Notes from
Michael Shanks on archaeological experiences of making and designing - with special reference to creativity and new media.
Helen Shanks - ceramics
This site, Traumwerk, is about working on remains of the past. It is about mediating the past - bringing what is left into the present. This means it is also profoundly about media - text, image, information.
In this dynamic production of the past are to be faced a series of matters concerning design.
Elsewhere I deal with an organic approach to documentation and record under a heading of heretical empirics, with an outline of a design philosophy to go with it, one that shares much with a wabi sabi - zen design.
Archaeologists have a lot to offer in understanding design and making.
- They have the only truly long-term perspective on human making.
- Archaeologists intervene - excavating, surveying, collecting - only for the last 50 years have archaeologists figured significantly in the academy. Still now archaeology as a field is dominated by workers in the heritage industry. So archaeologists have long been cultural producers - making stories and identities, a crucial component in cultural development.
- Archaeologists deal in materiality and material processes - archaeology is one of the few disciplines that concentrates on this most fundamental feature of human being.
I have long cherished working with people who make - Artists and engineers.
My work on Greek pottery involved a great deal of ethnography of studio potters in Europe and China - see my book Art and the Early Greek State. I work closely with performance artists in Brith Gof, a theatre company, The Presence Project, and the animated archive we have created in the online world Second Life - Life squared.
Particularly revealing experiences were with improvising groups of performance artists, with the studio set-up of the art colleges in the UK, with teams of corporate researchers at DaimlerChrysler, with archaeological pasts that are of necessity co-productions.
Here are some recommendations for how to promote creative thinking outside of the box.
Oblique strategies in creating something engaging, insightful, enriching, while remaining faithful to empirical experience:
- articulation - use a comparative perspective
- aleatoric articulation - force connections between elements that share no association
- articulation - map and explore connections - moving sideways rather than drilling down
- remediation - translate from one medium to another, one symbol system to another
- collaboration through diversity - bring together disparate interest
- metamorphosis - change medium - translate - visualize - materialize
- force a polyglotic form - don't translate
- amplify connections - research to amplify not reduce/simplify - elaborate first, reduce later
- triangulate to avoid polarization and binary opppositions
- storytelling not narrative - dynamic mediation of author and audience rather than unifying narrative structure
- articulation - map and explore connections - moving sideways rather than drilling down
- improvise = draw on experience (abductively), hunches, speculative reasoning, be spontaneous
- build glossaries rather than narratives
- demote spatial coordinate and temporal index from categorial primacy - look for other attributes of location
- fail quickly - run pilots - get building quickly and try it out - be agile and iterative
- deal with mess - don't be too tidy with your categories - cherish noise, multiplicity, ambiguity, dysfunction
- collect then search rather than categorize then record
- professionalism requires teams (you can't do it all yourself) - work with others
- aim simply to make manifest - don't expect to explain - you may, in the end, have nothing to say
Note also
- the power of theory - abstraction in order to connect the disparate and diverse
- hybrid method - phronesis (practical know-how) and pragmatics
- surreality and the fascination of chaos
More examples and references
- Some comments about transitive information - "information is a verb" - [link]
- Experiencing the past - [link] - my book that deals with an archaeological and critical poetics
- A discussion with Sam Schillace about media design - media eigenvectors - [link] - tying discourse theory to information science in building a vocabulary and glossary for handling the qualities of media
- A paper on media and archaeology - agile design, philsophies of information and designing data - [link]
- An older paper from 1993 about rhetoric and designing pasts, with comments about the creativity of archaeological work - [link]
Design philosophy - heretical empirics
