from Nicole Kahn’s  (IDEO) talk last week about need finding and ethnography

in class today – project notebooks as presentation/manifestation

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.

A panel discussion with Marisa Gallagher of CNN. The topic was the future of journalism and the place of narrative. Mobile Media Design – Is the Medium Still the Message?.

The contemporary crisis in journalism is simple. With everyone able to witness and publish their experiences of newsworthy events, what role is there for the skilled, and expensive, journalist who is likely not present at the event?

Marisa showed us CNN’s superb new project – Open Stories – where anyone can make their own (online digital) contribution to an ongoing news event. [Link]

The role of the (CNN) journalist is here to

curate content.

I reiterated my now well-worn distinction between narrative and storytelling,
where narrative is the structure or grammar of character, plot and event, and

storytelling is the performance of narrative.

Storytelling – the articulation of performer/storyteller, place/event, audience/commentators, where narrative structure is (potentially) adapted to suit the particular performance. Storytelling can accommodate deep critique of the familiar formulaic frames that we all know so well and which shut down our appreciation of the unique human experience of place and event.

The (future) journalist – enabling, curating such performative events.

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

Link – Presence – the conference

Next comes a book from Routledge – “Archaeologies of Presence” – due out in 2010

Here are Pearson/Brookes in a performance Friday 27 March 2009:

memory, family, being there/here …

Link – Theatre/Archaeology

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 offices, a stretch of old timber fencing, the odd scattering of flint blades: new and increasingly vast plantings of Pinot Noir, flashy tasting rooms designed to look like traditional well-to-do farm residences and buildings, a new art gallery under construction in town.

This week my fascination with old media took me back to the collection of worn and abraded Daguerreotypes I put together from an intense exploration of eBay back in summer 2004.

I had discovered how digital scanning could recover images from these haunting and uncanny polished mirrors (the Daguerreotype, popular in the US between 1840 and 1860, was a one-off positive-negative photographic image held in a silver plating of copper).

Daguerreotype c1850

I have now started a somewhat obsessive project of rephotography – reworking these most finely resolved of portrait images.

A mirror conveys depth – another world beyond or behind the surface.

Could it be the same with the polished mirror surface of the Daguerreotype?

Here is a detail, one of many I made this week (scale is about x10 – x15 at screen resolution) -

More about this project in archaeography – Link

Meanwhile Sam, as part of his management of Google applications, was again thinking of the future of photography.

OK – what happens when you make vast spaces available for people to upload and share their photos, as in flickr or picasa from Google? Tagging more and more pictures with their location is going to be quite fascinating. The implications of quantity – colossal scale and magnitude of imagery.

I am convinced that the materiality of the image is going to grow in importance – people’s sensitivity to their material mode of engagement with an image – the screen, the paper, the printed page, the surface

More information – Link

Gallery – Link

Gallery 2004 – Link

Bamburgh, Northumberland

On Monday 22 January and Wednesday 24 January our experimental facility in the online world Second Life will host the première of Lynn Hershman’s new movie “Strange Culture” as part of the Sundance Film Festival.

In 2004 artist and college professor Steve Kurtz was preparing for a [http://www.massmoca.org/ MASS MoCA] exhibition that would let audiences test whether food has been genetically modified when, days before the opening, his wife tragically died of heart failure. Distraught, Kurtz called 911, but when medics arrived, they became suspicious of his art supplies and called the FBI. Dozens of agents in haz-mat suits sifted through his home and impounded his computers, books, cat, and even his wife’s body. The government held Kurtz as a suspected bioterrorist, and, nearly three years later, the charges have not been dropped. He still faces up to 20 years in prison.

Because he is legally barred from comment, the movie uses actors as avatars to tell this story of contemporary art, science, politics and paranoia.

We have chosen to screen the movie on our island in Second Life because SHL is committed to exploring the intersections of the arts, humanities, science and technology, reaching out beyond the academy to address such matters of common concern.

Guests will include Lynn Hershman, Steven Kurtz and Howard Rheingold.

[Sundance Festival Link]

[Lynn Hershman Leeson's web site]

Camera c 1947.

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

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.

He is working at the fabulous site of Teotihuacan, Mexico, on different attitudes and understandings of the site – local and beyond. Teotihuacan has become emblematic of the Mexican state and Mexican heritage. I posted some comments last year from Meg Butler about the Wal-Mart controvery there – [Link]

Rather than study the site and people’s reception of it as a conventional anthropological object, he has set up a software network to enable the expression and publication of the different understandings. An active prompting and enabling.

He has done a great service in carefully outling one crucial context for this kind of work – a science that does not, as a guiding principle and premise, separate professional application of reason from vernacular understanding.

All this in pusuit of a way of holding on to different understandings of the past – the multivocality that is much discussed by more and more archaeologists.

Read more at Tim’s website – [Link]

Yes – the Bible in lego bricks …

The death of Jacob by The Reverend Brendan Powell Smith

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

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

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

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

[Guardian Link]

Bottom-up self-organizing networks.

Archaeological relevance –

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

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

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

The dots are messages – text, and video!

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

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

It certainly isn’t photographic verisimilitude!

Archaeological connection and relevance -

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

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

Thanks to Sam (Schillace) for this link.

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

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

My points?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few traditional aphorisms and gestures.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

[Link]

This is how we describe the project

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

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

Abandoned apartment San José – photo Michael Shanks

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

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

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

[Link]

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 or Traumwerk) to track every change made to its pages. You can watch a bunch of us edit a collaboratively authored page on symmetrical archaeology, for example.

So what? – you might well ask.

Think of the teamwork that is archaeology.

A bunch of esoteric specialists in genetics, art history, taphonomy, trowelling, ceramics, soil science … and all the rest, working together to make sense of the remains of the past.

Wouldn’t it be instructive to watch how they might co-author a study of an archaeological site – comparing evidence and inference?

Here is how it might look – Jon Udell’s screen cast of a study of a page in Wikipedia on the heavy metal umlaut. (What a great philological topic!)

[Blog page link]

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!