I visited the apartment today – the one abandoned over a year ago. He had lived there since 1964. It looks as if he was preparing to leave – there were some things in boxes, and the place is a little to messy with junk. But all his things seem to be still there. He…
the uncanny
the mystery of the locked room
In a piece called Three Rooms – published in the Journal of Social Archaeology June 2004 issue and as a traumwerk/wiki, I tracked the case of David Rodinsky. He walked out of his one room apartment in Whitechapel, London one morning in 1969, and never returned; the door was unlocked over a decade later to…
the archaeological imagination
Some years ago back in Lampeter Julian Thomas and I used to talk about something we called the archaeological imagination. We were close to a host of superb human geographers in the next corridor who were reshaping their field (Chris Philo, Ulf Stroymeyer, Catherine Nash, Ian Cook, Tim Cresswell, Hester Parr, Miles Ogborn, Joe Painter,…
between prehistory and the stars – deadly litter
Bill Rathje on space junk I have been trawling eBay for the last month or so looking for old camera equipment for my Metamedia Lab – part of our explorations of media metarialities – getting away from the notion that new media are somehow immaterial data. Came across an item that I had forgotten –…
media archaeology – Laurence Olivier recycled
Laurence Olivier has been resurrected for a film role. A new movie – Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow – uses old footage of Olivier, with dubbed voice, as the villainous leader of killer robots threatening civilization. The style, judging from the trailer, is wonderfully retro and noir – looks very reminiscent of Fritz…
media archaeology – hearing the past again
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Getting back into the groove News of some more fascinating media archaeology in Berkeley – recovering sound from wax cylinders too delicate to touch. Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale and other characters from history may soon be able to speak again, as scientists perfect techniques to recover…