The visual plays a key role in understanding information. As early as John Locke, a father of empiricism and science, understanding itself is compared to visual perception. Even earlier in the Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti established the conventions of visual geometry for representing the world around us. At least since these early formulations, vision has come to be the prime manner of perceiving, thinking, formulating arguments and communicating information to each other. It has been argued that the European-American tradition is thoroughly ocularcentric. Within recent scholarship, some have urged the recognition of a pan-discipline visual turn in acquisition, organization, storage and interpretation of knowledge. The ubiquity of new media - from the convergence of multi-media in personal devices, to streaming video, software programs, on-line communities and gaming - in and outside of the university has increased our reliance upon, and augmented, visual apprehension.
Archaeology has historically been one of the leading fields in conveying the 'stuff' of the archaeological site and landscape in visual form. More than most disciplines, archaeologists have been at the forefront of developing and strategically deploying and thinking about visual media. For the discipline, visual media serve as 'stand-fors' the vestiges of the past. From GIS maps and query databases to stratigraphic profiles and artifact sketches to obsidian hydration composition graphs to photogrammetry, site and feature photographs and theodolite maps, little of archaeology can be conveyed or argued without visual media. This is particularly so with a discipline that records as it irrevocably transforms through archaeological excavation and survey. Often all that remains at hand are our visual media. Unfortunately, archaeologists too often restrict their usage and familiarization with visualization to GIS or 3-D 'fly-throughs'. With such a trade-off in moving from world-to-word and image, archaeologists need to understand and have technical capacity in a range of digital resources. GIS and VR are powerful and useful tools; but they present a selective fidelity to the complexity of archaeological material and they require a host of epistemological and historical assumptions which should be acknowledged. They form part of a suite of software now widely and cheaply available to archaeologists - indeed the ubiquity of open-source and 'free-ware' software is a trend which will increasingly raise-the-bar of expectations from the discipline on the part of other researchers and the public.
This course will familiarize students with the fundamental role visual media - both analog and digital - have played over the past century in archaeology. It will familiarize students with the ideas of archaeologists concerning the role of representation in the discipline. Arguments will be presented relating to the process of visualizing the stuff of archaeology: representing, mediating, translating, recording, transcribing, archiving. It will be underscored that these processes are active, that visual information is a verb, and that students should be aware of the research goals driving particular methods of visualization. We will unpack archaeological case studies to examine just what occurs when we move from world to word and image. Developing their own projects using various new media, students will be encouraged to understand their own goals for visualization, how it transforms information, what is gained and what is sieved away, and how to communicate most effectively their results. Students will also be exposed to the most relevant thought from cognate fields, such as cognitive science, art history, computer science, philosophy of science, science and technology studies, visual anthropology and visual culture studies.
Posted at Feb 13/2008 04:02PM: twebmoor: The legal foundation (14th amendment) of corporations = parallels with corporeality/the 'body'.
Nice connection to work through.
Posted at Feb 14/2008 04:05PM: jonathan edelman: A good example of the kind of compositing about which Lev Manvich speaks can be seen in Michel Gondry's work, here Kylie Minogue's video "Come Into My World". Here is a [link].
Posted at Feb 14/2008 04:08PM: jonathan edelman: Gondry's work can be seen at:
Posted at Feb 14/2008 04:14PM: jonathan edelman: Another great complement to Lev Manovich's "The Language of New Media" is Mark Rappaport's "From the Journals of Jean Seberg. The movie is available at Green Library at Stanford. Here is a link to a review: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/16/jean.html
Posted at Feb 19/2008 10:11AM: student: These are great, thanks. Gondry's work with Bjork was my introduction to his cinematic style. Eternal Sunshine... also brings out Manovich's useful notion of transcoding: of temporal/memory mixing and pastiche which disrupts a normal narrative flow - and can be a little jarring or disorienting for a while.
Posted at Feb 19/2008 05:17PM: jonathan edelman: Yes, Eternal Sunshine is one of my favorites. Normal narrative is a useful tool and convention. Gondry knows how to encapsulate narrative and bend it.
Posted at Feb 19/2008 05:38PM:
In his book "the Language of New Media", Lev Manovich speaks of two types of representation: those which fit into the history of illusionism, and those which fit into the history of instruments for action.
Representations which may be considered instruments for action include: diagrams, charts, maps, and x-rays. Manovich asserts, "Any representation which systematically captures some features of reality can be used as an instrument."
Representations which fit into the history of illusionism are those which create "fake realities". Manovich cites the cheery facades of Potemkin's villages, which convinced Catherine the Great that all Russian peasants lived in happiness and prosperity.
How do the two histories of representation enter into the domain of engineering design?
Posted at Feb 19/2008 05:39PM: jonathan edelman: Software for Finite Element Analysis (FEA) can be seen as new media in the sense that Lev Manovich suggests. Manovich provides five criteria for new media:
Finite Element Analysis meets all these criteria, and can even be seen as a paradigm for them. FEA is clearly in the category of History of Instruments for Action.
Posted at Feb 19/2008 05:40PM: jonathan edelman: I have started an "Archeology 303" blog. Here is a link:
Posted at Feb 26/2008 08:55PM: jonathan edelman: Michael Shanks' beautiful composition "Photography and Archaeology" deserves many carefully chosen words. For now, this digital file of picture of a painting and the few words it enfolds may suffice.
Posted at Feb 27/2008 10:24AM: twebmoor: Magritte's image is appropriate; I do think it may speak more to context providing meaning for an image/object; versus Michael's long-standing thesis that images/photos are not inherently ambiguous and need context to pin down their meaning (though there is a related school of thought in arch. which proposes this) but that the mechanics of photography - crafting a photo - mean that certain qualities of the world are brought forth while others are left behind or altered. But, Magritte's art piece does bring up the appropriate point about prioritizing text versus photo - Michael's point about images being relegated to secondary status as evidence.
