materiality of the invisible

Yesterday I had the great honor to open a remarkable exhibition of artworks at the Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht – multiform institute for fine art, design and reflection Curators: Lex ter Braak, Director of Van Eyck and Huib Haye van der Werf, Head of Artistic Program. The exhibition runs through The Van Eyck Academie, Marres,…

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…

place/event – the Titanic (or not)

Places are always associated with happenings – actualities, potentialities, imaginings, documented or not. place/event Here’s a variation. In 1935-6 the liner RMS Olympic was broken up at Jarrow on the River Tyne, and hotelier Algenon Smart bought the fittings from the First Class dining room for his hotel, the White Swan in Alnwick, Northumberland. The…

returning

The past comes back to haunt in all sorts of ways. This is a key feature of the archaeological imagination. It may be something like “this happened here”, or “this was the way it was, and still is”. And, as archaeologists, as all of us do – we return, revisit, rehearse, reiterate, repeat. This familiar…

foresight and innovation – the automobile

Foresight and Innovation returns to Stanford With Stanford colleagues Bill Cockayne and Tamara Carleton, I have started to revive our research interest in Foresight and Innovation, anticipating, plotting future scenarios, as a part of the Center for Design Research. Bill pioneered this effort when we worked together in Stanford Humanities Lab with Jeffrey Schnapp and…

Edsel Ford and a 1915 Model T – automotive archaeology

Mark Gessler and the team from the Historic Vehicle Association of America called in to Stanford’s Revs Program today on their epic trip from Detroit to San Francisco in a 1915 Model T Ford [Link] (Click on the photos for full evocative resolution) They’re following the tracks of Edsel Ford who took a Model T…