, substrate – and its instrumentality – how it came to be made, by what means, agency, mechanism. So I have been buying old cameras. The Graflex Pacemaker Speed Graphic arrived [...]