I took these photos from the Catalhoyuk Photo Database, built and maintained by Jason Quinlan, and remixed them with Comic Life to illustrate a point in a small project that I will finish soon, hopefully.
Meanwhile: Is art on the internet considered public by its very nature? Is all art public? Has it always been?
“The aesthetic function of public art is to codify social distinctions as natural ones.”
(newspaper rock in Canyonland, Utah, by Molas)
“The economic function of public art is to increase the value of private property.”
(Outside Cheapo Records, Austin, TX)
“The social function of public art is to subject us to civic behaviour.”
(Angkor Wat, by David Willmot)
From the Three Functions by Hewitt and Jordan.
This is the semester that refuses to die! Die, semester, die!
Anyway, so I made (even more) comics about how to make mudbrick and posted them to flickr. I don’t really like the front page much (it’s rehash), so here’s the third page:
I think I’ll use this as the example comic for my short SHA article that I need to pound out.
Anyway, I also got a blog set up (with hosting from the ever helpful Noah) for the Presidio Archaeology Lab, so we’ll see if they keep using it after my research position ends there:
http://okapi.dreamhosters.com/presidio/blog/
I really like how the map header turned out. When I tweaked the scan to make it look “older” some of the pencil marks popped out, and showed how the map had been drawn a bit differently at first–unintentional photoshop archaeology.
On a slightly different note, Katy invited us to go with her to an art opening at the Exploratorium featuring a mind-reading robot. We got there somewhat late, so we didn’t have time to try out the thing or to look around, but I absolutely have to go back. We stopped by Lucky 13, then we made our way over to the Flaming Lotus Girls benefit, where I got a few good pictures of the Orb Swarm. The Orb Swarm are remote-controlled balls that have lights inside of them, but they’re counterbalanced in such a way that makes them very hard to control, so they tended to go crashing into things. Perfect!
Just a quick reminder that I’ll be around on Second Life for most of today (especially after 12) at Okapi Island (125, 93, 47) for Remixing Catalhoyuk Day.
We’re getting some neat coverage; a writer for Archaeology magazine was out a couple of days ago, and I talked to the editor of the Second Life architecture blog today for a bit.
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Okapi/128/128/0
My name is “Clementine Glass” on there, for what it’s worth.
Obviously I draw a lot of inspiration from A Softer World with the photo-comics, though I can hardly claim their gravitas. Another of my favorite blogs, Visualizing Neolithic, does the same sort of photo juxtapositions, but without captions. Using images (or in this case comics) to showcase interpretations in archaeology is often done without too much introspection, and my dissertation necessarily involves a critique of previous practice, so I’ve turned to a lot of Visual Studies literature to work through some basic theory. If photographs are melancholy objects, then putting them together into a narrative at least gives them a bit of company, and, more enticingly, the white space between, the “gutter” where all the action really happens, is a fabulous liminal space.
Bonus, my favorite A Softer World strip:
(Poems, prose, and comics that remind me of archaeology, pt 6)
The Guardian featured Greenpeace’s new project depicting climate change in Spain and one of my favorite blogs speculated that these photos are so romantic that they would encourage “Climate Change Escapism”–that people would be so curious about this brave new world that they’d keep cranking out the pollution.
I’ve long been a connoisseur of the post-apocalyptic aesthetic–reading survivalism novels in my pre-teens and cyberpunk in my mid-teens only cemented the aching need to see this world in smoking ruins.
Granted, as BLDGBLOG notes, these are fantastic, romantic visions, with all of the traces of human suffering that this would entail happening off-screen. My personal carbon print is actually very small–walking/bicycling around with no car, tiny apartment, no air conditioning, recycling, buying local–but is it okay to do all of this with my fingers crossed? I am curious.
“blah blah, I miss the stars”
I heard they look like pinpricks in our sheet
of tinfoil, hung in the window of a dark room
Big deal!
They say the sunsets never used to look like this,
All blues and greens they’re beautiful
Admit it!
They’re beautiful.
My New World – Epoxies
Oof, gotta take a break from negotiating the “visual turn” in text. Sometimes I wish I could just make a film to show at my orals this spring. Anyway, I was chatting with a friend about the recent virtual worlds conference in San Francisco about the world of Second Life and other recreated experiences and both of us expressed some scepticism about the utility of the concept. Admittedly, I am more interested in emplaced interpretation–giving people the tools to better understand the place that they currently inhabit, rather than a virtualized interpretation of a different place, but there is a lot of overlap between the two concepts in new media.
To illustrate, Vassar (a college I actually almost went to, had I not nearly failed out of high school out of boredom and distaste) has brought the Sistine Chapel to Second Life:
It’s apparently a proof of concept by Steve Taylor for experiencing art and architecture virtually. Neat idea, especially in that you can fly, and aren’t hurried through by crowds and guards. And, apparently, you can sit next to some guy with black wings. I’m curious to see if there is any interpretation, like text boxes explaining the art or the building material.
Lower tech, and closer to home (physically not virtually, I guess!) is the recent Helena Keeffe project which involves drawings of actual San Francisco Muni drivers, along with their stories AND their interpretations of their own routes. While I am interested in the Second Life project, these art installations are exciting and inspirational. First, for the non-Bay Area readers, riding the Muni (bus/train system in SF) can be a full-contact sport, and I’ve always thought the drivers must have near-heroic capacities for putting up with craziness and general mayhem.
Second, Helena Keeffe puts a face on these drivers and brings their interpretations of the route they see every day to the thousands of people who ride public transportation every day, not just to a select few who go to a gallery (in real life or online). I love that there are maps, annotated by the driver, along with drawings of different incidents which stand out in their minds.
As an archaeologist, I’d love to harness this interaction with place. As I was riding home from the Pamuk lecture with Burcu and a couple I had just met, Pamuk’s commentary on buildings came up, and the woman (I’m criminally horrible with names) mentioned that she’s now looking at the buildings in a different light, wondering about their histories, wondering who lives/lived there. Yes.
Back to work!
I was carrying supplies back up the mountain
when I heard it, the laughter of children,
so strange in that starkness.
Pushed past the brush and scrub willow
and saw a ruined farmhouse and girls
in ragged clothes. They had rigged a swing
and were playing as though they were happy,
as if they did not know any better.
Having no way to measure, I thought,
remembering the man in Virginia who found
a ruined octagonal mansion
and repaired it perfectly. For months
he walked through the grand empty rooms
wondering what they were like.
Until he found a broken chair in the attic
and re-created the colors and scale. discovered
maybe the kind of life the house was.
Strangers leave us poems to tell of those
they loved, how the heart broke, to whisper
of the religion upstairs in the dark,
sometimes in the parlor amid blazing sunlight,
and under trees with rain coming down
in August on the bare, unaccustomed bodies.
(By Jack Gilbert, in The Great Fires)
(Poems and prose that remind me of archaeology, pt 4)
“Amid the doomsday chaos, among toppled wrecks of old City Line ferries, will stretch vast fields of bottle caps and seaweed. Adorning the mossy masts of American transatlantic lines that ran aground when the last of the water receded overnight, we shall find skeletons of Celts and Ligurians, their mouths gaping open in deference to the unknown gods of prehistory. As this new civilization grows up amid mussel-encrusted Byzantine treasures, tin and silver knives and forks, thousand-year-old wine corks and soda bottles, and the sharp-nosed wrecks of galleons, I can also imagine its denizens drawing fuel for their lamps and stoves from a dilapidated Romanian oil tanker whose propeller has become lodged in the mud….
…No longer will we soothe our souls with songs about the birds of spring, the fast-flowing waters of the Bosphorus, or the fishermen lining its shores; the air will ring instead with the anguished cries of men whose fear of death has driven them to smite their foes with the knives, daggers, bullets, and rusting scimitars that their forefathers, hoping to fend off the usual thousand-year inquiries, tossed into the sea.”
Orhan Pamuk, The Black Book
(poetry and prose that reminds me of archaeology, pt 3)
It’s no secret that I deeply enjoy the works of Pamuk, especially My Name is Red. I brought Istanbul with me during my last trip to Turkey, and especially enjoyed his descriptions of the quiet neighborhoods I was walking through. He writes very evocatively of the Bosphorus, and Istanbullus’ relationship with the large, muddy river, so I was happy to catch this bit in The Black Book about the history that not only surrounds the channel on both sides, but that which lies underneath.
I’m looking forward to his multiple Bay Area engagements later this month, but am a little annoyed that he is not giving a talk here on campus–I have to schlep to a church (he’s speaking at one in the city and one here in Berkeley) or to Stanford. I don’t mind the schlepping necessarily, it’s more the surprise that he’d be around and Berkeley wouldn’t be taking advantage of his presence.
Colleen Morgan 