I am at the Getty Center today at a symposium organized by Alain Schnapp. Some very distinguished experts brought together to discuss antiquarians. Antiquarians? Those fascinated, often passionate, about the collection, description, classification of the remains of the past. Artifacts and monuments, landscapes even, as evidence connecting us with the past. Antiquarianism sounds arcane. It…
archaeological imagination
Ghost signs: BBC Viewfinder
The BBC is covering Tom Bland’s photography in the archaeological imagination – Ghost signs. “I was seeing layers of typography, paint, colour – and combined with the texture of the crumbling and flaking materials, many of them were appealing to me as contemporary pieces of design in the vein of work by Ray Gun magazine.”…
Steampunk at Oxford
What if the Victorians (with their steam engine industrial aesthetic) had had access to digital technologies? What if a Victorian design sensibility had not been eclipsed by modernism and its minimalist aesthetic? What if technologies such as dirigibles, analog computers, or digital mechanical computers (such as Charles Babbage’s Analytical engine) were still with us? Steam-powered…
elements of a theory of ruin
A wonderful talk this evening from Alain Schnapp in our Archaeology Center. It was about “ruin” as an intellectual artifact. Through a kaleidoscope of quotes and vignettes about ruin from antiquity to modernity, Alain reflected upon broad human experiences at the heart of our sense of history, memory practices, collection, temporality. Goethe among the ruins…
haunted media
Some years ago Sam (Schillace) put me onto a Russian photographer, Sergey Larenkov, who combines old and new photographs of Leningrad/St Petersburg, then – WWII, and now. They have haunted me ever since. It’s not difficult to find the photos on the web; it only took me a few moments to find them again –…
IDEO, design, the everyday
This is the first in a series of commentaries on a class running at Stanford, Winter Quarter 2010 – “Transformative Design” ENGR 231 – [Link] I made a visit to IDEO last week, the design consultancy with its head office in downtown Palo Alto, by Stanford. I’m teaching a class next term with one of…
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