A talk by Michael Shanks in Turku, as part of the Nordic Graduate School 2006

My class has three themes

1. An argument about virtual reality reconstructions in archaeology - think of them more as augmented or mixed realities
2. The coming digital dark ages - leading to reflections on the nature of information
3. New developments in authoring and publishing - dynamic documents, co-creative collaboration, smart mobs and Web 2.0 - some opportunities, because they suit archaeologists so well

Here are my arguments

Overall I want to emphasise the creative possibilities opening up for archaeology to explore its metadisciplinary interests - of working on the remains of the past, with wonderfully simple questions such as "what was it like?", "what happened here?", "what has become of what was?"

These creative possibilities are, for me, connected with new media, and, in particular, the relation of new media to information design and management

• Old definitions of media according to material form or technology (film, photography, print, TV, painting etc) need to give way to a broader understanding of medium as mode of engagement.

• This particularly applies to digital new media.

• I challenge the common notion is that a medium is a means to an end. Not just to invoke McLuhan's point that the medium is the message. Rather to challenge the separation of form and content, substance and expression, reality and representation.

• I call this the fallacy of representation (or the expressive fallacy) - that media primarily express or represent.

• This challenge to typical Cartesian dualisms does not erode our notion of reality but makes it far more robust because it focuses on active perception and knowledge-building - active engagements with the world.

• We need to elide the distinctions between signifier, signified and referent through a focus on their respective and distinct materialities (this is a media archaeology).

• A close corollary here is a challenge to the notion of a convincing illusion as in the concept of "virtual reality". Because VR often assumes the radical distinction between real and represented worlds. Instead we need to be far more savvy with the concept of "virtuality" and connect it closely with our understanding of materiality and engagement.

• So archaeological use of media is not some matter secondary to the discovery of the past, for example, as in the publication of finds. Media, as modes of engagement, as practices of mediation, are essential moments in archaeology's relationship with the past.

• The close relationship of media with infrastructures and standards amplifies this active mediating and material conception of mediawork.

• So information, crucially, is not passive, but active - information is a verb.

• And media are design environments, where, for example, archaeologists take up what is left of the past and translate/(re)mediate.

• In this active process of designing the past, digital and agile design of information offers a way of managing and avoiding the predefinition of data (finding what we are looking for).

• This implies a new, though complementary, approach to digitally enabled research, analysis, publication and pedagogy - a new media poetics for archaeology that bridges science, the arts and humanities.

I will present these arguments through some case studies, anecdotes, examples

Archaeological photography and Mortimer Wheeler - message = media are material modes of engagement (context - think of science studies and ethnographies of scientific practice that question media as primarily representational systems)

How the UK computer company ICL helped an archaeologist in 1970 - message = data and information are intimately related to media

NASA shops on eBay - message = digital IT is as material as any other medium

A cautionary tale from Stanford about time proofing data - message = information is a verb

Terminator and Matrix: archaeology and illusions of reality - [link] - message = notions of VR are an unhealthy aspect of what I call the "fallacy of representation" - that communication and media are all about representation (in the sense of signifying the signified)

Mass producing the past and the way VR all looks the same - [link] - message = think instead of enhancing different kinds of modes of engagement with the past through augmented realities

IT and augmented realities - [link] - amplifying the previous comment

VR and connections with phenomenology - [link] - message = certain modes of engagement (such as phenomenological landscape archaeology) are ideologically compromised - the notion that media are modes of engagement opens up the politics of representation

Andreas Gursky, new photography and "being there" - presence effects and augmented realities - [link] - message = media are modes of engagement

The simple insights of a collective photoblog - http://archaeography.com - message = the emergent effects of agile information and media design/management, and how research and publishing are converging

A sense of place? - Three rooms - heretical empirics - message = data management and narrative - and how publishing systems have become creative note-taking/making environments

Resources

For much of my argument see - "Digital media, agile design and the politics of archaeological authorship" - [link] - a paper appearing in a new book on Media and Archaeology edited by Marcus Britain and Timothy Clack

Here are some comments on digital media from myself and Cliff McLucas (architect and scenographer/dramaturg for Brith Gof).

We note some features of The Digital:

• the interchangeability and easy juxtaposition of what were previously separate material media;
• the absence of predetermined outputs;
• the generation of new creative environments;
• the generation of new associative arenas;
• the relentless de-structuring of relationships in the media industries;
• the challenging of ‘hierarchical’ structures by ‘geodesic’ ones - single linear and dendritic patterns and relationships replaced by networks;
• the proliferation of modes of ‘authorship’;
• the proliferation of modes of ‘publishing’;
• the proliferation of modes of ‘reading’.

The Digital allows the gathering of moving image, still image, music, text, 3d design, database, geological survey, graphic detail, architectural plan, virtual walk-through etc, into a single environment. These may be infinitely manipulated and re-mobilized without loss in that space. The eventual output as video, photograph, CD ROM, DVD, paper based print, web page, broadcast, archival database, live event, exhibition, site specific installation etc, is in no way predetermined by any factor in the original material.

Numerous characteristics of this environment - cutting, pasting, undoing, reformatting, layering, and so on - define an entirely new and creative arena in which even the simplest of tasks becomes less predetermined and more speculative. Even while working with complex visual and sound environments, these characteristics help to create a working space that can be much more investigative and more creative. Digital networks notoriously create the possibility of new associative and collaborative arenas, new ways of moving ideas and communications around. Potentially this raises issues about differences of power and influence between center and periphery, between the urban and the rural. There is increased potential for small-scale and locally-based 'artisan' and 'non-industrial' modes of operation. The 'virtual', as an extensive and sophisticated cultural space, may move into competition with, or parallel to, the 'real world'. The Digital may imply a re-negotiation of the relationship between the global and the local.

We suggest that these features of The Digital create what we will refer to as an expanded and 'poetic' space.

The Poetic is a key concept in our endeavors. By poetic we are not referring to a kind of ephemeral and personal way of writing, one belonging with ideas of subjective inspiration and expression. By poetic we mean the combining of materials (here, as described above, in the digital realm) - materials from different sources and of different orders, in such ways that they resonate to create meanings within the spaces of their combination as much as in the elements themselves.

Media and ‘modes of engagement’

The choreography of previously diverse materials through the digital realm inevitably breaks down the structural properties of what have been commonly referred to as 'media'.

The term ‘medium’ has usually referred to an institutional agency of communication, such as TV, or the materials and methods used in the production of an artwork, such as oil on canvas. But the fluid manner in which visual material, for example, is turned into animation, photographic print, painting, digital video grab, film, photographic transparency and so on, is less and less important in defining the 'medium' of the product generated.

Instead, and in celebration of Roland Barthes notion of the 'death of the author', the way a reader or viewer is engaged by those agencies which distribute cultural works is an increasingly significant factor in any attempt to mark the difference between given works. Hence we propose that the notion of Modes of Engagement might offer us a more accurate and useful way to categorize the format and placement of cultural works in the public or private arena.

Crucially, these formats are not being driven so much by subject matter or discipline (one concern of The Academy), nor the material or form (one concern of The Studio), but by an interface or hybridization of distributing institutions, individuals, families and social or professional groupings. We propose, therefore, to adopt four schematic working categories for the media productions in The Three Landscapes Project (this is what Cliff and I were thinking about when we wrote all this during an archaeological field project in Sicily back in 1999):

• those that we experience 'in the privacy of our own homes' - such as the website, the interactive CD-ROM or game, the sound CD, and most printed materials;
• those that are experienced 'in the company of ones family and friends' - such as television and radio;
• those that are experienced 'with colleagues at the school or in the workplace' - such as the formal lecture, demonstration or multimedia presentation;
• those that are experienced 'in the public arena' - such as the billboard, the exhibition, the public performance.

In addition, the decision to adopt this way of characterizing 'media' will place us in confrontation or, at least, in conversation with some powerful generators of cultural meanings - the media industries and institutions. A component of the study will therefore be to track the negotiations, at conceptual and administrative levels, with such organizations. The gatekeepers in the distribution and mandating of cultural authors and their productions are the commissioning editors, the business managers and the commercial analysts of these institutions. Our study must embrace them and their attitudes.

Thoughts on reconceptualizing media in terms of archaeology and information theory - see me and Sam Schillace - Media Eigenvectors (though we have since dropped the notion of eigenvector)

On Howard Rheingold's notion of "smart mobs" - see http://www.smartmobs.com/

On Web 2.0 - see this article by Tim O'Reilly - What is Web 2.0?

This one too from Richard MacManus and Jason Porter - Web 2.0 for designers

For some more provocative prospects of digital archaeological futures - watch the development of the island NEWare in http://secondlife.com - a memory palace - track it at http://metamedia.stanford.edu/lifesquared/