hylography

I am preparing with Paul Noble a guide to his work, as part of an upcoming exhibition at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. Paul’s vast drawn world (as well as sculpted material forms) – a place called Nobson Newtown (though it questions just what we mean by place) – has at its heart a kind of fontography…

The Field Marshal, the artist, and an old edition of Walter Scott

Matters of the presence of the past — haunting presences. A couple of editions of Walter Scott’s poetry have arrived from my favorite bookseller – Barter Books of Alnwick, Northumberland UK. The first is an 1866 edition of Scott’s poem, Marmion, about the days before the disaster of Flodden Field in 1513. It is illustrated…

an archaeology of the contemporary past

Today I’m in the Clark Center at Stanford, hub of the Bio-X Program – bioengineering and more. Steve Quake (Stanford Bioengineering and Applied Physics) is hosting a meeting of The Human Document Project – [Link] With us are Laura Welcher (Long Now Foundation), Tim D. White (Palaeoanthropology, Berkeley), Michael Fischer (Anthropological Sciences, Canterbury, UK), Andreas…

media archaeology – Deborah Yun

I have just written the foreword to Deborah Yun’s fabulous photographic study of payphones [Link] [Link] Portland Oregon Maybe they were never quite where you wanted them to be, but away from home, out of the office or workplace, seeking anonymity perhaps, or simply without a phone and needing to make a call, the payphone…