– the clouds take on shapes almost recognizable – the waves on the shore offer smooth gestures in the sand – the gravestone inscription weathers such that it appears to have lost all form … but not quite This is hylography – the process of emergence and disappearance, intentional or unintentional, of graphical form out…
ruins and remains
Ruin Memories
The Ruin Memories project is drawing to a close. Here is the introduction to the final portfolio: Modernity is rarely associated with ruins. In our everyday comprehension ruins rather bring to mind ancient and enchanted monumental structures; an archaeological dream world featuring celebrities such as Machu Picchu, Pompeii and Angkor Wat. Yet never have so…
political engagement, contemporary art, archaeology
Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art has just closed at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art [Link] [Link] The topic of the exhibition – contemporary art in six “far-flung” cities not typically defined as traditional centers of the art world: Beirut, Cali, Cluj-Napoca, Ho Chi Minh City, San Francisco, Tangier. Ostensibly this is…
Ben Cullen
On the anniversary of the untimely and sudden death of Ben Cullen in 1995. [Link] [Link] [Link] I dedicated my book, The Archaeological Imagination [Link], published in April, to Ben. It is seventeen years today since he died. Uncanny. I wonder what I would say to him about the book, that might reveal how much…
automotive archaeology and the physiognomy of a car
Fred Simeone’s new book about the conservation and preservation of cars is out today, launched at Bonhams’s “Preserving the Automobile” auction at the Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum, Philadelphia, – [Link]. Fred is prompting a reevaluation of car collecting with his support for sensitive preservation rather than restoration. There have been two preservation classes of cars…
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…
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