An art student has sparked outrage with a show of puppets made with dentures and glass eyes from dead people. Karah Benford, 20, is exhibiting the dolls, entitled Death Threads, at The Ultraviolet Contemporary Art Gallery in Southsea, Portsmouth. A vicar at Portsmouth Cathedral has branded the show “gratuitous”, while a local councillor called it…
ruins and remains
media archaeology – Stockstock Film Festival
Wired News: Festival Takes Stock of Old Films A group of amateur filmmakers in Seattle has put together a festival that doesn’t require any filming, sets or actors. Instead, the Stockstock Film Festival showcases films made from stock footage – those old educational films, forgotten commercials and other random movies freely available in the public…
media archaeology – the Venus transit of 1882 – a return of what never was
Boing Boing: Collaboration across 120 years yields “oldest” movie ever The article is in Sky and Telescope. In 1882 David Peck Todd photographed a transit of Venus in California. Two astronomers have found the 147 negatives archived at Lick Observatory, just down the road here, and have turned them into a Quicktime movie. Another kind…
ghosts, abandonment, ruins
From Phil@philosophistry – ghost town gallery.com – a gazeteer of ghost towns. You can send virtual postcards through the site. See also my comments last August on photographs of archaeological ruin.
archaeology of the contemporary past
The Newcastle Journal has run an article about the WWII remains I mentioned in connection with the landscape archaeology around Dunstanburgh Castle in the UK. The two concrete radar buildings still survive and there is clear evidence of where equipment was sited. The remains of the Nissen huts behind the radar station, which accommodated the…
Dunstanburgh, Northumberland
English Heritage, the government agency reponsible for managing the historic environment in the UK, has posted a web diary of a fascinating survey done last November of Dunstanburgh Castle in the north of England. [Link] This is one of my favorite places. I have been visiting, photographing, teaching and writing about it for as long…