Basket Weaving at Çatalhöyük

I uploaded the above test clip for the longer machinima that I posted about a little while ago.  It took an immense amount of work to get this far, and this is only a tiny clip of a somewhat awkward avatar doing a single animation.  I used Jing for the video [...]

The Real Technology of Indiana Jones

It’s here!  I’m getting ready to go to Austin, TX to speak on a panel at South by Southwest, an annual music conference that has grown to include film and interactive media.  When I lived in Austin I would go check out hundreds of bands that were playing all over town, but this will be [...]

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 [...]

ViA – 2008

The Visualisation in Archaeology workshop was easily one of the best and most productive conferences I’ve ever attended.  Most of the attendees were presenting as well, and there was only a single session at any one time.  Megan Price’s paper on the Victorian lantern slides produced by H.M.J. Underhill was particularly fascinating, and I approached [...]

…and I’m an Archaeologist.

A short clip from a longer video that we’re making for the San Francisco Asian Art museum. It’s the first time I’ve shot in HD, and it’s producing some problems between Final Cut Pro versions, but I’m struggling along.

Çatalhöyük in Second Life – Update

As previously mentioned, while I’m not writing, I’ve been working on OKAPI island in Second Life.  I wanted an area where we could package and give away textures from our upcoming events so that people could recreate any part of Çatalhöyük in their own Second Life reconstructions.  Naturally, I chose to recreate Sadrettin’s on-site cafe, [...]

Embedded Interpretation

So, once upon a time, a naive undergraduate from the University of Texas applied for graduate school in archaeology.  She sent out a statement of purpose that boiled down to: “I want to be able to embed archaeological information in the landscape, and I want other people to be able to add to that information…on [...]

Presidio Memory Maps

For the next three weeks I’m helping to teach a class at the Presidio of San Francisco on digital documentation, cultural heritage, and interpretive trails.  It’s an intensive course, 8+ hour days for the undergraduates and more like 12-13 hour days for me.  For the first day, I had the students create memory maps using [...]

Prescot Street

L-P Archaeology has started a lovely multimedia blog covering their work on Prescot Street.
http://www.lparchaeology.com/prescot/
They have a nice overview of the site, videos, and blogs from the excavators.  My friend Anies is doing a great job with the filming there, and he mentions how difficult it is to record while you have several other duties as [...]