Mike Pearson died last week. He was a performance artist, theatre director, theorist and philosopher, scholar and teacher. And, as composer John Hardy said, Mike collaborated and connected – visual design, architectural stagecraft, poets, playwrights, composers, experimental jazz musicians, dancers, disability & gender specialists, comics, community art conveners, museum curators, traditional Japanese theatre performers, Patagonian farmers,…
media archaeology
Studio update – Spring 2022
This academic year I am on sabbatical leave finishing three long-running projects and planning to focus more on applications of the archaeological imagination to matters of common and pressing contemporary concern, especially through design foresight and futures literacy. This is why I have put to one side my critical commentary on all things archaeological and…
memory and return – Tri Bywyd (Three Lives) 1995
On the return of the past: document, memory, and archive. Katie Pearl (theatre director and professor at Wesleyan – see her extraordinary work here – [Link]) recently got in touch asking about the performance in Wales in 1995 of Tri Bywyd (translation – Three Lives), a work of theatre/archaeology by arts company Brith Gof. Specifically…
Archaeolog.org: 2005 to 2011 to . . .
Timothy Webmoor and Christopher Witmore Last month archaeolog.org turned six years old. And in the blogging world this ripe old age is quite an accomplishment – a veritable geezer. But this birthday passed unacknowledged and in the midst of one of the longest dry spells in archaeolog.org’s history. Since 2005 we have been silent for…
Archaeology, Science Fiction, and Pop Culture
The first time I TAed an archaeology class, we began by having our students draw a picture of an archaeologist. The result was predictable: a pile of comically bad drawings of Indiana Jones, leavened with a few nerdy-looking academic characters. That semester, we went on a mission to wipe this image out of our students’…
‘Popular culture’ and the archaeological imagination: A commentary on Cornelius Holtorf’s Archaeology is a Brand! (2007)
When presented with the question of “why I became an archaeologist” I tend to cycle between 3 different responses; responses all rooted in childhood experiences. Indeed, which of these I dispense varies with whom I am speaking. My answers are: 1) I enjoyed both digging up and collecting bits and pieces of glass and metal…