automotive archaeology and the physiognomy of a car

Fred Simeone’s new book about the conservation and preservation of cars is out today, launched at Bonhams’s “Preserving the Automobile” auction at the Simeone Foundation Automotive Museum, Philadelphia, – [Link]. Fred is prompting a reevaluation of car collecting with his support for sensitive preservation rather than restoration. There have been two preservation classes of cars…

an archaeology of the contemporary past

Today I’m in the Clark Center at Stanford, hub of the Bio-X Program – bioengineering and more. Steve Quake (Stanford Bioengineering and Applied Physics) is hosting a meeting of The Human Document Project – [Link] With us are Laura Welcher (Long Now Foundation), Tim D. White (Palaeoanthropology, Berkeley), Michael Fischer (Anthropological Sciences, Canterbury, UK), Andreas…

media archaeology – Deborah Yun

I have just written the foreword to Deborah Yun’s fabulous photographic study of payphones [Link] [Link] Portland Oregon Maybe they were never quite where you wanted them to be, but away from home, out of the office or workplace, seeking anonymity perhaps, or simply without a phone and needing to make a call, the payphone…