car futures – art views

This weekend at the meetings of Performance Studies International Bruce Tomb introduced us to Maria del Camino – a flying car! Well, kind of! This ’59 Cadillac is mounted on a hydraulic excavator, and is named in homage to Maria – human turned android in Fritz Lang’s 1927 science fiction movie Metropolis. Maria appears in…

Pearson|Shanks – Autosuggestion

Mike Pearson and I have a new work of theatre/archaeology, to be premiered next week – Friday 28 June. Here’s how we describe it: Just what is an automobile? In this new work of theatre/archaeology — the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real-time event — Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks reflect on an…

heritage – men from the ministry

In my talk a couple of weeks ago at the HVA (Historic vehicle Association of America) summit on automotive heritage I warned of some of the political tensions in the field of heritage [Link] Just whose heritage is to be cherished? Are governments going to regulate and how? We considered how the treatment of historic…

the rhetoric of remains

Grosser Mercedes 770 – Hitler at Nuremberg in 1935 Twenty artifacts, twenty cars — how do you decide which is the most historically significant? This was the challenge of one of our classes in the Revs Program this term. We have considered the obvious criteria that might be applied — a car associated with an…