landscape aesthetics – tactics (continued)
From a conversation in the Dun Cow, Durham (with Bianca Carpeneti and Chris Witmore). Topic – archaeology, ruins and the picturesque landscape. The allure, the ideology, the challenge to avoid cliché. How do we deal with archaeological landscapes today? Should I just give up photography? As a tainted medium? This is too simple a response [...]
landscape aesthetics – the politics (continued)
A conversation in the Dun Cow, Durham. To continue with the concern that I shared yesterday – the ideology of land, property and labor transformed into aesthetic form – landscape. Images that disguise history? (guilty pleasures of the sublime picturesque) [Link] It is not difficult to identify various components of this aesthetic. (I recall dealing with [...]
Innovation Journalism: performance and curation
Conference at Stanford – Innovation Journalism 2011 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 [...]
writing ancient Egypt
I have just received a copy of Toby Wilkinson’s Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. The cover endorsements are enthusiastic; the blurb is packed with hyperbole and the promise of a roller-coaster soap-opera of pomp and ceremony, corruption and decadence, rulers with all-too-recognizable human emotions, in a book that will, we are told, become the [...]
Mike Pearson | The Persians
Classics and the contemporary past Mike Pearson and his new production of Aeschylus Persians (National Theatre of Wales) gets a superb review in the Guardian today [Link] This is site-specific theatre with a vengeance. High up in the Brecon Beacons, in a mock-up village used by the military as a training-base, National Theatre Wales is [...]
anthropometrics – the Museo Cesare Lombroso
This post is in a series of commentaries on a class running at Stanford, Winter Quarter 2010 – “Transformative Design” ENGR 231 – [Link] Anthropometrics – part of human factors design. Its roots lie in nineteenth century anthropological science, and forensics. Measuring the distances between eyebrows for evidence of criminality, correlating shapes of skulls with [...]
Globalization – Mike Moore
Mike Moore, once new-labor Prime Minister of New Zealand, then Director General of the World Trade Organization, champion of neoliberalism, has written a new book about globalization. And he has made me think again about our world today, about the big picture. I wouldn’t have looked at the book if I hadn’t met Mike in [...]
Behind the Locked Door
An archaeology of the store rooms of the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford Don’t you often wonder about what museums keep in their store rooms, but rarely manage to display? The hidden, perhaps forgotten, treasures of “The Archive” Last year, between March 2007 and April 2008, in a small gallery off the main stair well in [...]
Routin Lin
Northumberland UK drag – pan | shift – zoom in | control- zoom out Beneath the hill fort; around from the rock carvings. (Please be patient with a long load time – I think it is worth it)
post mortem
Photographs taken after the death of a child were popular in the mid nineteenth century. Daguerreotype, 1850s, eastern USA.
Esgair Fraith, Wales
“Tri Bywyd” (Three Lives) – a work of theatre/archaeology by Brith Gof Eddie Ladd as Sarah Jacob – read more