Song Dong at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well is a large-scale installation called Waste Not. It comprises over 10,000 items ranging from pots and basins to blankets, bottle caps, toothpaste tubes, and stuffed animals collected by the artist’s mother over…
archaeological sensibility
past personality
Latest on the excavations of Binchester Roman town – [Link] David Petts has posted an x-ray made by Jenny Jones of one of the artifacts found this summer – [Link] It didn’t look like much when it was found. It turns out to be a stylus – for writing on wax tablets. Evidence for literacy…
d.ethnography
In Tokyo for EPIC – Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference. 6th edition. [Link] Wonderful comment this morning from Victoria Bellotti (PARC) – that archaeology is dethnography Absolutely – (d)ethnography – d.ethnography – the intermingling of dreams and mortality, utopia and the realities of material constraints, the angel of death whispering in the ear of aspiration….
Kenya Hara: emptiness
In Tokyo for EPIC – Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference. 6th edition. [Link] Kenya Hara, Art Director of Muji, has opened the conference with a beautiful meditation on emptiness – “ku”. For me, Kenya was talking about human being and how it implicates the world of things. This Henckels knife fits the hand of the…
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…
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