- Readings/Assignments By Week - all readings assigned for the week should be completed no later than the wednesday discussion.
- There are no required texts - all readings will be made available from this wiki or as a handout in class. Supplemental readings may be found in the Metamedia Lab, Archaeology Center, Bldg. 500
Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8 | Week 9 | Week 10 | Reading Commentary
Week 1
January 9th - First day of course - Lecture
- Overview of course, syllabus, expectations, requirements and potentials
Week 2
The Visual - the centrality of human visuality across the university
January 14th - Lecture Notes-part 1
January 16th
Readings:
Friedberg, Anne 2006 The Virtual Window: from Alberti to Microsoft. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. - Introduction, Chapters 1, 5, Conclusions - pages 1-48, 219-244 (handout)
Supplemental reading:
Stafford, Barbara 1991 Body criticism : imaging the unseen in Enlightenment art and medicine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. - introduction
Stafford, Barbara 1996 Good Looking Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Week 3
Visual Cultures - is the visual cross-cultural/historical?
January 21st - NO CLASS (MLK)
January 23rd - Lecture and Guest Speaker - Ian Russell, Trinity College Dublin on ~"digital interventions in archaeology"
Readings:
Benjamin, Walter 1970 "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction," in H. Arent (ed) Illuminations. London: Cape.
Mitchell, Timothy 1989 "The world as exhibition". Comparative Studies in Society and History 31:217-36. 
Mitchell(1989)WorldasExhibition.pdf
Mitchell, W.J.T. 1996 "What do pictures really want?" October 77:71-82. Buck-Morris, Susan 1992 "Aesthetics and anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's artwork essay reconsidered". October 62:3-41.
Supplemental reading:
MacDougall, D 1998 "Visual Anthropology and the Ways of Knowing," in Transcultural Cinema. Edited by L. Taylor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. - Chapter 2
Week 4
Translating the visual in the sciences
January 28th - Lecture Notes-part 3
January 30th - Wiki personal pages done + 1st short project DUE
Readings:
Hankins, Thomas and Robert Silverman 1995 Instruments and the imagination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. - Chapter 1, Conclusion, pages 3-13, 221-232 (handout)
Hankins, Thomas 2006 Lecture to Visualizing Knowledge Seminar - available here (thanks to Hankins): Hankinspaper.doc
Latour, Bruno 1986 "Visualization and cognition: thinking with eyes and hands," in Knowledge and Society: studies in the sociology of culture past and present. Edited by H. and E. Long Kuklick, pp. 1-40. London: JAI Press, Inc.
Supplemental reading:
Elkins, James (ed) (in press) Visual Practices Across the University. - introduction
Elkins, James (in press) Six Stories from the End of Representation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Latour, Bruno 1999 Pandora's Hope: essays on the reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. - Chapter 2 (pages 24-79)
Week 5
The effective visualization of information
February 4th - Lecture notes-part 4
February 6th
Readings:
Tufte, Edward 1995 Envisioning Information (5th printing). Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. - entire book (short) - 2 copies available: 1)Metamedia Lab, Archaeology Center; 2)Lane Reading Room, Green Library (call # P93.5 .T83 1995)
Alternate reading - assigned:
Latour, Bruno 1993 We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Supplemental reading:
Pauwels, Luc 2006 Visual cultures of science : rethinking representational practices in knowledge building and science communication. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press.
Tufte, Edward 2001 The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press. - pages 1-77 (part I)
Week 6
Augmenting the visual - new media and the 'information age'
February 11th - Lecture notes-part 6
February 13th
Readings:
Manovich, Lev 2001 The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. - Chapters 1-3 (pages 19-175). - 2 Non-circulating copies available : 1) Bender Room, Green Library (P96 .T42 M35 2001) 2) Metamedia Lab
Supplemental reading:
Hassan, Robert and Julian Thomas 2006 The New Media Theory Reader. New York: Open University Press. - pages 41-62
McLuahn, Marshall 1964 Understanding Media: the extension of man. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press. - part I
Wardrip-Fruin, N. and N. Montfort (eds) 2003 The New Media Reader. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. - pages 3-25 (part I)
Week 7
Archaeology and the role of visual media - I: representations of the past
February 18th - Lecture notes-part 7
February 20th - 2nd short project DUE
Readings:
Brittain, Marcus and Timothy Clack 2007 "Introduction: archaeology and the media". In Timothy Clack and Marcus Brittain (eds) Archaeology and the Media. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. - pages 11-65. (handout)
Moser, Stephanie 2001 '"Archaeological Representation: The Visual Conventions for Constructing Knowledge about the Past". In Ian Hodder (ed) Archaeological Theory Today. Cambridge: Polity Press. - pages 262-283 (handout)
Week 8
Archaeology and the role of visual media - II: maps, plans, photographs. From representation to mediation of the past.
February 25th - Lecture
February 27th - proposals for final project DUE (submit via wiki)
Readings:
Shanks, Michael 1997 "Photography and archaeology", in B.L. Molyneaux (ed) The cultural life of images: visual representation in archaeology, London: Routledge, 74-107. (handout)
Van Dyke, Ruth 2006 "Seeing the Past: Visual Media in Archaeology", American Anthropologist 108(2), 370-384. - VanDyke-MetaMediareview.pdf
Webmoor, Timothy 2005 "Mediational techniques and conceptual frameworks in archaeology: a model in mapwork at Teotihuacan, Mexico", Journal of Social Archaeology 5(1):52-84. - JSA-MediationalTechniques.pdf
Witmore, Christopher 2006 "Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time. Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World", Journal of Material Culture 11(3):267-292. - WitmoreJMC.pdf '
Supplemental reading:
Black, Jeremy 1997 Maps and History: constructing images of the past. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
— 2003 Visions of the World: a history of maps. London: Octopus Publishing Group Ltd.
Harley, J.B. 1992 "Deconstructing the map," in Writing Worlds: discourse, texts and metaphors in representation of landscape. Edited by Trevor and James Duncan Barnes, pp. 231-47. London: Routledge.
Harris, Nathaniel 2002 Mapping the World: maps and their history. San Diego: Thunder Bay Press.
Week 9
Archaeology and emergent media: a discipline of the past in the future's 'information age'
March 3rd - Lecture
March 5th
Readings:
Hodder, Ian 1999 The Archaeological Process. Oxford: Blackwell. - Chapter 10
Richards, Julian 2006 "Archaeology, e-publication and the semantic web," Antiquity 80:970-9.
Shanks, Michael (in press) Digital media, agile design and the politics of archaeological authorship", in T. Clack and M. Brittain (eds) Media and Archaeology, Walnut Creek, CA:Left Coast Press. - available here.
Zubrow, Ezra 2006 "Digital Archaeology: a historical context" in T. Evans and P. Daly (eds) Digital Archaeology: bridging method and theory. London: Routledge. - pages 10-31.
Supplemental reading:
Chippindale, Christopher 1997 "From print culture to electronic culture," Antiquity 71(274): 1070-4.
Meskell, Lynn 1997 "Electronic Egypt: the shape of archaeological knowledge on the net", Antiquity 71:1073-6.
Tringham, Ruth (in press) "Forgetting and remembering the digital experience and digital data". In Boric, D. (ed) Excavating Memories, London:Oxbow Books.
Cohen, Daniel 2005 "The future of preserving the past", CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship 2(2):6–19. - available here
Webmoor, Timothy (in press) "New media and the platform shift in cultural heritage: taking 'Yahoo!s' seriously", Visual Anthropology Review 24(1). - available here.
Week 10
Archaeology's future vision: visual media as cognitive prostheses
March 10th - Lecture notes-part 10
March 12th - Final day
Readings:
Gray, Hables Chris, et al. "Cyborgology: constructing the knowledge of cybernetic organisms" in C. Hables Gray (ed.) The Cyborg Handbook. London: Routledge.
Gillings, M. 2005 "The real, the virtually real, and the hyperreal: The role of VR in archaeology", in Moser, S. and S. Smiles (eds) Envisioning the past: Archaeology and the image. Oxford: Blackwell. - pages 223-239
Haraway, Donna 1995 "Cyborgs and Symbiots: living together in the new world order" in C. Hables Gray (ed.) The Cyborg Handbook. London: Routledge.
Manovich, Lev 2006 "Visual technologies as cognitive prostheses: A short history of the externalization of the mind", in M. Smith and J. Morra (ed.) The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman to a Biocultural Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Supplemental reading:
Bowker, Geof 1993 "How to be universal: some cybernetic strategies'", Social Studies of Science23:107-27.
Earl, GP. 2005 "Video killed engaging VR? Computer Visualizations on the TV Screen", in Moser, S. and S. Smiles (eds) Envisioning the past: Archaeology and the image. Oxford:Blackwell. - pages 204-222.
Haraway, Donna 1985 "Manifesto for Cyborgs", Socialist Review 80:65-108.
Hayles, Katherine 1999 How We became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Reading Commentary
Posted at Feb 25/2008 06:10PM:
jonathan edelman:
Clark and Brittain have written a great compendium of the relation of media and Archaeology. Having worked in the film and television world for over twenty years, I am struck at how gentle they are in their commentary (perhaps this is a difference between manners in the UK and the USA). In addition, they seem to limit most of their criticism to the institutions, rather than the artists and craftspersons who work in film and television.
I would like to take this opportunity to expand on some of what Clark and Brittain have put forth.
On page 17, the authors cite Cleere, saying producers presented " a somewhat distorted and over simplified picture of what archaeology is all about." My immediate response was, "Take a number." This simplification is the stock and trade of film and television. I will grant that 30 to 90 minutes does not give one much time to develop depth. In fact, the depth we perceive is often what the viewer brings to the table. This is because the image/film is ambiguous. I am not saying documentaries are free of solid content. I am suggesting that what filmmakers know is that the audience completes meaning, and that gives greater depth to a film.
The authors quote Holtorf about the ambiguous nature of fashion styles, which make them "open to unintended interpretation." Here again, I say, that is the nature of how the medium is practiced.
Manichean simplifications abound because people are taught that "contrast equals interest" in film school. Students are taught formulas for storytelling, building character arcs, and engaging the viewer. They are easy to fall back on, especially when time is crunched, which is nearly all the time on production schedules.
As Stephanie Moser beautifully outlines in her essay, "The Visual Conventions for Constructing Knowledge about the Past", "conventions characterizing archaeological representation are iconography, autonomy, longevity, authenticity, signularity, dramatism, and persuasiveness." These conventions are the tool kit of the filmmaker.
Filmmakers are not experts at telling the truth. I have been on plenty of documentary productions in which rooms are re-dressed in order to get a better shot. Filmmakers want to get their point across, often at the expense of what the subject believes to be real or true.
There is a joke told in Hollywood: "How can you tell someone in Film is lying?" "Their lips are moving." Films, like relationships in Hollywood, are stepping stones to other, better, more lucrative options. Hollywood is peopled by the bright and clever, not the highly educated, as a rule. Film people have often been likened to "carnies with teeth." The Harvard comedy mafia is a noted exception to the rule.
Images have affordances for showing what looks good, what looks true, rather than what is good or true. Films do not ask that the mansion be really haunted. It asks that it looks haunted. When a choice has to be made between being and seeming, seeming will win.
Films have not been the best medium for transmitting textual thinking. We do, however, do lots of thinking about what we have seen and heard. Film does very well with watching people dig, or discover spectacles large and small. Film does less well talking about it. The caveat here is getting someone with a gorgeous voice (Patrick Stewart) or a strange voice (Stephen Hawkins) which adds character. These kinds of voices may tell the story more than the actual words do. The discourse of film is emotional first, cerebral a distant third at best.
Truly, PBS has fallen. Supposed scientific shows are in truth Big Foot in in lab coat drag.
The bottom line is one thing and one thing alone: MONEY. Viewer ratings mean sponsors are happy which means that they will pay to have shows broadcast. Anything that will get viewers to buy their products is the trump card. Shows are simply wrap-arounds for commercials. "Station breaks" are the sole purpose of most television. If you are neither adept at feeding this dragon, nor willing to feed it you are out of a job. Plenty more where you came from.
So, it is in part institutional, but the individual players all tow the line. They want what everyone else wants: better and more lucrative options.
Clark and Brittain are commendable in that they are upfront about the need for funding. That makes the research wheel go round. They wish to find a common ground where media and archaeology can be partners.
Alas, I think the lure of Hollywood is too great for all but the very faint of heart.
The good news is that digital cameras are cheap. A camera bought at Best Buy paired with a Mac can make films possible in a way that could not have happened 10 years ago. The Web has changed how films are seen. Youtube has Universal doing back flips.
Archaeologists of the world unite!
Take the means of film production into your hands and tell the stories you want.
But there is another thing. We must learn to use the tools. This takes time and practice. For example, knowing how light works, or how depth of field makes an impact on the image. Storytelling itself, not textual, but graphical storytelling must be broached. There are plenty of good texts:
Will Eisner's "Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative", and his "Comics and Sequential Art" are a great start. Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" is another great book that reveals the inner workings of graphic storytelling.
Let us not forget about sound design and production design, two more powerful tools cinema uses in creating compelling experiences.
Add interactivity and we may have better options for disseminating and contributing to archaeological studies than ever before.
Posted at Feb 26/2008 12:12PM:
twebmoor: Jonathan, nice thoughts on the readings. I think you would be keen on what Michael Shanks has written on the topic of politics and design in presenting the past in archaeology. Combining his "Digital media, agile design. . ." with my "New media and the platform shift. . ." with what you have already summarized would offer a nice synergy of ideas - and lead to a http://archaeolog.org post on the topic. I will fill you in on this tomorrow. But read these 2 additional pieces in the meantime.
Posted at Mar 04/2008 08:33PM:
jonathan edelman: I wish there was a way to comment on the readings contextually. This would give affordance to greater specificity and generate a less ambiguous dialog. What I have in mind is a format that keeps the text in the center and allows comments to be made in broad margins. This way comments could be posted right next to the text to which it refers. Not just textual comments, but images and sounds could be used to augment and argue with the text. I imagine it could look something analogous to the text of the Talmud:
It may be rightly argued that a wiki supports a changeable text. Most wikis are refereed, and the text is changed after some kind of mediation. Changes in primary text could happen after some kind of review, when a new understanding has been developed. The advantage of the broad margined layout is that user/contributors can see the argument as it develops. Time can be folded on the page. Comments which appear linearly on the bottom of the page require user/contributors to scroll up and down to have a discussion -- less like an actual discussion with people interrupting one another in the course of the conversation. If the readings had line numbers, in the way ancient texts have numbers, one could refer to those, but that would be second best to the kind of multi-threaded and multi-media "page" that I describe above.
Posted at Mar 05/2008 11:35AM:
twebmoor: Jonathan I like this idea of a ~'folded hyper page', or a series of 'liquid text' in the margins which could perhaps be linked like a concept map (with lines) to the actual places in the 'main text' (maybe not primary anymore) which they are referring to or building upon. Thread more like a natural conversation. This would be a real break with the linear structure - either vertical or horizontal with turning pages - of text. Perhaps this limitation in design of text stems from the underlying architecture which text - digital or analog - is predicated upon: Friedberg's window. Katherine Hayles wrote an entire book (Writing Machines 2002 MIT Press) on the topic of digital architectures transforming literature and how we read/write/edit. It is short so we can take a look at it today.
Maybe it would appear like this:
Posted at Mar 04/2008 09:44PM:
jonathan edelman: So, here are a few comments about some of this week's readings.
I enjoyed reading Christopher Witmore's "Vision, Media, Noise, and the Percolation of Time", It struck me as odd that the progeny of the movement which brought us the scientific revolution has forgotten some of the amazing sonic experiences the Baroque period (if there is such a thing) brought. Not simply the music, but also the architecture which developed acoustic spaces based on the ellipse. The sound of the baroque church is unique, as well as baroque concert halls. Listening theatres were constructed, in which whispers at a distance could be overheard if one was situated at a focus. Here are a couple of links about baroque acoustical spaces:
Hearing Architecture. Exploring and Designing the Aural Environment
TED SHERIDAN, KAREN VAN LENGEN
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1162/104648803770558978
Some contemporary soundscapes made in a Baroque church:
http://www.rajesh-mehta.com/sqlindex.php5?chapter=cds&page=benedict
"In a typical architectural space, the ringing vibration of lips, breath, brass and stringed instruments, the crash and clang of wood and metal objects function primarily as distinct, simultaneous units: their sounds are heard at the very moment they are made. In spaces that reverberate with echoes, the multiplication of the duration of tone, as it gradually disappears into the spiraling virtual distance, disorients our common perception and experience of time and space."
Baroque notions of time and space are intimately related to sound. I mention this in support of Witmore's beautiful paper. His deep understanding of Latour and the visual/scientific language that was brought into being may be augmented with a survey of Baroque acoustics and architectural spaces.
blindstorey / silencetracks:
http://www.constanzeruhm.net/portfolio/blindstorey-silencetracks.phtml
This is another exploration into the sound of a space.
For a scholarly look at the acoustics of historical theatres:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WM3-45CWVW3-GD&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=768c66f8f13a0a1bc7ab72db6546efc5
Here are some examples of the work of Francesco Borromini, 1642–60.
What I find curious is that the legacy of the Baroque period had become The Grid. Borromini's undulating walls, his spirals to the infinite, his folding of dark and light are so much more than the reductive Grid. To be sure, they were made possible in part by The Grid, but they were not purifications in the modern sense.
Perhaps the answer is found in Baroque printing technology, in particular Baroque typeface. This impacts the written word: text, the ultimate movable immutable. One may expect to find eloborate flourishes in the typefaces of this era. Instead we see a new found precision due to copper and steel engraving techniques introduced in the 17th and 18th Century. This is to suggest that typface itself is a media with a message, and that message is The Grid.
Wouldn't that have been great to put right next to the passage on page 274 of Witmore's piece?
I also enjoyed the discussion of Ingold's Wayfinding and Navigation. It seems to me that we do a combination of both when we negotiate new territories, as in Engineering Design. Engineers tend to want the map, more than the wayfinding. It is part of the training, part of trusting The Grid as the portal to knowing. On page 277, Witmore discusses the mapping of the Peloponnesus. So much of what we take for "knowing" is tied to the two dimensional projection of a three dimensional perspectival representation of space. This is made from a fixed single point of reference, which infers either time has stopped (no motion), or a view from eternity - a Newtonian "God's sensorium". Indeed, this kind of seeing does freeze objects, and give them a measure on The Grid, and with that measure comes mathematical knowing, truth's second self. Only a fool would mistake a picture of a musical instrument for music itself.
The Umela use hearing as a way of experiencing the distant, as it was difficult to see very far in the dense forest. I used to walk the mountains of Northern New Mexico with my part wolf dog Jack. Like many dogs, his vision was not so keen. He would smell, mostly a local sense, and listen, mostly a distant sense. I could see into the distance. Together we were one another's sensory prosetheses. A hybrid of sorts.
In Ancient Greek literature, we often "hear" what someone saw, as in Euripides' Bacchae. We do not see on stage the Dionysian rites, we hear about them: women suckling wolves, tearing apart Pentheus with their hands.
Finally, I come to Witmore's lovely notion of pleated time. "The present is always a rich aggregate mix of multiple times which are not necessarily in linear association." Folding is another Baroque notion, via Leibnitz and resurected by Deleuze. I word I love for this kind of time is:
pro·pin·qui·ty /proʊˈpɪŋkwɪti/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciationproh-ping-kwi-tee Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation –noun 1. nearness in place; proximity. 2. nearness of relation; kinship. 3. affinity of nature; similarity. 4. nearness in time. [Origin: 1350–1400; ME propinquite < L propinquitās nearness, equiv. to propinqu(us) near (prop(e) near (see pro-1) + -inquus adj. suffix) + -itās -ity]
These disparate nearnesses are what makes for the experience of time, rather than the measure of it.
Posted at Mar 05/2008 10:52AM:
jonathan edelman: I would like to make a few remarks about Timothy Webmoor's "Meiation Techniques and Conceptual Frameworks in Archaeology". I will begin with the end, his endnote on page 77, in which he broadens "maps" to include "any spatial representation conveying visual information in a strictly coordinate, graphical manner." These by implication may include 2x2's, common conceptual frameworks in the academy.
These maps are how we "know" in contemorary terms. But this "knowing" by itself is a partial knowing, and serves as an isolated 'dangling reference'. The sense of a map is only made when there is a movement between either mediational techniques or movement between map and "place". Webmoor shows this when he walks us through Teotihuacan, map in hand and tells us what he sees. The phenomenology of this place, when map and presence dance in the telling/showing of Webmoor, yeilds a new sense of how spaces relate (page 73).
The purpose of mapping, Webmoor explains, "revolves around the identification of boundaries"(page 72). Again, these lined boundaries, the lines of maps and engineering drawings, characterize "knowledge". Making boundaries is characteristic of Latourian purification. This is more than the language of disengaged, removed perspective, it is facilitating the portrayal of all surfaces as abstracted and mathematized. "Mathema" is knowing. The trouble is that the map is a construct, with a claim to authority because of its mathematical referencing.
Perhaps a richer kind of knowing can be found in the places in between. This place in between can be detected in engaging mutually operative elements, in the way that Webmoor walks us through Teotihuacan. The place in between can be reached when you mix photography with maps. The place in between is reached when we make the movement between "non-token-indexical" statements (representations on The Grid) and "token-indexical" statements (current subject-centered perception). Make note of the word "current". The play of time cannot be understated here. When moving between non-token indexical and token indexical statements we are moving between two realms of time: the eternal and the moment. Taken together these realms of time yeild a picture of how knowing is before the great divide of object and representation. Gell's method of moving between the non-sensorial and the percieved landscape is a method of moving which brings us to the place in between.
Latour will call this a hybrid. I would like to push back on him. A "hybrid" assumes two distiinct entities coming together. If we have never truly been modern, then the entities were never really really separate. When did we lose the word for what Latour intends by "hybrid"? Anaximander may be the last trace in our tradition, when he says, "things come and go in order to pay for their injustices according to the ordinance of time." Heraclitus strives to keep the cleft world together when he states, "the up-down road is one and the same". (While I at it, the story about Heraclitus in the oven retold by Heidegger retold by Latour is suspect. The phrase that Heraclitus uttered was "warming himself by the stones." A collegue of mine, who is a native Greek speaker, laughed when he heard the phrase in Greek. He told me that "warming himself by the stones," was a euphemism for defacating. This would make more sense than Heidigger's interpretation. "There are gods here, too" refers to the notion that there is no split between the up and down, the sacred and the profane. There are 'gods' in the bathroom.)
I would like to conclude by picking up where I left off in my last posting on Witmore's piece. I asked the question, "How did we get to purifiactions from the era that brought us the oh-so-unpurified works of Borromini?" The short answer is that we tend to look at the 17 Century through the eyes of the 18th Century and the Modern.
The contemporary notion of the Cartesian grid, which I call "The Grid", is not exactly what Descarte proposed, though I believe that he would have really dug it, in a cerebral way of course. Descartes' grid was not posited to have lines at 90 degree angles. Furthermore, Descartes was suggesting a single point of view, not an absolute pointof view in order to solve mathematical and philosophical problems. He does this and solves problems concerning conic sections that could not be solved for 2000 years. He does this in philosophy and heralds the beginning of what has become object representation talk.
Another point of departure to construct a model of what the hybrid space or the place in between can be heard in the history of music.
Renaissance music is pretty much in the realm of the modal. The dominance of Major and Minor keys had not yet gelled. In fact Major and Minor are two of the seven modes that were used in renaissance music. The opening moments of Monteverdi's 1610 Vespers is a clarion call to the future. Old plain chant calls out and is answered in the new sound. It is breath taking. J.S. Bach wrote in an archaic style, but he knew what he was doing. Bach plays between Modal music and the Major and Minor. He has his living in the Major/Minor, but spirals around in the modes. He, like Borromini, brings us to the place in between. By the time we get to Haydn and Mozart, we are strickly in the world of polarity, the worl of Major and Minor keys.
Posted at Mar 05/2008 01:41PM:
twebmoor: Jonathan, I like your personal vignette about you and your dog forming an sensory prosthetic of sorts. Donna Haraway, an early thinker about cyborgs and human prostheses, has spoken a lot about companion species such as her own dog cayenne. I think she might term you and your dog's sensory partnership a symbiont. This is a good transition to the readings next week where we will conclude the theories of representation and representational practice in archaeology with the future of info. technologies and humanity - informational cyborgs/techno-human interfaces/cognitive prostheses/extended minds - by reading Haraway and Manovich.
The diagrammatic look to cyborgs:
And of course the erotic:
Posted at Mar 05/2008 02:12PM:
twebmoor: Some links of maps-as-prostheses and cyborgs:
Posted at Mar 05/2008 03:25PM:
twebmoor: percolating texts - new design for dynamic reading/authoring of primary text w/ancillary text/comments/dialogue presented . . .
Posted at Mar 05/2008 03:26PM:
twebmoor: Also present in flash application of same info. rendered in different media - layered and make apparent the transformation of info.
Posted at Mar 05/2008 04:36PM:
twebmoor: "open source hardware" development and fabrication - or 'fab it' for designers - allow for downloading high resolution files and then print out 3-D models in various media - e.g. paper arybollos, plastic folsom point.
Posted at Mar 10/2008 01:05PM:
twebmoor: OpenMoko Offers Phone Case CAD Files For 3-D - Printinghttp://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=206901738
Thanks for the link.
