Archaeology shares a great deal with photography. Particularly time and a temporality of actuality. Here is how I descibe it in my wiki entry on the archaeological (also mentioned on 10 December). Four archaeological temporalities: Recollection It is not only that archaeologists gather fragments and build collections. Like memory, the work of archaeology is re-collection…
Author: Michael Shanks
how the copy constitutes the original
Gavin Lucas was with us this week, talking about archaeological fieldwork. He described to us how archaeologists use mimetic machines for copying the past into the present. This is how I would put it – At the heart of our archaeological interests is the archive – we collect, codify, make and manage inventories. It is…
quotidian flux
Scanning the excellent detritus.net – dedicated to pratctices of recycling culture – I came across Mark Napier’s work. Barbie dolls (have a look!), found imagery in New York, and “negative space – an attempt to scan my entire appartment”. OK – it doesn’t get very far and is a little too whimsical for me, but…
metamedia utopias
Maybe a positive side of all the proposals for funding we have to write is the dreams and utopias they embody. Here is a current proposal from Joe Adler and myself. What if one could learn about a work of art on-line as if tackling a mystery in a game?What if each solution creates a…
Garbage – our most intimate relationship with the environment
Bill Rathje and I have a plan, a dream to create a center for garbology. Building on his twenty five years of sifting through garbage and digging land fill sites to show how wrong is our perception of discard and waste. Building on my obsession with matters archaeological. Not just garbage and rubbish. Everything from…
archaeology-performance
Alessandra (Lopez Y Royo) and I have teamed up to make her web site on archaeology and performance more available, and to develop it. It went public this week at archaeology-performance.net. All sorts on performance, performativity, documentation, archaeological materialites.