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…
storytelling and narrative
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…
memory and return – Tri Bywyd (Three Lives) 1995
On the return of the past: document, memory, and archive. Katie Pearl (theatre director and professor at Wesleyan – see her extraordinary work here – [Link]) recently got in touch asking about the performance in Wales in 1995 of Tri Bywyd (translation – Three Lives), a work of theatre/archaeology by arts company Brith Gof. Specifically…
automobility past and future
Project: Future of Mobility. [Link] Cars – Accelerating the Modern World An exhibition at The Victoria and Albert Museum in London Running into February 2020. The exhibition is one of the very first in a major international museum to acknowledge the extraordinary significance of the automobile, as its design, engineering, and significance evolve. There’s a…
ambient rhetoric – Joker
Pop-up museum – cars – the power of less
Mobilizing the past Project: Future of the Past – [Link]Project: Future of Mobility – [Link]Project: JANUS Initiative – [Link] With the extraordinary Mark Gessler of the Historic Vehicle Association of America in the presentation of a pop-up museum of automotive history. Three cars sat in an exhibition for a week in Manhattan in the run…