Fred Wilson – Remixing Museums

(from my upcoming talk)
Fred Wilson, a name probably familiar to most people who work in museums, is a contemporary artist who made headlines in 1992 for his exhibit, “Mining the Museum.” Wilson makes site-specific installations with museum collections, often juxtaposing the museum’s holdings in a way that creates a new public persona for the museum [...]

Fake Dead People

What exactly is the agency of the virtual non-human human? This question hit me when I was in the midst of editing what is shaping up to be my first publication, (Re)Building Çatalhöyük: Changing Virtual Reality in Archaeology, a text refashioned from my more stridently titled paper presented at the World Archaeological Congress, Get Real: [...]

Telerobotics and Archaeology

While doing some reading for my dissertation, I came across a reference in The Robot and the Garden to the Mercury Project, an art installation based out of USC in 1994-95.  The Mercury Project was co-directed by Ken Goldberg and Michael Mascha, the former now being at UC Berkeley, and with whom I took a [...]

Red and Hands

I finally made something that just might be Archaeography worthy, so I abused my limited moveabletype knowledge and posted an entry over there about the wall paintings and Second Life.  Let’s hope I didn’t break anything in the process.
I’ve been banging away at the buildings in Second Life–they’ll be ready by Wednesday, but only just!  [...]

Lego Archaeology Field Report

The south-facing wall and return are both of medieval origin and were repaired in the mid-1800s with undifferentiated gray and red bricks and concrete mortar.  This repair had been heavily degraded by the elements, and later repaired once again with a series of tiny (1cm x 3cm) multicolored plastic blocks.  The overall feature is 1.3m [...]

Pyramiden

Pyramiden was a Soviet mining town in the high Arctic that was completely abandoned in 1998.  We were lucky enough to have Bjørnar Olsen, an archaeologist from the Institute of Archaeology at the University of Tromsø in Norway come speak to us about his recent documentation of the archaeological-site-in-the-making.  Pyramiden is a fascinating town all [...]

Tactile Maps and Imaginary Geographies

A story on NPR about Braille city maps for the blind instantly reminded me of some artifacts I had read about during one of my literature surveys for my oral exams (Place as Recently Imagined by Archaeologists, to be exact).
Peter Whitridge wrote a brilliant article titled Landscapes, Houses, Bodies, Things: “Place” and the Archaeology of [...]

Postproduction

“In The Practice of Everyday Life, the astonishing structuralist Michel de Certeau examines the hidden movements beneath the surface of the Production-Consumption pair, showing that far from being purely passive, the consumer engages in a set of processes comparable to an almost clandestine, “silent” production.  To use an object is necessarily to interpret it.  To [...]

Lightwriting

This photo of a “Indiana Harbor Belt R.R. switchman demonstrating signal with a fusee, used at twilight and dawn when visibility is poor” was taken in 1943, and found on Shorpy.com. Click on it to view the incredible beauty of the full size.
These traces of light are so evocative and so ephemeral–as anyone who ran [...]

Color and Sound

I uploaded another one of my videos to youtube so that I could show it in class tomorrow. I’m taking over half the lecture from Ruth, to tell the students a bit about archaeology and new media, since that’s the way that most of them will experience archaeology, outside of [...]