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…

Mark Bradford

We made it at last today to the Mark Bradford exhibition in San Francisco at SFMOMA – [Link] Exhibition website – [Link] Maybe it’s about … tracing the ghosts of cities past. It’s the pulling off of a layer and finding another underneath. It’s the … details that point to people saying, “We exist; we…

presence and authenticity – routes to civility

A perceptive item in the Guardian yesterday, from Simon Jenkins: Welcome to the post-digital world, an exhilarating return to civility – via Facebook and Lady Gaga. The point – our contemporary world is a mixed reality – witness the growing importance (again) of “live events”, even as we are more connected digitally: A week in California…