Dial M For Manchester – community art project – (area) code – a project in material monumentality and the (archaeological) layering of social time and memory tied to new media technologies … [Link to (area) code] If this comes off it will be fascinating.
posts – matters of design
plotting the past – the first modern humans in South Africa, and a scenario for the first farming villages
A couple of recent press comments about new discoveries have caught my attention because of what they reveal about the way academics build their careers and how archaeological field projects get turned into stories about the past. Basically it comes down to this – archaeologists want their site to be the discovery that will rock…
archaeology and modernism
Modernism/Modernity, Volume 11, 2004 – Archaeologies of the Modern – a special issue of the journal has just appeared. All about archaeology in the modern world. Jeffrey Schnapp, Matthew Tiews and I edited the volume – we are quite proud of the result.
recycled body parts
An art student has sparked outrage with a show of puppets made with dentures and glass eyes from dead people. Karah Benford, 20, is exhibiting the dolls, entitled Death Threads, at The Ultraviolet Contemporary Art Gallery in Southsea, Portsmouth. A vicar at Portsmouth Cathedral has branded the show “gratuitous”, while a local councillor called it…
media archaeology – Stockstock Film Festival
Wired News: Festival Takes Stock of Old Films A group of amateur filmmakers in Seattle has put together a festival that doesn’t require any filming, sets or actors. Instead, the Stockstock Film Festival showcases films made from stock footage – those old educational films, forgotten commercials and other random movies freely available in the public…
media archaeology – the Venus transit of 1882 – a return of what never was
Boing Boing: Collaboration across 120 years yields “oldest” movie ever The article is in Sky and Telescope. In 1882 David Peck Todd photographed a transit of Venus in California. Two astronomers have found the 147 negatives archived at Lick Observatory, just down the road here, and have turned them into a Quicktime movie. Another kind…