materiality of the invisible

Yesterday I had the great honor to open a remarkable exhibition of artworks at the Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht – multiform institute for fine art, design and reflection Curators: Lex ter Braak, Director of Van Eyck and Huib Haye van der Werf, Head of Artistic Program. The exhibition runs through The Van Eyck Academie, Marres,…

place/event – the Titanic (or not)

Places are always associated with happenings – actualities, potentialities, imaginings, documented or not. place/event Here’s a variation. In 1935-6 the liner RMS Olympic was broken up at Jarrow on the River Tyne, and hotelier Algenon Smart bought the fittings from the First Class dining room for his hotel, the White Swan in Alnwick, Northumberland. The…

returning

The past comes back to haunt in all sorts of ways. This is a key feature of the archaeological imagination. It may be something like “this happened here”, or “this was the way it was, and still is”. And, as archaeologists, as all of us do – we return, revisit, rehearse, reiterate, repeat. This familiar…

Model T Ford at the Palace of Fine Arts

I was at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco this morning to welcome the arrival of the Historic Vehicle Association of America in their 1915 Model T Ford – culmination of a 3600 mile drive from Detroit following the tracks of Edsel Ford who made the same road trip a century ago. He…

Edsel Ford and a 1915 Model T – automotive archaeology

Mark Gessler and the team from the Historic Vehicle Association of America called in to Stanford’s Revs Program today on their epic trip from Detroit to San Francisco in a 1915 Model T Ford [Link] (Click on the photos for full evocative resolution) They’re following the tracks of Edsel Ford who took a Model T…