More legacies of antiquity, reworkings of what remains. Displacements. Funerary portraits. Loss and the burden of interpretation. I have been posting some photographs of statues from the extraordinary collections in the Glyptotek in Copenhagen. The museum also holds a large collection of funerary reliefs from ancient Palmyra, the oasis city in Syria that once served as…
archaeology
Larry Leifer
Larry Leifer, extraordinary pioneer in design practice and design research, passed away yesterday August 29. Larry was a key figure in what I had hoped Stanford might stand for when I arrived in 1999. He welcomed me into The Learning Lab, Stanford Center for Innovation in Learning, Center for Design Research (CDR), and the Hasso…
More on Nolan’s Odyssey (2) — The Trickster and the Civics Class
On Ezra Klein’s review of Nolan’s Odyssey, New York Times July 31 A second wave of response to Nolan’s movie has begun to arrive, and with it a piece worth pausing over: Ezra Klein in the New York Times. I want to take it seriously — more seriously than it takes itself — because it…
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey (1) – an old story, but not the one that’s being talked about
Replaying Homer — Theatre/Archaeology. Notes on Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. The Odyssey, adapted from Homer and directed by Christopher Nolan. Even before its release on July 17, the movie generated much discussion and commentary. Historical accuracy – helmets from the wrong period, Viking ships in the Bronze Age, and an Agamemnon that looks like Batman. Fidelity to Homer’s…
Infrastructural imaginaries
Chris Ford and I are in a conference in Cambridge UK. The archaeological imagination applied to urban architecture, planning, design. Hosted by the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, this global conference on Situated Imagination and Imaginaries of Urban Futures brings together over 70 scholars, practitioners, and artists from around the world for a day to…
Welsh memories in a Cretan landscape
I am on a short visit to Crete. Elounda, Lasithi. Out east. Past the prehistoric ruins of Malia, to where Chris (Witmore) and I drove in the Renault convertible on an impromptu photo shoot. It’s been twenty five years since. Another visit now to liquid commingling times. A dappled landscape I look out over a…