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

Daguerreotype c 1850. Oblique view.

See the project Ghosts in the machine.

Photographs taken after the death of a child were popular in the mid nineteenth century.

Daguerreotype, 1850s, eastern USA.

Nickel tailings #30 – Sudbury, Ontario

Like Gursky, [Link] Burtynsky works in large format – the pictures are up to 5 feet across. His subjects are envrionmental impacts. Great holes in the ground like open cast mines and quarries, Wasted landscapes – his series of rivers running blood red polluted with toxic mineral waste is extraordinary. Landfill sites – urban mines as he calls them. Sites of epic industrial spectacle – the beach shipbreakers of Bangladesh, oil refineries.

There is plenty of environmental politics here. As well as simply awesome pictures of huge holes in the ground.

Susan Cameron, Phil Dhingra, Annie Wyman, Erica Simmons, Bill Rathje and myself have started an accompanying web site exploring what we see as the contemporary sublime in Burtynsky’s archaeography – [Link] We are using Mark Roseman’s fabulous software ProjectForum – the same social software that we have enthusiastically adopted in the Metamedia Lab at Stanford.

Burtynsky at Stanford

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

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

Risonanze Oscure
Dark Resonances

We are at the Colosseum, the Flavian Amphitheatre – me, Nick (Kaye) and Gabriella (Giannachi). It is 10pm.

Across the street beneath the temple of Venus we have been looking at flickering images of what look to me like archaeological sediments projected into the foundation arches, behind the protective iron grills.

They are part of a new work by Gary Hill, the Seattle/New York based video and performance artist. It is a work of site specific theatre/archaeology. Gary is one of the artists of our new project – “Performing presence: from the live to the simulated”

Here is my archaeological “reading” of the event.

Location

A ruin – spectacular, yes, but the surface of much of the Colosseum has been stripped away over the centuries – all the seating and the floor of the arena – conspicuously revealing the skeletal sub- structure, the labyrinth of passages for managing crowds, gladiators, victims, the underside of the monument. And, of course, the Colosseum is emblem of all the underside of Rome – crowds, mass media, violence as entertainment, bread and circuses, the barbarism at the heart of imperial civilization.

We find the gate, they look for us on “the list” (there are three), and we get into the Colosseum.

Characters

Rome’s media and arts crowd are here as the audience tonight.
There are performers, sounds, projected images, lights, props. Ghosts – Persephone, Pan, the witch Kirke, invoked in the event. And, of course, the audiences, performers and victims from long ago – neither present nor absent – non-absent.

Episodes

One. Interference and resonance.
Within several of the great supporting arches of the Colosseum have been sited speakers and video projectors. Intermittently, randomly (?), they sound out horns across the auditorium filled with tourists as faint images appear projected up within the brickwork. Ghostly images – we spot an “angel” walking back and forth with a great curved brass horn.

Images almost invisible. Echoes across the ruin. Horns announcing what? That the past is still going on?

Two. Surface sediment.
Outside the Colosseum at the Temple of Venus – flickering indistinct images of what look to me like excavated surfaces, with spoken commentary. Shown in arches beneath a monument that now exists only as an indication of where the columns and walls once stood – traces in the thin grass of early summer.

The indeterminacy of the trace of the past.

Our contact with the past is all about translations – mediations, like these videos of surface sediment – passages forced back and forth. Forced, because the material resists – we have to dig away and work on what is left. And it is all so indeterminate – what was and is going on?

Three. A face in the underworld.
The audience stands on the second tier looking down into the depths of the arena, actually at the passages and voids beneath. It is dark but we can make out activity in the shadows. Something is going on. On the temporary stage that replaces part of the missing floor of the arena there is a dimly lit structure. It looks like a face staring upwards.

Four. Clapping/flapping.
It begins with clapping, or is it a flapping of wings, white noise. It grows louder.

Is this an echo of crowds? Clamoring for bread and entertainment. Nourishment and numbing narcotic (pharmakon).

Five. Dreams of escape.
The first of the videos projected onto the monument – within the arena and up the sides of the auditorium. A contraption. A radio mast? It looks more like one of Leonardo’s flying machines – magical inventions that never flew except in the imagination. A dream of an escape.

Video recordings replayed on these ancient walls – reflexive spaces of difference.

Six. Word magic.
Strings of vowels appear projected up above the arena. They are voiced over and over again on the sound system. More clamoring. And resonance. We can detect no message, except in the performed enunciation, like a magical incantation. Mesmerizing magic – disorienting and misdirecting.

A classical location of dark magic is Kirke’s island at the edge of the known world, its name a palindrome of vowels – Aiaia. Where Odysseus’s men were turned to farm beasts, where he countered the witch’s magic with a drug given to him by Hermes, the god of mediation and interpretation, where he found how to travel to the underworld to speak with the seer Teiresias, to find his way home.

The palindrome comes and goes, works, reads, cuts both ways.

Seven. Goat in a field.
Another projected image. Not a lion or exotic beast. The calmness of country life and farming? Where bread comes from. But the Goat is also Pan – not a divinity but a disrupting force, of chaos, from a time even before the gods. Whose shout brings panic.

Eight. The dis-invented wheel.
A carriage crosses the arena in a transect back to the stage. It is a struggle to get it there because the wheels are triangular.

The carriage carries goddess Persephone on her way from sunshine and agricultural fertility (her mother is Demeter, goddess of harvest) to the world of the dead, in her cyclical return to the underworld and Hades.

Time and the past here are not an arrow of no return, but symmetrically cut both ways.

As Odysseus found out in his search for a nostos (homecoming), the trick is not finding Hades, but getting back – that needs magic.

Nine. A lament.
Voiced over the sound system.

A lament of what is missing – what never happened, but should have done.

Ten. Flights of fantasy.
A model aeroplane flies quietly round the auditorium in the dark, lands on the stage, takes off again. It carries little fairy lights. Then model gliders are launched from above and crash into the audience. No escape, again.

Augury – to read the future by interpreting the flight of birds. Here mechanical inventions of our intellect.

Remember , with Herakleitos, that Apollo, the god whose oracle of the future is at Delphi, neither reveals nor conceals the truth, but gives a sign.

Eleven. A ghost among us.
Persephone walks among the audience in a circuit around the auditorium, followed by a video cameraman.

Uncanny ghosts – with the uncanny as the return of the repressed, the return of what is no longer the same.

And a deparate attempt to record the unrecordable – how, on earth, is this all to be documented?

These encounters with the past are new to Gary Hill’s work. And though we are in the world of son-et-lumiere, this is no post-modern pastiche, but a circuit around the awkwardness of presence – a present past, more precisely non-absent.

No attempt is made to reconstruct a past – for what would that be other than superficiality of Hollywood CGI with its stock narratives like “Gladiator”, however spectacular.

There is a deep questioning here of the notion that sites like the Colosseum are somehow “sources”, somehow the origin of what is made of them, font of understanding the past. Instead the site, as a collocation of fragments, acts as a frame, parergon, supplement – an exterior that defines, has effect in its non-absence.

The site resists in its materiality and instead we deal in resonances and a geneaology of echoes and Chinese whispers through time.

Theatre/archaeology

PS I wrote this on the flight back home. Here are Gabriella’s outline and Charles Stein’s diary of the work’s creation.

Yes – the Bible in lego bricks …

The death of Jacob by The Reverend Brendan Powell Smith

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.

I regularly post about the horror that lies just beneath the surface of things, everyday normality rooted in the uncanny secret lives of things – have a look at Horror and disclosure – a scene of crime clings to its past

Joe (Adler) has just sent me word of Die Familie Schneider – An Art House Of Fear In Whitechapel. I do I wish I could see this!

The work is by Gregor Schneider and commissioned by Artangel.

Two apparently normal houses side by side.

Here is Camelia Gupta’s superb review on 24hourmuseum.org

I let myself in, wondering who I am to be letting myself into someone else’s house.

Shutting the door, I’m thus already a little nervous. The narrow corridors are claustrophobic. I hesitate in the doorway but my awareness that I only have 20 minutes to see both houses (one of several conditions of viewing) forces me on.

In the second house, I feel slightly braver. I wondered in the first house whether I was allowed to interact with the inhabitants of the houses but felt too oppressed. In an embarrassingly quavery and hesitant voice, I hail the woman in the kitchen. She ignores me. I’m not sure whether I want her to respond, as that would indicate that I belong in this world.

A world where violence seems to lurk at every edge. There’s the terrifying sexual graffiti in the attic, visible only through the keyhole of locked door with, most worryingly, a locked child-gate placed in front of it. Was a child kept here? Does this connect to the secret passage and its grim destination? On the other hand, being ignored has the effect of making me feel like a ghost, condemned to witness and absorb the horror but with no scope for action. Neither option appeals.

And in another related review -

There’s a woman in kitchen washing dishes endlessly, in a way that is reminiscent both of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and of Lady Macbeth’s “out damned spot”.

The 70s aesthetic of the bedroom is deeply unpleasant. The heat is suffocating, the carpet muffles my footsteps. I realise suddenly that there’s a body in a bag in the far corner. I feel faint for a second. It appears to be wearing a uniform and is small: child-sized.

Bathroom. A man masturbates in the shower, back turned and partially visible through curtains. I don’t know how to behave – and hover, while his pants and groans fill the small room. Needing distraction, I rummage through cupboards.

I’m glad that I have to write, I’m using it to anchor and ground myself, to remind myself that there’s a world beyond this one. I badly need the reminder right now. It’s hard to battle the sense that this awful space is all there is.

Deep breath, and onto the second house. Scared of what I’ll find. Another condition is that once you’ve left one house, you may not return to it.

On my god. It’s the same. But I’m different looking at it. I feel the need to look closely at the woman in the kitchen. As I say, I feel moved/able to speak to her. She’s exactly like the first one. (They’re twins.) In the bathroom, I’m moved to examine the wanking man to get closer. He seems louder than the first, but I cannot compare. Perhaps my mounting panic is heightening my senses?

I can’t know whether it’s the same, as I’m not allowed to go back and check.

Downstairs is also the same, and now I?m finding this sameness terrifying. What the hell is happening here? The repetition has varying effects; the carpeted room feels even more like a cell. I can hear nothing but my own, heavy, breathing. I’m scared – in the cellar, I’m reluctant to shut the door.

An archaeological sensibility holds that we only ever have fragments to work upon, that every locale is a potential scene of crime where anything could be evidence, that there remains to much to be discovered beneath the surface of things, and much that we will not like, because the stories we have been told are meant to console and quieten us …

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.

Jan Assmann tonight

I am particularly interested in the early genealogy of religion, part of my Origins project.

What I came away with was Jan’s distinction between universalist and globalist monotheisms. The first centers upon an inherent deity and universal truth that is fundamentally exclusive. It is distinctively unheimlich – uncanny in its distance from the everyday and in its strangeness – the holy ghost in the machine, as it were. We are familiar with such a universalizing tendency in many exclusive and fundamentalist theologies and religions, even secular movements such as the scientific enlightenment and its legacy of one universal principle of reason.

The origins of ancient Near Eastern monotheism, in contrast, seem much more associated with a search to find a god that transcends local difference. Hence it was “globalist”, in contrast to universalist.

There are many Near Eastern diplomatic documents that translate local deities, one into the other, and ultimately according to a single principle of deity. The purpose is to establish legal force through the validity of oaths sworn by god(s) with different names. There is a clear association of divinity, of course, also with monarchy. It is there in the difficult relations between temple, monarchy and state in the early city states of Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley.

With the divine cosmos intimately associated with political power, the most powerful is that which is uncreated, or rather causa sui, independent, not subject to another. Its geneaology runs from the god-king through the paradox of the king’s two bodies to the still-current association of state and church. Monotheism allows the ultimate global translation. Its roots are regional diversity, socio-political extension, international relations and sovereignty.

Some crucial matters here for our current fundamentalist clash of civilizations. Monotheism began as a transcendance of local difference, translating through a deity removed from the everyday.

Why didn’t I believe it until I read the original report in Nature?

And I am still skeptical.

Too fantastic?

Did I need the sober language and measurements? Lots of graeco-latin biologisms?

Description of Homo floresiensis (MS – not the homo floresensis of many google searches)
Order Primates Linnaeus, 1758
Suborder Anthropoidea Mivart, 1864
Superfamily Hominoidea Gray, 1825
Family Hominidae Gray, 1825
Tribe Hominini Gray, 1825
Genus Homo Linnaeus, 1758
Homo floresiensis sp. nov.

Etymology. Recognizing that this species has only been identified on the island of Flores, and a prolonged period of isolation may have resulted in the evolution of an island endemic form.

Holotype. LB1 partial adult skeleton excavated in September 2003. Recovered skeletal elements include the cranium and mandible, femora, tibiae, fibulae and patellae, partial pelvis, incomplete hands and feet, and fragments of vertebrae, sacrum, ribs, scapulae and clavicles. The repository is the Centre for Archaeology, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Referred material. LB2 isolated left mandibular P3. The repository is the Centre for Archaeology, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Localities. Liang Bua is a limestone cave on Flores, in eastern Indonesia. The cave is located 14 km north of Ruteng, the provincial capital of Manggarai Province, at an altitude of 500 m above sea level and 25 km from the north coast. It occurs at the base of a limestone hill, on the southern edge of the Wae Racang river valley. The type locality is at 08° 31? 50.4? south latitude 120° 26? 36.9? east longitude.

Horizon. The type specimen LB1 was found at a depth of 5.9 m in Sector VII of the excavation at Liang Bua. It is associated with calibrated accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates of approximately 18 kyr and bracketed by luminescence dates of 35 4 kyr and 14 2 kyr. The referred isolated left P3 (LB2) was recovered just below a discomformity at 4.7 m in Sector IV, and bracketed by a U-series date of 37.7 0.2 kyr on flowstone, and 20 cm above an electron-spin resonance (ESR)/U-series date of 74 – 12 + 14 kyr on a Stegodon molar.

Diagnosis. Small-bodied bipedal hominin with endocranial volume and stature (body height) similar to, or smaller than, Australopithecus afarensis. Lacks masticatory adaptations present in Australopithecus and Paranthropus, with substantially reduced facial height and prognathism, smaller postcanine teeth, and posteriorly orientated infraorbital region. Cranial base flexed. Prominent maxillary canine juga form prominent pillars, laterally separated from nasal aperture. Petrous pyramid smooth, tubular and with low relief, styloid process absent, and without vaginal crest. Superior cranial vault bone thicker than Australopithecus and similar to H. erectus and H. sapiens. Supraorbital torus arches over each orbit and does not form a flat bar as in Javan H. erectus. Mandibular P3 with relatively large occlusal surface area, with prominent protoconid and broad talonid, and either bifurcated roots or a mesiodistally compressed Tomes root. Mandibular P4 also with Tomes root. First and second molar teeth of similar size. Mandibular coronoid process higher than condyle, and the ramus has a posterior orientation. Mandibular symphysis without chin and with a posterior inclination of the symphysial axis. Posteriorly inclined alveolar planum with superior and inferior transverse tori. Ilium with marked lateral flare. Femur neck long relative to head diameter, the shaft circular and without pilaster, and there is a high bicondylar angle. Long axis of tibia curved and the midshaft has an oval cross-section.

Many of the reports claim that the finds prompt a rewrite of human evolution. Well no – it has been clear for some time that there is no single evolutionary line that leads to modern humans and that for most of human history there have been more than one contemporary species of homo and australopithecine precursors.

Homo floresiensis in Nature, photo by Peter Brown

The fascination for me is the remote island setting and story. Homo floresiensis – remnants of homo erectus maybe, dwarfed by an island isolation and the forces of evolutionary selection. Not enough to eat? Wiped out by a volcano?

The island is home to the giant Komodo dragon lizards.

It is Conan Doyle’s “Lost World”

Eaten by dragons?

I had a good deal of contact with him in the early 90s when he taught at Cardiff Art College. I was researching ancient Corinthian ceramics, was keen to get expert opinion on pottery manufacture and had heard about his interest in the history of ceramics from Helen, my wife, also a studio potter, whom he taught. We met several times when we discussed archaeology and pottery at length from his perspective and with his vast experience of all kinds of pottery making – industrial, studio, ethnographic. I particularly recall a lunch at St David’s Hall in Cardiff when I showed him several seventh century BC Corinthian aryballoi that Anthony Snodgrass at Cambridge had generously let me borrow from the university’s collection. He loved them. Key issues for Mick: the brushes for painting these exquisite miniatures – they must have been so refined; the clear evidence for using apprentices on the best wares – poorly applied handles; the trickiness of applying slip on slip – some of the perfume jars are multicolored; the clay – needing considerable preparation; and the speed with which they could have been made – a skilled thrower could run one off in 45 seconds or less. I incorporated this and more from him in my book on archaic Greek art.

photo – UK Potters

He was such an inexhaustible energy and a delight to talk with. A delight. He had an expert interest in everything to do with ceramics, craft, art history. And he could engage you because he listened. He crossed borders.

And sure enough – his salt-glazed stoneware shows his interest in Mycenaean pots. Simple beautiful things.

What a loss.

[Link] [Link]

My angle – some notions of authentic reality and truth can be quite mischievous and misleading! And lying can be liberating!

It started in the Washington Post – Sure, It’s Real! Real Fake – a report about a Museum of Fakes, an adjunct of the University of Salerno in Italy and its Center for the Study of Forgery.

“It’s not that Italy produces more fakes than other countries,” Museum Director Salvatore Casillo says. “It’s just that we have a deep and old culture and have built up skills in creating originals and skills in making copies. We’re good at both.”

This summer, Italians were twice spectacularly reminded of these venerable skills. In August, a blitz of raids on warehouses, galleries and clandestine printing shops in many parts of the country netted more than 4,000 lithographs, silkscreens, drawings and other reproductions that police say were destined for the modern-art market. It was the Italian police’s largest haul of fakes ever. Investigators in the southern town of Cosenza, where most of the forgeries were collected, promised to donate the haul to the Museum of Fakes.

During the same month, a museum in Siena hosted an exhibition of 19th- and 20th-century works by master counterfeiters. They produced replicas of Renaissance paintings, frescoes, statues and bas reliefs that are astoundingly close to the originals. Carefully copied cracks, grime and missing pieces provided a patina of old age. “In Italy, if you’re a good enough counterfeiter, you eventually get your own show,” says Casillo.

Precisely – making and copying go together. Just what is the problem with copies/fakes/counterfeits? Only that they threaten the values accorded to notions of individual genius and intellectual/cultural property.

Then Philip (@ philosophistry) put me onto a piece on Boing Boing: PK Dick on reality, Disneyland, and authentic humans – link to the original essay. Like many others I have always found fascinating the way Philip K Dick dealt with the paradoxes of human reality in his science fiction, and particularly their translation into movies.

Here is a taste (that garbologists like Bill Rathje will like)

The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?

In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly — and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog’s extrapolation was in a sense logical — given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too diffrently, there occurs a breakdown of communication… and there is the real illness.

I once wrote a story about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story… which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.

Dick gets into gnosticism, dreams, solipsism and coincidence, but his underlying point, if there is one, and as he puts it, is that

the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans — as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. … Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride — you can have all of them, but none is true.

When we first visited Eurodisney (as it was then in 1992) we expected the place to be an inauthentic fake, flimsy. ephemeral, insubstantial. It wasn’t. Toad Hall, presented as an “English” fish and chip shop/public house, was more authentic than many English pubs I know. In the lobby was a fine oil portrait of Toad, a cut above any decorative reproduction. In the bookcase was a genuine first edition of Pope’s Iliad!

In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds!

Real antiquarian volumes in Toad Hall. Real? Authentic? Historical fakery?

Jean Luc Picard Fark.com

They talk gobbledygook on Star Trek, but beautifully delivered with conviction. So much of our experience now of performance (including our own) is one of authentic felt fakery.

I have already commented recently on an historical interest in counterfactuals and the value of imagining “what if …?” [Link]

What if Hitler had invaded Britain in 1940? I like this way of thinking about the past because I connect asking the question “what if … ?” with the power of the imagination to change things. Imagining alternatives does actually help make the world the way it is. This is the power of the constitutive imagination. At the heart of our realities are real dreams. (Here I disagree with Dick.)

Cliff McLucas and I once built a positive theory of fakery and lying on this very foundation. Lies are often held to be deceiving and wrong, like fakes. But they can also be quite liberating, as in thinking about counterfactuals and multiple historical possibilities. All you have to do is, ironically, be honest!

“This is a lie: in 1940 the German armed forces invaded Britain.”

Confessing the lie deprives it of its deception and turns it into, here, a counterfactual. Admit to the fakery and the lie (now a decoy) takes you into a world of creative possibility.

[Link - the man who never was]

So why are archaeologists so hung up on rooting out fakery? I think it comes down to notions of property and ownership. Fakes are a problem to archaeologists because they challenge notions of authenticity. And authenticity is so often connected with aura – a religious sense of soul and identity lying within a person or thing – something I would call the uncanny ghost in the machine. I think it is about time we put aside such metaphysical notions and started lying a bit more!

Machines can then take on life, just as people can be fashioned as artifacts. Just look around – the old distinctions are beginning to dissolve with the sci-fi prospects of AI and genetic engineering, as well as the archaeological evidence for us being intimately united with our worlds of manufactured and crafted goods for millennia – we have always been cyborgs!

My angle – some notions of authentic reality and truth can be quite mischievous and misleading! And lying can be liberating!

It started in the Washington Post – Sure, It’s Real! Real Fake – a report about a Museum of Fakes, an adjunct of the University of Salerno in Italy and its Center for the Study of Forgery.

“It’s not that Italy produces more fakes than other countries,” Museum Director Salvatore Casillo says. “It’s just that we have a deep and old culture and have built up skills in creating originals and skills in making copies. We’re good at both.”

This summer, Italians were twice spectacularly reminded of these venerable skills. In August, a blitz of raids on warehouses, galleries and clandestine printing shops in many parts of the country netted more than 4,000 lithographs, silkscreens, drawings and other reproductions that police say were destined for the modern-art market. It was the Italian police’s largest haul of fakes ever. Investigators in the southern town of Cosenza, where most of the forgeries were collected, promised to donate the haul to the Museum of Fakes.

During the same month, a museum in Siena hosted an exhibition of 19th- and 20th-century works by master counterfeiters. They produced replicas of Renaissance paintings, frescoes, statues and bas reliefs that are astoundingly close to the originals. Carefully copied cracks, grime and missing pieces provided a patina of old age. “In Italy, if you’re a good enough counterfeiter, you eventually get your own show,” says Casillo.

Precisely – making and copying go together. Just what is the problem with copies/fakes/counterfeits? Only that they threaten the values accorded to notions of individual genius and intellectual/cultural property.

Then Philip (@ philosophistry) put me onto a piece on Boing Boing: PK Dick on reality, Disneyland, and authentic humans – link to the original essay. Like many others I have always found fascinating the way Philip K Dick dealt with the paradoxes of human reality in his science fiction, and particularly their translation into movies.

Here is a taste (that garbologists like Bill Rathje will like)

The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again. I consider them important topics. What are we? What is it which surrounds us, that we call the not-me, or the empirical or phenomenal world?

In 1951, when I sold my first story, I had no idea that such fundamental issues could be pursued in the science fiction field. I began to pursue them unconsciously. My first story had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbagemen who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food which the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly — and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can.

Finally, in the story, the dog begins to imagine that someday the garbagemen will eat the people in the house, as well as stealing their food. Of course, the dog is wrong about this. We all know that garbagemen do not eat people. But the dog’s extrapolation was in a sense logical — given the facts at his disposal. The story was about a real dog, and I used to watch him and try to get inside his head and imagine how he saw the world. Certainly, I decided, that dog sees the world quite differently than I do, or any humans do. And then I began to think, Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world, a world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. And that led me wonder, If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe, it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too diffrently, there occurs a breakdown of communication… and there is the real illness.

I once wrote a story about a man who was injured and taken to a hospital. When they began surgery on him, they discovered that he was an android, not a human, but that he did not know it. They had to break the news to him. Almost at once, Mr. Garson Poole discovered that his reality consisted of punched tape passing from reel to reel in his chest. Fascinated, he began to fill in some of the punched holes and add new ones. Immediately, his world changed. A flock of ducks flew through the room when he punched one new hole in the tape. Finally he cut the tape entirely, whereupon the world disappeared. However, it also disappeared for the other characters in the story… which makes no sense, if you think about it. Unless the other characters were figments of his punched-tape fantasy. Which I guess is what they were.

Dick gets into gnosticism, dreams, solipsism and coincidence, but his underlying point, if there is one, and as he puts it, is that

the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans — as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. … Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride — you can have all of them, but none is true.

When we first visited Eurodisney (as it was then in 1992) we expected the place to be an inauthentic fake, flimsy. ephemeral, insubstantial. It wasn’t. Toad Hall, presented as an “English” fish and chip shop/public house, was more authentic than many English pubs I know. In the lobby was a fine oil portrait of Toad, a cut above any decorative reproduction. In the bookcase was a genuine first edition of Pope’s Iliad!

In my writing I got so interested in fakes that I finally came up with the concept of fake fakes. For example, in Disneyland there are fake birds worked by electric motors which emit caws and shrieks as you pass by them. Suppose some night all of us sneaked into the park with real birds and substituted them for the artificial ones. Imagine the horror the Disneyland officials would feel when they discovered the cruel hoax. Real birds!

Real antiquarian volumes in Toad Hall. Real? Authentic? Historical fakery?

Jean Luc Picard Fark.com

They talk gobbledygook on Star Trek, but beautifully delivered with conviction. So much of our experience now of performance (including our own) is one of authentic felt fakery.

I have already commented recently on an historical interest in counterfactuals and the value of imagining “what if …?” [Link]

What if Hitler had invaded Britain in 1940? I like this way of thinking about the past because I connect asking the question “what if … ?” with the power of the imagination to change things. Imagining alternatives does actually help make the world the way it is. This is the power of the constitutive imagination. At the heart of our realities are real dreams. (Here I disagree with Dick.)

Cliff McLucas and I once built a positive theory of fakery and lying on this very foundation. Lies are often held to be deceiving and wrong, like fakes. But they can also be quite liberating, as in thinking about counterfactuals and multiple historical possibilities. All you have to do is, ironically, be honest!

“This is a lie: in 1940 the German armed forces invaded Britain.”

Confessing the lie deprives it of its deception and turns it into, here, a counterfactual. Admit to the fakery and the lie (now a decoy) takes you into a world of creative possibility.

[Link - the man who never was]

So why are archaeologists so hung up on rooting out fakery? I think it comes down to notions of property and ownership. Fakes are a problem to archaeologists because they challenge notions of authenticity. And authenticity is so often connected with aura – a religious sense of soul and identity lying within a person or thing – something I would call the uncanny ghost in the machine. I think it is about time we put aside such metaphysical notions and started lying a bit more!

Machines can then take on life, just as people can be fashioned as artifacts. Just look around – the old distinctions are beginning to dissolve with the sci-fi prospects of AI and genetic engineering, as well as the archaeological evidence for us being intimately united with our worlds of manufactured and crafted goods for millennia – we have always been cyborgs!

Archaeologists have been exploring an almost inaccessible cave in Romania, diving through icy underground sumps and making dizzying vertical climbs for the sake of a collection of fossil human remains washed into the cave 35,000 years ago.

Part of a skull found in the Pestera cu Oase cave in Romania: Erik Trinkaus And Ricardo Rodrigo

What makes these remains interesting is that they seem to be hybrids – between Neanderthals and modern humans. It is part of that fascinating speculation about our closest relatives – were they reclusive and autistic, or happy family members.

Trinkaus said the Oase fossils show features of modern humans: projecting chin, no brow ridge, a high and rounded brain case. But they also have clear archaic features that place them outside the range of variation for modern humans: a huge face, a large crest of bone behind the ear and enormous teeth that get even larger toward the back.

Trinkaus made a CT scan of the face to measure the unerupted teeth. “To find wisdom teeth that big,” he said, “you have to go back 500,000 years.”

The team considered whether early humans might have interbred with other hominids with Neanderthal-like features, but “in this time period,” said Trinkaus, “the only archaic humans those modern humans could have interbred with were Neanderthals.” The mosaic of Neanderthal and modern traits remind Trinkaus and Zilhao of similar traits they found in a 25,000-year-old fossil of a child in Portugal.

The team in Romania wants their finds shed light on whether the Neanderthals were such an inferior species to modern humans or whether they were serious competitors – serious enough for interbreeding.

But Neanderthals never made the cultural switch to what we understand as modern human life (about 50,000 years ago), even if we do find them in some limited kinds of symbolic behavior like personal ornamentation and displaying consciousness of death (things we associate with modern humanity). The evidence is too rare to support any idea that Neanderthals were seriously modern. The question is simply whether they were wholly replaced or swamped by modern humans (with their assimilated distinctiveness contributing Borg-like to the success of modern humanity).

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 and instumentality of representation, we have been experimenting with Polaroid emulsions.

These deliver a quite extraordinary color balance, softness and surface texture. The grain of the image lends an ineffable look to the photograph, and one that is distinctively nostalgic. I took a load of pictures on a Holga and NPC 195 while up in northern California last weekend with friends at their vinyard near Boonville. We couldn’t get over how they took us and the house out of time.

This week I took my dad to see two Ealing comedies at the Stanford Theatre. Again quite an extraordinary media experience. We are simply not accustomed to seeing this kind of production on the big screen. And the technicolor of “The Ladykillers” was uncanny.

Boccherini at King’s Cross

There is a distinctive aesthetic at work here to do with framing, color balance, mis en scène. I must dig out my notes on the aesthetic of nostlagia and landscape …

These experiences drove our project to investigate the representation of place in Brith Gof and the Three Landscapes Project …

Here are some extracts from our conversation.

TD There are a couple of points I’d really like to get into the film. First, the almost magical quality of wheat and that crop circles can be seen as an echo of ancient rites. Second, that people today really believe there’s something magical about this place (Wiltshire) and they point to all the prehistoric sites to say that even the ancients felt the same way. Whether or not it’s true, they believe it.

MS I think your instincts here are spot on – an echo maybe – certainly there is a recurrent theme of the aura of prehistoric monuments and senses of place.

A crucial contemporary attitude too is that of the perceived loss of an intimate relationship with the countryside (this is big news in the UK at the moment) – old ideas of the separation of city and country.

TD Is there a good (layman’s) overview of the Wiltshire’s history and religions?

MS English Heritage has a series of attractive guides – you have probably come across them – they include a series by the publishers Batsford. The one by Mike Parker Pearson on the Bronze Age is excellent.

A more academic (but good) read on prehistoric relationships with the land is Richard Bradley’s book on prehistoric monuments [Link]

Christopher Chippindale’s “Stonehenge Complete” is in a new edition – this is one of the best perhaps for you – it deals with how people have thought of the monuments and the land since they were built.

Then there is Barbara Bender on the meaning of Stonehenge – and she deals with New Age views very well – academic but chatty – “Stonehenge: Making Space”

TD Is there evidence that pre-Christians used bonfires as part of their worship or rituals? Or that bonfires carried on even into modern times? (I’m looking for an excuse to have a huge bonfire).

MS On prehistoric religion it is better to think less in terms of religious rites and institutions separate from everyday life, and more in terms of ways of life – ritual and belief, cosmology coterminous with everyday life. And everyday life back then was very strange.

TD What were some of their other planting and harvest-time rituals – any that involved practices we would find unusual today?

MS The calendar was clearly marked and understood – there is plenty of evidence for astronomical alignment and observation, knowledge too. There were two other cosmological ordering principles:
Land, place and the building of monuments – prehistoric northern Europe was ordered around a built environment – it may not look like an urban environment, but it was equally saturated in meanings, stories, histories, significances.
Relationships with the dead and with other species – very peculiar goings on in chambered and earthen monuments, fiddling with bones and much much more.

TD When and why were the barrows created?

MS There are different kinds and they date from the time of the first farmers through to the iron age in the early first millennium BC.

TD When and why were the original white horses created and what is their significance?

MS See all this as expression of the significance of location – place matters to these people.

TD Same with the stone formations?

MS Same with Silbury Hill.

TD How would I find out what iron age Britains wore?

MS There is a lot of information about bronze age and iron age dress in northern Europe – we have complete cloth outfits and much metal armor and the like. The English Heritage/Batsford series deals with it. See also bog bodies – many web sites.

TD And as a real leap into the New Age, what are leylines and is there anything to them?

MS Yes and no.

Prehistoric people in northern Europe were very sensitive to place – this is what we pick up on in their great stone and earthen sculptures. And not just the sites themselves, but the relationships between places. So archaeologists have become very sensitive to how sites and monuments connect together in a region like Wessex or Wiltshire, how they form what I just called a built environment.

So yes – there are prehistoric alignments. And they were/are charged with cultural meaning/significance/power.

But this is not what most people understand by ley lines. These are alignments of sites across many historic periods, and they don’t sustain scrutiny. It is a statistical commonplace that there will be several alignments in any random scatter of points. And supposing that the lines are tapping into some lost/unknown/secret knowledge of earth powers is amusing but a little silly.

You are tuning into a network of histories, beliefs, projections that include Druidism, neo-paganism, and the Celtic revival.

One of my favorite ruminations on all this is the movie Wicker Man [Link to a blog entry of mine] [Another link] I am convinced this is one of the sources for California’s Burning Man festival (just ended this weekend in Black Rock City) [Link to Patrick Roddie's superb Burning Man photography - somatic materialities!]

Stukeley’s Wicker Man

A supposed rite of pagan human and animal sacrifice to ensure the fertility of the harvest.

The evidence for the Wicker Man is minimal, but for an antiquarian, William Stukeley in the 17th century, and some very brief mentions in Roman author(s) writing about the Druids. The Celtic connection with all this goes back again to the 17th and particularly 18th centuries and the reinvention of Celtic identity in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and France …

All this is actually nicely dealt with in the movie!

And bonfires are nevertheless well attested rites going way back – plenty of archaeological remains of roast dinners at the entrance to chambered monuments.

more of the abandoned apartment in San Jose

[Link] [Link] [Link] [Link]

This was after I posted the photo of the girl I found in an old camera case (the lab’s new Graflex) – [Link]

More of the uncanny.

San Jose