Seeing, being, doing

Breaking convention

2011-02-10T05:38:00.000-08:00

BREAKING CONVENTION

An up and coming conference in which I will be presenting a talk

Abstract:

How perspectivist encounters can help reconstruct Neolithic worlds

Amerindian perspectivism refers to a specific type of worldview that forces us to take as a starting point an extended notion of the human: a notion that comprises a series of beings, including various types of animals, spirits and materials. In this paper I will follow the lead of anthropologists such as Phillipe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and archaeologists like the late Andrew Sherratt. In particular, I will highlight some of the ways in which people may have engaged with their worlds, practices which I believe may have shaped the development and expression of worldview in the Neolithic. To develop these ideas, I will be referring to an ayahuasca ceremony which I witnessed in the Amazon jungle, and consider how these events inform and create ontological understanding. Perspectivist systems of thought provide powerful worldview schemes in which close identification is made between different kinds of people and other types of being, be it animal, object or thing. It has helped, and continues to help dissolve the nature: culture, subject: object, human: non-human dichotomies which continue to shape Western thought, and through this may provide us with new ways of reconstructing Neolithic worlds – worlds in which Western polarities were almost certainly absent.

http://breakingconvention.co.uk/

The wonderful world of Albert Kahn

2009-07-13T07:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.albertkahn.co.uk/about.html

A rare portrait of the camera-shy
Albert Kahn on the balcony of his office
in Paris in 1914.

In 1909 the millionaire French banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn embarked on an ambitious project to create a colour photographic record of, and for, the peoples of the world. As an idealist and an internationalist, Kahn believed that he could use the new autochrome process, the world's first user-friendly, true-colour photographic system, to promote cross-cultural peace and understanding.

Kahn used his vast fortune to send a group of intrepid photographers to more than fifty countries around the world, often at crucial junctures in their history, when age-old cultures were on the brink of being changed for ever by war and the march of twentieth-century globalisation. They documented in true colour the collapse of both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires; the last traditional Celtic villages in Ireland, just a few years before they were demolished; and the soldiers of the First World War — in the trenches, and as they cooked their meals and laundered their uniforms behind the lines. They took the earliest-known colour photographs in countries as far apart as Vietnam and Brazil, Mongolia and Norway, Benin and the United States.

At the start of 1929 Kahn was still one of the richest men in Europe. Later that year the Wall Street Crash reduced his financial empire to rubble and in 1931 he was forced to bring his project to an end. Kahn died in 1940. His legacy, still kept at the Musée Albert-Kahn in the grounds of his estate near Paris, is now considered to be the most important collection of early colour photographs in the world.

Kahn’s palatial home at Cap Martin on the French Riviera, photographed around 1910

Albert Kahn’s much-loved garden at his home near Paris in 1911

Guests in the gardens of Kahn’s cliff-top residence in Cornwall on 25 August 1913

Until recently, Kahn's huge collection of 72,000 autochromes remained relatively unheard of; the vast majority of them unpublished. Now, a century after he launched his Archives of the Planet project, the BBC Book The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn, and the television series it accompanies, are bringing Kahn's dazzling pictures to a mass audience for the first time and putting colour into what we tend to think of as an entirely monochrome age.

The Incredible Century-Old Color Photography of Prokudin-Gorsky

2009-07-13T07:51:00.000-07:00

http://quazen.com/arts/photography/the-incredible-century-old-color-photography-of-prokudin-gorsky/

In 1909 a remarkable project was initiated by Russian photographer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky. His mission was to record - in full and vibrant color - the vast and diverse Russian Empire. Here, with his story, is a selection of his amazing century old full color pictures.

2009-06-23T07:20:00.001-07:00

big mushrooms!

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=56475

production stills for the new tim burton alice in wonderland

2009-06-23T06:57:00.000-07:00

The Glue Society, a group of artists, designers and projecteers, have created these amazing series of sculptures and films commissioned by 42Below Vodka where they've created chair rainbows on the frozen tundra, a curb-side wrap party, gratuitous nudie pictures for airplanes passing by, a house of crates, and a blow-up doll's vacation paradise. The Glue Society's past projects include a very chilling series of "God's Eye View" Google Earth's shots of classic biblical scenes (scroll and see down below) and their "Hot With the Chance of Late Storm" melting ice cream truck which we're featuring in the upcoming Hi-fructose Collected Edition. See the new videos and the other Glue Society's projects and much more below.

http://www.hifructose.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=246

Their own website:

http://www.gluesociety.com/

2009-06-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

The Vulcan, under destruction or a Cardiff heirloom?

(well, not for 3 years at least according to the County Council)

Pint of 45

Perhaps it's a Brains viral thing, but either way, he or she has endured many more of Canton's pubs than is strictly necessary. Bravo.

2009-06-16T09:00:00.000-07:00

Nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker's library. You exit the austere parlor of his New England home and pass through a hallway into the bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride. Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects—on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor—the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) That edition of Chaucer ... is it a Kelmscott? (Natch.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.) No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you—a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London (you can track plague fatalities by week), the instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket (which launched the Apollo 11 capsule to the moon), a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II. In no time, your mind is stretched like hot taffy. Read more...

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-10/ff_walker?currentPage=all

2009-06-16T05:05:00.000-07:00

Forthcoming conference held in Italy

European Association of Archaeologists

15th EAA Annual Meeting will be held in Riva del Garda, Italy,
15-20 September 2009

http://www.eaaitaly2009.com

2009-06-16T04:43:00.000-07:00

I am involved with the excavations at Llanmaes, near Llantwitt Major, Vale of Glamorgan again this year June/July 2009.

Check back for updates

http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/1492/

2009-06-16T04:15:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture is available..... with my current article 'Regenerating substances: quartz as an animistic agent'

http://www.bergpublishers.com/BergJournals/TimeMind/tabid/3253/Default.aspx

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/berg/tmdj/2009/00000002/00000002

2009-06-16T03:54:00.000-07:00

A forthcoming conference: 'Living landscapes' organised by Mike Pearson, Aberystwyth University, 18-21 June 2009

http://www.landscape.ac.uk/2009conference.html

http://www.relu.ac.uk/events/Living_Landscapes_%20leaflet.pdf

The Arcades Project : A 3D Documentary

2009-06-16T03:37:00.000-07:00

http://www.jenniesavage.co.uk/motm%20cardiff/Museum%20of%20the%20moment.htm

The Arcades Project : A 3D Documentary is a series of projects initiated by artist Jennie Savage which will take place in Cardiff’s Victorian and Edwardian Arcades between October 2008 and October 2009.

Cardiff is known as the city of Arcades because it has the highest concentration of Victorian and Edwardian Shopping arcades in the UK. Over the next year (2008-2009) artist Jennie Savage will lead an exploration into these spaces, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project and constructed in the light of the St David’s 2 Shopping Centre.

http://www.a rcadesproject.org/

2009-06-16T03:35:00.000-07:00

http://archaeography.com/photoblog/

Representing the Archaeological

2009-06-16T03:26:00.001-07:00

Archaeologies of Art Podcast Series

UCD Scholarcast has released a podcast series featuring highlights from the Sixth World Archaeological Congress’ theme ‘Archaeologies of Art’. The series features contributions from Douglass Bailey (San Francisco State University), Blaze O’Connor (University College Dublin), Andrew Cochrane (Cardiff University) and Kevin O’Dwyer (WAC6 Artist-in-Residence). The series responds broadly to the themes raised by the Abhar agus Meon exhibition series hosted at WAC 6.

The series can be downloaded here: http://www.ucd.ie/scholarcast/series2.html

SOME POETRY FROM MEXICO

2009-06-16T02:49:00.000-07:00

A Village: San Jose del Pacifico, Mexico

The bus trundles along the mountain-scape
As the altitude snakes even higher
The clouds blast through the windows,
with thinning air we enter a butcher's freezer
Clasping hands close the windows
And the headlights are turned on.
The foggy mist lowers and the clouds sink,
Treetops for miles down valley of forests
Appearing like spokes - the scenery revealed.

Mountains in the distance look like floating islands-

Of far away
Rolling clouds tumbling through their valleys
Like the crests of waves.

A misty forest of mountaintop shacks appear
A homely light is switched on in the distance
And a dog patters past quizically

The sun cracks through the clouds
Sunset is nearly over.

Copyright Ffion Reynolds 2009

2009-06-16T02:24:00.000-07:00

http://www.otherthings.com/grafarc/

A group of photographers and artists are documenting the accretion of the 'underground' urban landscape through graffiti art. Based in San Francisco, but also looking at graffiti in Los Angeles and New York, Cassidy Curtis and his team at Graffiti Archaeology document the changes through time of graffiti art at several tagging locations. All of the photographs are then 'photoshopped' together, placed in sequence, and made freely available via a custom flash program on the web. Arresting our web-enhanced gaze, it is a visual record manifesting what is routine and intimate, yet often simply hurried by.