Metamedia is a studio and lab. It is a diverse ecology of interests between archaeology and media studies pursuing research projects and pedagogy in design history and media materialities. In particular it is a focus for 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 50k pages of content generated by nearly 1000 users located in 35 countries. Currently it is evolving with a tighter focus on substantive archaeological research.
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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.
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.
