Studio update – Spring 2022

This academic year I am on sabbatical leave finishing three long-running projects and planning to focus more on applications of the archaeological imagination to matters of common and pressing contemporary concern, especially through design foresight and futures literacy. This is why I have put to one side my critical commentary on all things archaeological and…

On the politics of (museum) exhibition

More about the future (potential) of museums I was at a very thought provoking talk today at Bard Graduate Center [Link]. Yannis Hamilakis told us about an exhibition he has helped curate that is currently running at Haffenreffer Gallery, Brown University USA. It is called Transient Matter: Assemblages of Migration in the Mediterranean. Yannis leads…

fictive realism – Ray Harryhausen’s model making

There’s an exhibition of the stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen running at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art – [Link]. I vividly remember first seeing his magical movies in the 60s and 70s. The infamous fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts (1963); Pegasus the winged horse in Clash of the Titans (1981). Paul Noble…

imagining the future – SAP’s Ideathon 2020

Today I opened and SAP University Alliances Ideathon – 21 teams around the world spending a weekend addressing critical world challenges – [Link] For future world building, I made the case for using a toolkit that we are calling creative pragmatics, a kind of next-generation design thinking.