On trust and digital photography – Sam put it this way – and very effectively – Yes, but I think this is the central point of all this – that sometimes, a big enough quantitative change in the ease of doing something makes a qualitative impact on some social action. I think you see this…
Month: April 2004
prehistoric beads in South Africa
more on those items from Blombos Cave – a case for scepticism 75 000 year old shells claimed as beads – Blombos Cave, South Africa I was arguing a few days ago on 17 April [Link] that the case for these shells being evidence of a modern human mentality was fragile, to say the least,…
media archaeology – Prelinger’s story
Warren at Stockstock has pointed me to the great story of how Rick Prelinger came to start building his archive of ephemeral film – the unofficial, the everyday, the ignoble, the detritus, the humble [Link] Meantime also have a look at some of the movies made at last years Stockstock festival out of old media…
romantic pasts and archaeological crimes
There has been an increase in the theft of ancient artefacts from Dartmoor, a fabulous ancient landscape in the UK, reports the BBC. So the Dartmoor National Park Authority have started implanting electronic RFID tags in the stones themselves to mark and track stone crosses and troughs in their jurisdiction. This time though it is…
picking up the pieces – “Disaster Archaeology”
The Boston Globe is running a piece today about “Disaster Archaeology”[Link] When Richard Gould, an archaeologist at Brown University, took a walk in Lower Manhattan in October 2001, his trained eye fixed on a gravelly dust strewn on dumpsters and fire escapes that cleanup crews had missed. Looking closer, he saw that the coating contained…
telemediated mythology
Dial M For Manchester – community art project – (area) code – a project in material monumentality and the (archaeological) layering of social time and memory tied to new media technologies … [Link to (area) code] If this comes off it will be fascinating.