Notes from Michael Shanks about heretical empirics and "wabi sabi" - a design philosophy for research.

In my archaeological research into prehistoric farming communities in northern Europe, the Greek city states of the Mediterranean, and now in exploring the Roman and Scottish borders of norther England (information link), I have been very concerned to pay scrupulous attention to the intimate textures of the sources - archaeological remains and ancient texts. I have been very aware of how some strong methodologies can overstructure, overdetermine our accounts and you end up finding what you were looking for (or not). I outlined this danger a whila ago now in my book with Chris Tilley - ReConstructing Archaeology, 1987.

I have experimented with various ways of organizing sources, encounters, texts, images, narratives, accounts, interpretations in conventional analog and digital publishing - books, articles, blogs and wikis - including here - Traumwerk. Even in performance-based media (see Theatre/Archaeology).

I now prefer a philosophy of knowledge design that relates in very interesting ways to "wabi-sabi" - the zen philosophy of design.

values

• impermanence

• transience

• imperfection

• the incomplete

• organic decay and ruin

• absence as much as presence

• negative space and void

• relational value - that things come to have value in their specific relation/juxtaposition (momentary and site specific) with other things

attitude

• attention to small details

• site specific, located encounter - and so self-effacing, denying panoptic control beyond the particular

• "I have nothing to say" - having no a priori pretensions to make grand statements

• listening to things and others

experiences

• actuality - the intersection of two local present moments

• getting lost in the details

• process and flow as much as the end destination

• connection and emergence

• agile adaption to local interest

• aleatoric encounter

• multiplicity and mutability

forms

• imperfect, unfinished

• irregular, inconsistent and asymmetrical

• corroded and contaminated

• mutable dynamic approximations

• repurposed forms - reworked for the local task - bricolage

• devolved and entropic

• blurred

• things not as bundles of properties and attributes, but relationally distributed

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The irony is that such a design philosophy is far from remote and abstract, but profoundly grounded and holistic.

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Links to wabi sabi

• http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WabiSabi

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi

• http://www.hermitary.com/house/aesthetics.html

• http://www.art.unt.edu/ntieva/artcurr/asian/wabisabi.html

• http://www.resurgence.org/resurgence/issues/koren203.htm

• http://users.exis.net/~jnc/nontech/wabisabi.html

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Have a look at Helen Shanks - ceramics

Chorography - noise - steps towards a regional archaeology