A thing.
While browsing the discount shelves at a bookstore in downtown, or rather ‘downcity’ (as the locals call it), Providence yesterday and I came across a peculiarly shaped book stamped:

BEIJING 10/2003 

AI WEIWEI
Hard bound, covered in a grey paper, imprinted with a weave texture to give the appearance of cloth, the book has the dimensions of a brick, 11.1cm X 24.3cm X 5.9cm.
The first page along with each and every one of the next 862 pages contain two images side by side. Following these images are 2 pages containing 12 lines of Chinese followed by 2 pages containing 14 lines of English text, Arial Font. The text is white printed on a black background. The remainder of the work contains a map of Beijing which is then subdivided into a series of 16 maps by day over the following pages. It ends with the publisher’s credits: timezone 8.
The book is a document of Beijing.

An engagement.
In October of 2003 Ai Weiwei mounted a video camera in the front passenger seat of a van. Along with a driver, and perhaps two assistants who are mentioned by name, they proceeded to drive every road within the Fourth Ring Road of Beijing. The book is the translation of this 16 day video survey. It contains 1719 images captured at every five-minute interval from nearly 150 hours of video.

Each scene is taken through the windshield from the vantage point of the passenger seat. A rearview mirror appears in every shot. From the mirror hang red tassels. Woven into these is a red filigree circle inside of which is a heart containing a Chinese character. The position of these tassels give an indication of the smoothness of the drive. Windshield wipers are present depending on the weather.
Katachresis.
The effective juxtaposition of images: a major highway jammed with traffic | a long lane framed with green foliage | a thin alleyway with little room to maneuver | parking lot | brick wall caught in mid turn | vegetable market crammed with people | dirt lot with workers | crowds | mobs | during the day | at night | with blue sky | under cloud | rain | snow | order | chaos; these are windows into a city of constant movement and commotion. This energy and variety is heightened by the arrangement of the images side by side. The only constants are windshield, the tassels and the pavements of Beijing.
A transformation.
Each image is an arbitrary stand in for five minutes of film footage. The approach, we are expected to believe, is exact, rigid and methodical. We must trust that these images are captured at these exact intervals and that their arrangement is linear. The approach to place is precisely sequenced.
In this reductive process vision wins out. We have no way to translate the sounds into two dimensions (for an example of an integrated approach refer to: One hour at the Lion Gate of Mycenae or Teotihuacán, Mexico). Nonetheless, multiplicity abounds.

An example of good practice.
How do we as archaeologists document place? While we are beginning to integrate video into excavation and survey, how are we to circulate these materials? What can we learn from approaches such as that of Weiwei?
Archaeological images are always combined with captions, figure descriptions, they always work in combination with text. It would be anathema to leave of an archaeological feature or thing without coding.
Art helps us to understand without concepts. BEIJING 10/2003 denies verbal classification. It operates without textual categories.
As archaeologists must code, we must classify, we must determine. And still such artwork should not be regarded as antithetical to our work as archaeologists. Rather it should be regarded as extremely complimentary.
Not only is our task is to embrace multiple modes of documentation, it is also to understand what these various forms do, what they transform, and how they operate in relation to each other. Sometimes a good course of action calls for simply manifesting places, features, things, without attempting to speak for them.