The Metamedia Lab at Stanford is active in developing theory across several disciplines, from archaeology to media.

Theory is not about being abstract and disconnected from the world. It is thoughtful practice. And, crucially, theory is a means, sometimes the only means, of connecting what is treated as separate, bridging disciplines and different practices.

Theory is at the heart of creative interdisciplinary work.

And this is what we want to pursue.

Topics include:

archaeology | media | mediation | mapping | performance | photography | classification and databases | land and place | collection | collective heritage | cultural ecology | ethnography | technoscience | time | presence | visualization | cyborg ontology | posthuman condition | software theory/programming | mutability/mixing | collaboration

• Collaboration Some experiences and comments from Michael Shanks. For a colloquium at Stanford Humanities Center. February 2007.

• Archaeology and the visual More on media and archaeology from Michael Shanks and Tim Webmoor, this time for the Sawyer seminar at Stanford Humanities Center - Visualizing Knowledge. January 2007.

• Landscape, Archaeology, Chorography: encounters in the Scottish borders. A talk at Brown University by Michael Shanks, December 2006. Here he connects new ideas about media as mode of engagement (see below) with regional and landscape archaeology - sketching out deep mapping as a project in a contemporary chorography, that old antiquarian genre.

• Media as modes of engagement - Michael Shanks remarks on antiquarians in the Scottish borders. Society for the Social Study of Science, meetings in Vancouver November 2006. This proposes a radical rethink of how media, new and old, work in scientific disciplines, indeed how we understand media generally. The idea of medium as mode of engagement is worked out here and in several other papers listed below. They are to be the focus of a new book by MS with Sam Schillace of Google.

• Digital media, agile design and the politics of archaeological authorship in T. Clack and M. Brittain (eds) Media and Archaeology, University College London Press, in press. New approaches to the design of information in an heretical empirics. A talk originally given at TAG 2004, Glasgow.

• Symmetrical archaeology new thinking beyond the aporias of archaeology - reconfiguring relationships with the material past. The topic is to be the subject of several papers in a future issue of World Archaeology

• Stanford archaeological theory - a research and reading group at Stanford - no more, as of October 2006 - anti-intellectual interests in our Archaeology Center forced a withdrawal of support for our work on the grounds that thinking deeply about archaeology is a minority interest (!)

• Performing presence: from the live to the simulated an international research project with some of the world's most prominent contemporary performance artists

• Traumwerk archaeological dreamwork and the design of new media

• archaeolog.org a collective weblog exploring archaeological thinking

• Archaeology - implications for writing history - a microlecture in a wiki by Michael Shanks

• Critical Studies in New Media - a workshop at Stanford Humanities Center, funded by the Mellon Foundation, hosted by Fred Turner and Michael Shanks

• Garbology Online - thinking about The Garbage Project over its 32 year life history - from Bill Rathje

• Metamedia - a discussion document from the consolidation of the lab in 2003

• Matters of metamedia in contemporary archaeology - a talk from MS

• Media archaeology and entries in Michael Shanks's blog and in his wiki - [link]

• Michael Shanks's weblog - covering all things archaeological

• see also Michael Shanks's online publications - [link]

• Media - eigenvectors - defining the design chracteristics of media in the light of information science and technology - a conversation between Sam Schillace and Michael Shanks

• Theatre/Archaeology - from Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks

• Technoscience meets archaeology - Timothy Webmoor on social software, science studies and mediating archaeology

• On multiple fields - Christopher Witmore on multiplicity, mediation and percolating time in the context of Mediterranean landscape studies