Fabulous piece of writing from Gordon Burn today in the Guardian about a particular, and very familiar, relationship with the past – The ‘English disease’ See also Gordon Burn in my blog entry on murder, the domestic and the uncanny – [Link] So good I have to quote quite a bit … Bob Dylan hated…
media matters
responsive media – improvisation, neosemy, and synaesthesia
Sha Xin Wei visited our New Media group (Mellon funding) yesterday – Wednesday. He is an old friend of many of the group – did his PhD at Stanford. Is now a part of the Topological Media Lab at Georgia Tech. He was talking about his work on “responsive media”. Particularly with the performance group…
conservative heritage – the Yes Men version
A new take on our Classical heritage from The Yes Men. Louise, Mike, and Andy decide to attend the Heritage Foundation’s annual Resource Bank meeting at the Renaissance hotel in Chicago, April 29-30, 2004. Heritage is the biggest free-market think tank – in fact the biggest think tank period – in Washington. It has a…
Beltane – the Wicker Man burns again
Beltane at Butser Ancient Farm, UK It is May 1 – Beltane. Beltain is the spring festival of the Celtic religion and, like other major Celtic events, was a fire festival: the ‘good fire’ was burnt for purification, for healing, for light, for growth. According to Caesar, the Iron Age Britons would construct huge wicker…
the uncanny preservation of curse-laden mummies
archaeological archetypes Daily Telegraph | News | Ice Maiden triggers mother of all disputes in Siberia This story has it all. High in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia, where Shamans still practise their ancient rites and most people are descended from Asiatic nomads, there is a whiff of revolt in the air. Local officials,…
archaeology and photography – splinters in the eye
Last Thursday I was commenting on digital manipulation [Link] This got me thinking again about two recent collections of David Carson’s photography – The Book of Probes and Trek. Superficially there is a lot of play in these on focus and resolution – abstraction in a dissolved image, recognition that there may be something in…