Design research, media materialities and long-term trends - currently undergoing a shift into more tightly focused projects concerned with social modeling and run through a new paradigm - digitally-enabled research networks

Metamedia is a studio and lab. It is a diverse ecology of interests between archaeology and media studies pursuing projects and pedagogy in design research and media materialities. Lab members have developed expertise in the application of new media, particularly Web 2.0 technologies, in archaeology and cognate fields.

Metamedia is located in Stanford Archaeology Center, lives online at http://metamedia.stanford.edu and is a hub for worldwide affiliates. Metamedia websites extend to over 100k pages of content generated by over 1000 users located in 42 countries. Currently it is evolving with a tighter focus on substantive archaeological research connected with matters of common human concern such as regional development in the post-industrial west, local identity, and long term social and political trends.

the lab in 2006

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The lab began for me as a fascination with media — how archaeologists, of necessity, translate the material remains of the past into text, image, map, diagram, 3D visualization.

I started my archaeological career as photographer and draftsman.

My book Experiencing the Past (1991) took up the challenge to experiment with such archaeological mediation of the past in the present and led directly to a long-running dialogue and collaboration with the theater company Brith Gof around the documentation of performance. We developed hybrid genres of theatre/archaeology (the rearticulation of fragments of the past as real-time event) and deep-mapping (the stratigraphies of temporal topography).

Stanford brought an introduction to the latest of digital technology and the lab was formally created to be a focus for the cross-fertilization of social and participatory software and content management systems with archaeological themes of memory, fragment and document By 2005 Metamedia became tightly associated with Stanford Humanities Lab, sharing resources and many thematic interests.

Metamedia combines archaeology and media, with an archaeological and long-term focus on how people get on with things, with media(works) treated as modes of engagement between people and things. Media as artifacts and prostheses as well as systems to convey meaning — we emphasize the materialities of mediation at the heart of design — the way, for example, the steel was burnished, the clay was turned, how the vessel connects makers and materials, users and contents in genealogies of containment, portage, representation.

Metamedia is a hybrid of archaeology

and media/mediating practices —

• because time, historicity (our sense of historical belonging and agency) and memory are at the heart of media, in re-presentation, record, documentation, archive — mediawork is temporal process — constantly revisiting the past, reworking, re-presenting
• because mediation is at the heart of time, our sense of history (historicity), and memory — the past, to live, has always to be brought into the present — visualized, written about, re-presented in its traces — mediated
• because media are artifacts and archaeology is THE discipline of things
• because we do well to remember the materiality of all media, understanding our writing, visualization, our conversation, our work in video and sound as material modes of engagement with objects, environments, each other, through instruments and material modalities — media are so much more than the communication of messages, texts, images.

http://metamedia.stanford.edu

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