The Chapter: A Political Economy of Visual Media in Archaeology
a discussion with Tim Webmoor for the Sawyer Seminar at Stanford Humanities Center - Visualizing Knowledge
January 2007
TW: Thinking critically about visualizing the past is not something conventionally associated with archaeology.
However, we have a Metamedia lab in our Stanford Archaeology Center. You have worked for many years with a site specific performance arts company - Brith Gof. You are running a project with the new media artist Lynn Hershman in the online VR world SecondLife - Life Squared. Such work is very unique in our discipline. Why do archaeologists need to think about media? How is visualization implicated?
MS: The easy answer is that archaeologists need to publish what they find, otherwise the past is lost. But there is more to it. There is a distinctive experience of immediacy in archaeology - a notion of discovering the past in its material remains. A conservation ethic drives the global heritage industry - that the past should to be looked after as a legacy of cultural property, with such a past often even considered a human right. But it is, of course, the case that archaeologists do not discover the past. They work on what remains. And such work involves the translation of materiality into proxy mediating forms - texts, catalogs, images. Now while this discursive character is widely accepted in many disciplines, the archaeological nature of the relationship between past and present is less often recognized. By this I mean the material relationship of decay/loss and rescue/restitution at the core of contemporary historicity. Such an archaeological sensibility refers to matters of presence and absence, of trust and authenticity. It reaches far beyond the discipline. I consistently argue that there is an archaeological sensibility at the heart of modernism and modernity.
In this I would subordinate inscription and visualization to mediation. I hope the reason why will become clear - it is to do with the idea of medium as mode of engagement.
Archaeology: from stewardship to co-production
TW: This also connects with an argument against the dominant contemporary paradigm of the archaeologist or archivist as steward or custodian of the past.
MS: Attention is shifted to the active and productive character of the archaeological relationship with the past. Archaeologists work on the past.
TW: And this is necessarily a project of co-production. We'll come back to this later, but this idea of mediation as working on the past connects up well with the cultural politics of archaelogy. There is much interest in heritage, and much of it pushes archaeological presentation of material beyond traditional media. As you say, this is part of a much larger archaeological imagination. Some of this involves VR reconstructions of archaeological sites. But VR is often disappointing. So . . .
A critique of VR -
Life to the second power: animating the archive
TW: Let's move straight to a current project that involves visualization. There has been a great deal of interest lately in your experimental work with Lynn Hershman.
MS: Let me run a short video.
Some points
- we have taken what is left of an artwork from 1972 and reworked, remixed, reanimated it for 2007
- one context is the future of the art museum in the absence of a self-contained artwork
- Life Squared is about modeling and simulation - core epistemological practices in archaeology
- with respect to visualization - rather than a stand-in, substitute or replica, we have chosen to treat the "virtuality" of this online world as an opportunity for re-iterative engagement
- one intention is to open up the past to new interests and involvement - revisiting and reworking the past.
Building the Dante Hotel - images
A broader argument concerns the transitive character of information - information is a verb - [link] [link] [link]
Simulation, modeling, prosthetic worlds
TW: Let me take up the spatiality of this building. You have spoken elsewhere about its ichnography.
MS: Yes - tracing out the floorplan, the skeletal framing of the building, the mapping out of traces, the footprints of the avatars.
TW: Wikimapia
Spatial tracing and the information as a verb brings up the map: the touchstone medium for archaeology. Indeed it directs most other methodologies at archaeological sites. Maps become the organizing informational framework - much like a Microsoft Windows Operating System - within which information must be rendered compatible.
Unlike Pat Hanrahan's 'self-illustrating phenomena', the map is a very indirect compression of certain information. This information is selected for from the total synaesthetic possibilities. So far from simply a mimetic model or 'objective' simulation of an archaeological location, the map augments certain visual relationships while minimizing or not registering others. It reduces out the belles noiseuses or background phenomena. This of course is fine for many purposes. And maps work well in being purpose-driven.
But working with maps at Teotihuacan - an incredibly complex and monumental site - it becomes apparent that maps must be rethought of as cognitive and perceptual prostheses. Along the lines of spatial information as a verb. They should not be regarded as stand-alone representations of archaeological features and places. This should bring out the contrast again between visual representation and mediation.
Example of mapwork. Literally, how maps work as information devices. Inherent to how maps work, is the inextricable relation between perception and the schematic visualization. Maps convey information as visual short-hands. But in practice, maps only work, only allow navigation and wayfinding, via relating directly this abstracted information beyond the immediate perceptual and cognitive capacity of a map-reader to what is immediately perceived on-the-ground. The perceiving map-reader becomes a conduit for coordinating information offered directly through perception - of features, plazas or pyramids - and indirectly through the schemata of the map. One cannot operate effectively without the other. This is a cyborg ontology. In this sense, maps are better understood as prostheses of the individual. We might say that visualization is less what we do with information - to convey, condense or distribute - and more how we intimately function through visual media.
MS: Rather than a virtual world, we have treated Second Life as such a prosthesis. Not a substitute, not a re-presentation of a world, but as an extension. An instrument of augmentation. A mediation of certain source materials - re-sources for mapping pasts.
TW: Michael, several years ago you collaborated on The Three Landscapes Project here at SHC which addressed these similar complexities of the map - what you have called deep-mapping.
MS: In a triangulation of interest in that profoundly ideological notion of landscape - an archaeologist, artist and theologian attempted to rethink place through a topological folding of place, yes, what we called deep mapping:
"Reflecting eighteenth century antiquarian approaches to place, which included history, folklore, natural history and hearsay, the deep map attempts to record and represent the grain and patina of place through juxtapositions and interpenetrations of the historical and the contemporary, the political and the poetic, the discursive and the sensual; the conflation of oral testimony, anthology, memoir, biography, natural history and everything you might ever want to say about a place …"
Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, Theatre/Archaeology (Routledge 2001) page 64-65
A deep map of California - there is a map on a wall at the back of the Humanities Center. A crucial feature is its reception - how you engage with the information it collects.
Video diary describing the map and its making
Cognitive instruments and Media as modes of engagement
TW: Let me return to something you said earlier that builds upon the notion of the map as a central prosthesis in archaeology - that you are treating Second Life as a cognitive instrument.
MS: And as a cultural probe (after McLuhan). (Just as that map on the wall was contistuted by a probing, a search, an intervention in a landscape.)
TW: At the recent 4S conference in Vancouver we tried in our session to deal with the implications of new media for the cultural politics of archaeological engagements with the past.
You dealt with 18th century antiquarian chorography in the Scottish borders. You dealt with different kinds of cognitive instrument that were being developed for dealing with the remains of the past - fieldwork, survey, philology, textual criticism and illustration. This brings up the idea that we have disciplined, restricted our notion of documentation in archaeology as the field became a discipline. You have worked on the idea of pre-disciplinarian practices.
MS: Yes. Let me amplify with an anecdote about how we might understand how archaeologists have come to mediate the past.
It is about Walter Scott as polymath.
Walter Scott was a magistrate, antiquarian, musicologist, novelist, essayist, collector, landowner, poet, bestselling author in the book trade of the early nineteenth century. His focus was a borderland between Scotland and England, between past and present. In 1814 was published his "Border Antiquities of England and Scotland". The two volumes, profusely and wonderfully illustrated with engravings, are subtitled Border Antiquities - "Comprising Specimens of Architecture and Sculpture, and other vestiges of former ages, accompanied by descriptions. Together with Illustrations of remarkable incidents in Border History and tradition, and Original Poetry." It is a gazetteer of archaeological interests.
A long introduction takes the reader through an historical narrative of the borders. On pages xviii - xix Scott is dealing with the Roman border and Hadrian's Wall: "The most entire part of this celebrated monument, which is now, owing to the progress of improvement and enclosure, subjected to constant dilapidation, is to be found at a place called Glenwhelt, in the neighbourhood of Gilsland Spaw.*"
He adds a footnote:
"* Its height may be guessed from the following characteristic anecdote of the late Mr. Joseph Ritson, whose zeal for accuracy was so marked a feature in his investigations. That eminent antiquary, upon an excursion to Scotland, favoured the author with a visit. The wall was mentioned; and Mr. Ritson, who had been misinformed by some ignorant person at Hexham, was disposed strongly to dispute that any reliques of it yet remained. The author mentioned the place in the text, and said that there was as much of it standing as would break the neck of Mr. Ritson's informer were he to fall from it. Of this careless and metaphorical expression Mr. Ritson failed not to make a memorandum, and afterwards wrote to the author, that he had visited the place with the express purpose of jumping down from the wall in order to confute what he supposed a hyperbole. But he added, that, though not yet satisfied that it was quite high enough to break a man's neck, it was of elevation sufficient to render the experiment very dangerous."
Was it that Ritson hadn't read the many accounts of the Wall published since the sixteenth century in that fascinating lost genre - chorography? Had he forgotten? Or was it rather, as Scott suggests, that his "zeal for accuracy" meant he had to visit and witness the very structure in order to authenticate the written accounts of the remains? He clearly assumes that there was or had been a Wall: ancient authors and sources document it. What he disputes is that there was anything left. (This tension between text and monument is very characteristic of antiquarian debate.)
(Aside: on Joseph Ritson's life see: [link])
Alexander Gordon's Itinerarium Septentrionale was published through private subscription in 1726. It deals with Roman remains in the north. Ritson may not have read it. He may have known it, but still doubted the description of Hadrian's Wall. We may assume that Scott had read it: his copy is still in his library at Abbotsford. Listen to a part of a page from this account of "A Journey thro' most of the Counties of Scotland and those in the North of England."
Reading - Itinerarium Septentrionale
Gordon literally paces out and records every boot-marked trace of the Wall. He might not have jumped off the Wall, but you can almost hear every crunch of his boots.
The book sets the "northern journey" in the context of accounts in ancient texts of the Romans in the north. Gordon knows his classical authors. The engravings are revealing. He illustrates in expensive copper engraving many rectangular monuments in their various relationships with straight Roman roads. The monuments are all unexcavated and comprise simply earthen features - tumbled down overgrown ramparts. Gordon's illustrations mark out nothing except rectangles and lines; though they have, significantly, been paced-out. The engravings of sculpture show only sketched-in figures, focusing instead on the transcription of the inscribed text.
Ancient authors, epigraphy and the antiquarian's boot - authentic witnesses of antiquity and its relics. In ambiguous relationship to voice, text and figure.
Scott's own writing is a cacophony of voices articulating past and present (cacophony? - just read his bibliography):
- ethnomusicological collection of medieval bardic epic - the border minstrelsy
- his own poetry - Marmion, Lady of the Lake et al
- medieval historical novels (Ivanhoe et al)
- the antiquarian gazetteer
- historical novels dealing with Scottish themes in recent memory (Waverley, Guy Mannering et al)
- essays and non-fiction in various genres
- all these illustrated with the latest in steel engravings.
Scott consistently elides fact and fiction in his examination of traces in the present of the past (archaeological, memory, textual, placenames, landscapes).
We should note here a recurrent theme in literary antiquarianism in the eighteenth century - establishing the authentic voice of the past - from Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry" through to Macpherson's Ossian. A related interest is the transition from voice (oral poetry, verbal account, memory) to text (a new version of the old song, the annotated transcription/edition, the historical novel, historical narrative). This is inseparable from address to the transition from the land to the illustrated book - how the witnessing pace of the antiquarian, sites and their names, how place-events become itinerary, chorography, cartography, travelogue.
Conventional notions of media (as material modes of communication - print, paint, photography, or as organizational/institutional forms - the media industries) are of limited help in understanding what Scott and his contemporaries were up to in mediating authorial voice and authentic traces of the past. We can consider the rise of cheaper engraved illustration, the popularity of the historical novel in the growth of the publishing industry, developments in cartographic techniques and instruments. But in order to understand how all this and more came to be archaeology - the field, social and laboratory science - we need to rethink the concept of medium.
Scott, Ritson, Gordon and their like are making manifest the past (or, crucially, are aiming to allow the past to manifest itself), in its traces, through practices and performances (writing, corresponding, visiting, touring, mapping, pacing, debating), artifacts (letter, notebook, manuscript, printed book, pamphlet, map, plan, plaster cast, model), instruments (pen, paint brushes, rule, Claude Glass, camera lucida, surveying instruments, boots, wheeled transport, spades, shovels, buckets), systems and standards (taxonomy, itinerary, grid), authorized algorithms (the new philology, legal witnessing), dreams and design (of an old Scotland, of a nation's identity, of personal achievement). Making manifest through manifold articulations. And as a complement to epistemological and ontological interest - getting to know the past “as it was”.
Media, in the conventional sense, are involved - print, engravings, maps - but also much more that challenges the premises of communication and representation underlying the concept of medium. What we are seeing, I suggest, is a reworking of ways of engaging with place, memory (forever lost, still in mind, to be recalled), history and time (historiography, decay, narrative), and artifacts (found and collected) when the author's voice was undergoing question and challenge (who wrote the border ballads? - is this our history?), when ownership of land and property, and the traditional qualities of the land were being altered under rational agricultural improvement, when property was being reinvented as landscape, when the status of manufactured goods was changing rapidly in an industrialized northern Europe. But note, of course, that it is not the Scottish Enlightenment that is generating Scott's historical fiction (what a place - Edinburgh at the end of the eighteenth century - with Hume, Smith ... in a community of maybe 70,000!). That dinner with Ritson and the visit to Gilsland are establishing what constitutes an appropriate way of engaging with the past. It is only later on that Scott gets called a historical novelist, Ritson is marginalized, largely forgotten, and archaeology becomes the rationalized engagement with site and artifact through controlled observation, "fieldwork" and publication in standardized media and genres.
So medium is better thought as mode of engagement - a way of articulating people and artifacts, senses and aspirations, and all the associative chains and genealogical tracks that mistakenly get treated as historical and sociopolitical con-text. Scott presents us with a fascinating laboratory of such modes of engagement, one that runs from field science to romantic fiction through what was to be formalized as altertumswissenschaft by German classical philology.
By the mid nineteenth century the noise of mediating the past had quietened into an orthodoxy of modes of engagement that came with standardization of practice and publication - an orthodoxy of measurement, inscription and illustration.
The heterogeneity of mediation
TW: So there is no necessary limit to visuality - mediation is relational - precisely.
MS: The visual instrument and artifact is defined by the heterogeneity of mediation - the networks of connecting and located productive practices.
TW: Watching a movie in Second Life is not the same as watching the same movie in a cinema multiplex.
MS: Or on an iPod at your gym.
TW: This is the site specificity of mediation - you worked for many years with Brith Gof a site-specific theatre company.
MS: We developed a hybrid genre we called theatre/archaeology - the re-articulation of fragments of the past as real-time place/event. Location matters. Tri Bywyd, for example, was one of the most ambitious works of such a theatre/archaeology. It was as assemblage of three portfolios of evidence relating to three deaths in west Wales - Sarah Jacob, the "Fasting Girl of Wales", Lynette White, murdered in Cardiff in 1988, and an anonymous farmer's suicide. These portfolios were mediated through five performers, three architectures, an amplified sound track, various props including flares, buckets of milk, a bible and a revolver, and a dead sheep. This in the archaeological remains of a farmstead deep in a forest plantation.
The explicit purpose was to visualize and make manifest the subtleties of these archaeological/forensic narratives, but not to simulate or represent. Nor indeed to explain.
Here is another experiment in the documentary articulation of three forensic portfolios - Three rooms.
TW: This is not about correspondence - a deeply entrenched view of representational media in archaeology. You are directing attention away from the communicative and representational function of media?
MS: As we said, the paradigm of the archaeologist as custodian or steward of the past is under serious challenge; it is, at least, undergoing widespread redefinition. As in the eighteenth century this is to do with shifting definitions (legal included) of cultural property. Archaeologists are again having to address the matter of re-presentation - that is, advocacy and witnessing, who is representing (in a constitutional as well as communicative sense) the past, for whom, and on what basis. That the past is there as a datum to be represented is under question; though, of course, the traces remain, conspicuously prompting these questions. What I have called the expressive fallacy (that archaeological texts somehow "express" or represent the past) is being recognized and accepted, as archaeology moves towards a paradigm not of stewardship, but of co-production. We are all archaeologists, working, in different ways, on what is left of the past, sharing a modernist archaeological sensibility attuned to materialities and temporalities.
The critical reflexivity so apparent even in that anecdote from Scott has been, of course, a feature of theoretically informed disciplines for several decades. The history of archaeology is becoming an extended disciplinary memory that recognizes negotiation and multivocality in situated knowledges.
We are indeed back with the eighteenth century.
The past as collaborative project
TW: (archaeolog)
How new, widely available media - the open-source initiative - allow for collaborations in archaeological projects on an unprecedented scale. Example: utilizing wikis at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Teotihuacan, Mexico. With respect to the themes of this Sawyer Seminar - capture | storage | retrieval | distribution - a wiki as new media augments or even creates several features not possible for analog media. This gets back to the co-creative act of heritage as rethinking the discipline as steward of the past and moves toward a mediating role. And this in the double sense: working to collate a enormous amount of interests from those living intimately with these archaeological sites in addition to the archaeological - a legal facilitator; and aware that this is not/cannot be a transparent registry of all archaeological interest and knowledge. So digital technology has certainly amplified capture. But it seems that storage, retrieval, distribution - and, we should add, the creative re-mixing or fungibility allowed for with digital media - are all magnified with new media and specifically the platform shift which has ocurred in the technology sector. The digital democracy ethos of open-source and public domain. Lifting restrictions on how media are used.
MS: And revealing the character of all media as modes of engagement. Let me follow through some implications. They are to do with the increasing ubiquity of media and their changing political economy.
I can take a photo on my phone, send it as an email, post it on a blog, print it out, display it in a gallery in Second Life, add it to a lecture slideshow, add it to a home movie ... . This fungibility is part of an increasingly diverse political economy (you might call it a cultural ecology) of media. No longer is it quite such a regularized process of painting a landscape, printing a museum catalog. It is a political economy. We are very aware of contested property rights in relation to cultural creativity. There is considerable effort being made now to pin down cultural re-sources, imposing restrictions. Issues of access (who gets to produce and consume) however, now have less to do with ownership of the means of production (owning the printing press). In this political economy, the notion of medium as mode of engagement prompts us to look beyond product (the image, the text), to the conditions of conception, manufacture, distribution, consumption and curation or discard. These are internal to the media object. A picture is such a distributed field, as well as a material artifact. Second Life is not a "virtual world", but an extension of sociality into another synthetic and commoditized mode of engagement, usually alone in one's home, with screen, currency, server network, graphical objects, other residents, company managers.
Two key and contemporary concerns in this diversity of media and information are noise (spam) and trust (think of Wikipedia and Google searches). Noise - sorting value, hearing the voice, finding the archaeological artifact in the debris of history. Trust - is the voice or image as authentic as we might wish it to be? These are constitutional issues of re-presentation (constitution - political settlement).
This is the intimacy of those eighteenth century concerns with the ancient text, the voice of the author, concepts of region and nation, authentic pasts, visiting remains, reanimating them in the present.
More concepts to deal with medium as mode of engagement - [link]
More on the antiquarian anecdote - Media as modes of engagement :: Landscape, archaeology, chorography
