The recent opening of Paul Clancy’s “The Search for the Soul of a Building” in Providence, RI provided occasion for me to resurrect a languishing Archaeolog entry I had started back in the late spring and which has been annoyingly stapled to may desktop every since.
Regarding the exhibition, Clancy’s subtext is what drew my interest: “A Photo-Archaeologist Dig”. Clancy documents transformations in the urban fabric of cities like Boston and Providence. For Clancy, his photographs of derelict structures or buildings in the process of being torn down become “markers of time and place.” His ‘dig’ consisted of, among other matters, scenes of the former police and fire headquarters of Providence in various states of demolition. Clancy’s photographs experiment with the effects of age: the patina of old film stock, the worn surface of metal plate photos such as daguerreotypes. Scratched, exposed, and degraded surfaces in his photography speak to the textures of ruins, of perpetual perishing, of entropy. The works were all set in frames upon the white walls of a gallery at 17 Peck (http://www.17peck.com/). All these works are for sale.

Back in the spring we had a couple of MA students conduct ‘excavations’ of photographic materials here at Brown University. As with Clancy’s exhibition, these projects take photographs seriously as ‘markers’ of transformation, as articulations of arrested moments, as memories. This work falls under the rubric of media archaeology.

Media Archaeology
Media archaeology can be approached from two directions, each with its own definition. One: media archaeology is an object-oriented field of media studies (as distinguished from conventional history) concerned not only with dead media (see Bruce Sterling’s Dead Media Project http://www.deadmedia.org), the forgotten practices associated with them, and their impact in the co-production of past knowledge but also the more erratic developments and idiosyncratic genealogies of contemporary technologies of communication (Druckrey 2006; examples include Kittler 1999 and Zielinski 2006). Two: media archaeology is a concern with media as modes of engagement with the material world. Media archaeology is an understanding of media as sensory prostheses which mediate archaeological practices and experiences; it is a concern with the nature of translation in archaeology and the qualities of the material world manifest by particular media. I would push the definition even further in underlining a certain recognition of the negentropic potentials of everything from lantern slides, daguerreotypes and other photographic materials to maps, plans, texts, or combinations therein to digital media — an archaeology of the information age (Shanks 2006; also see archaeographer; Witmore 2006; on negentropy see Witmore 2007). With the former, we find media studies practitioners revealing forgotten, disregarded sets of relations whether with optics, computers, or the camera obscura, and thus generating more complicated genealogies of media. With the latter, we find archaeologists engaging with found photography (Shanks 2006), the mediating practices of excavation or survey (Tringham (in press)), found video footage (Avikunthak 2001) or even questions of transformation in comparative studies of archaeological sites.
Both media archaeologies complicate what are seen to be conventional understandings of media lodged in their progressive trajectories as if it could not have happened otherwise. Both deny the exclusivity of time as linear progression. Both recognize media as particular modalities offering up diverse possibilities for engaging the material world. There is much more to be said, but enough already.
It is under this rubric of media archaeology that we may locate the two projects that I want to draw attention to.
Excavating a photo album: Egypt 1923
The John Nicholas Brown Center, which is directed by Steve Lubar (who, by the way, runs a great blog on museums and exhibitions http://www.museumblog.blogspot.com/), maintains archives of the Brown family. Among the stacks of personal and professional correspondence, corporate records, architectural drawings, etc. was a photo album of a ‘grand tour’ through Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near East and Egypt taken by John Nicholas Brown. Undertaken by Tracey Gierada, Egypt 1923 is a Web 2.0 exhibition (which hopes to expand with a future gallery component) of select photographs contained in the album: specifically, Brown and his entourage’s journey down the Nile.

Cairo, Abydos, Karnak, Luxor, the Valley of the Kings, Alexandria; between January 11 and March 15 1923 Brown visited a number of emblematic sites while archaeological excavations were taking place. Indeed, glued in this personal album were a series of photographs taken on January 24th at the Tomb of Tutankhamen. Here is a partial list of what was portrayed:
• Carriages, pack animals, and attendants waiting in the valley
• Women gathered by a hastily built stone retaining wall above the tomb
• Howard Carter and crew removing a portion of a funerary couch from the tomb and setting it in a crate
• Carter and crew removing one of the supports of the funerary couch — the ‘Sacred Cow of Hathor’
• Carter and crew positioning the couch support/cow (gold on wood) so as to be placed in a crate
• Carter and crew boxing the couch support/cow (a line of shadows cast by eager tourist cuts through the center of the photograph)
• Workers lifting the crate containing the cow
• Armed soldiers leading a procession of cow-in-crate with visitors/tourists following along
• The procession continuing through the valley towards the Tomb of Seti II
The photos are all displayed using open source Zoomify imaging software which, depending on the quality of the original scan (in many cases 10,000 plus pixels wide for landscape scenes), allows one to focus in on the most intimate of details. Such a dynamic visualization package establishes a different relationship with a scene, an event, a performance, an excavation, or even a stone facade at Karnak. The high resolution scans break up the photo into hundreds of windows as one zooms in. Here, random noise of the ground captured in these arrested moments may become the signal, the figure, the point of interest: the clothing worn by bystanders, the bare feet of a worker lifting a crate, the smooth hooves of the ‘Cow of Hathor,’ Carter’s expression while lifting a portion of the couch, a ceramic water jug set off to the side. Each frame focuses, even redirects our attention. Set within a wiki interface, visitors to the exhibition may leave commentary, links, or even other photographs (this Web 2.0 format was executed by Metamedia and the Cantor Arts Center for an exhibition of the photographs of Edward Burtynsky at the Stanford University back in 2005). This option is currently closed.
Let us turn to the second excavation.
Resurrecting lantern slides
Adam Bravo, a member of a course — ‘Archaeology in the Information Age’ — that I taught back in the spring, stumbled upon an abandoned box of lantern slides in the basement of the Classics Department here at Brown. Adam carefully unpacked them, dusted them off, accessed each one, and decided to resurrect some of them.

Lantern slides are medium format glass plate positives which were used for entertainment and teaching after the mid 1870’s. The glass plates are 3.25 by 4 inches. Many have decorative borders around the image at center (indeed, I have several dozen which decorate the shelves of the media lab at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World). These slides were projected through a ‘magic lantern’ or sciopticon on classroom walls, cloth screens and other surfaces right up to the 1950’s, and even later, when they were usurped by smaller positive transparencies. Beyond the potential hazards of cutting your finger on a broken slide or burning your hand on a 400W tungsten bulb, a major drawback (that is in comparison to contemporary standards of projection) of lantern slides resides in the projected image — yes, Bravo managed to track down a working projector and he even provides photos of the projected images for comparison. The intensity of tungsten bulb varies from center to periphery producing a certain haze across the images. Nonetheless the flat surfaces of medium format plates are full of visual information.
T.H McAllister of New York, G. Sommer and Son of Naples, Frederick E. Partington, J, Levy of Paris: many of the slides scanned by Bravo were produced by professional studios and sold for educational use. From the Roman Forum and the Via Appia to Tower of Winds and the Hephaestion to 490 Angell Street and Wayland Ave in Providence, RI, a random assortment of slides are set in zoomify windows — the design and architecture are the same as Egypt 1923. Ultimately, neither project is complete. They are ongoing.
Both projects raise a question.
Where shall we look for memory?
In the digital world memory is cheap. We regularly snap photographs of scenes which under the different circumstances presented by analog photography (number of shots per roll, production costs, etc) we may have hesitated upon (see Tringham (in press)). Do more images necessarily equal more information? Yes and no.
Think of a camera as a clock. Each image, a slice of a particular time and place. Each image, a translation (and, therefore, a transformation) of certain qualities of the material world at a given moment (or over a short duration). So much noise is captured by standard analog film (not to mention medium format and large format archival photography). Conventional analog materials contain phenomenal amounts of information. The emulsion of a 4×5 large format photograph may equate to over 500 to 600 megapixels. Again information noise may under different circumstances become signal. This same noise turned information will fail to translate in a 10 megapixel digital image (for more here see Michael Shanks notes from Archaeography the class). If the devil is in the details then lantern slides are a devil’s dream. Shall we maintain an exclusively digital archive for archaeological projects? I hope not.
Moreover, the management and long-term viability of digital materials is a different matter altogether. Digital media will not, at least on the basis of current technology, survive by accident in the way a photo album or a box of glass slides will (refer to the digital dark ages). Dead media, examples of which include Peek-a-Boo index cards, paper tape, floppy disks, zip-disks, CD-ROMS, are a major concern for anyone concerned with the long-term viability of digital materials. As Michael Shanks, has emphasized, information is a verb (2003, see link http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/weblog/?m=20030606). As such, digital media will require consistent management, curation, care and iteration, even translation into more ‘stable’ (read ‘supported’) media forms. Connected to this are questions of archive, information design, metadata standards, and much more. However, all this brings me back to memory practices.
Memory practices in archaeology are distributed and dislocated (on memory practices more generally see Bowker 2005). They play across various lines whether personal and professional or archival and pedagogical. Often, archaeological matters of concern may be found in private albums, in abandoned, forgotten boxes of old slides in a basement. Such media may play a role in tracking the transformations of archaeological sites, in recirculating mundane engagements of people with well-known excavations in the Valley of the Kings or lesser-known ruins in the Greek countryside. New engagements may be facilitated through the translation of analog into dynamic digital interfaces. Both Egypt 1923 and the lantern slide project (through a combination of high resolution scans and basic digital manipulation) manifest details which were otherwise not apparent in a black and white photograph or a lantern slide. Information sieves, these two digs allow us to gain a certain intimacy with the displacement of materials from the tomb of Tutankhamen or to read the label on the door of the Potter household. All that is left is for us to redirect our browsers and have a look for ourselves.
References
Avikunthak, A. 2001: Rummaging for Pasts: Excavating Sicily, Digging Bombay. Film (http://www.avikunthak.com/Sicily.html).
Bowker, G. 2005: Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Druckery, T. 2006: Foreword. In S. Zielinski, T. Druckrey, and G. Custance 2006: Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, The MIT Press.
Kittler, F. 1999: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. (trans. G. Wintrop-Young and M. Wutz) Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Shanks, M. 2003: Information is a verb. (http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/weblog/?m=20030606)
Shanks, M. 2006: Ghosts in the Machine. (http://documents.stanford.edu/MichaelShanks/197)
Tringham, R. (in press). Forgetting and remembering the digital experience and digital data. In D. Boric (ed.) Excavating Memories. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
Witmore, C.L. 2006: Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time. Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World. Journal of Material Culture 11(3), 267-292.
Witmore, C.L. 2007: Landscape, Time, Topology. An Archaeological Account of the Southern Argolid Greece. In D. Hicks, G. Fairclough and L. McAtackney (eds.) Envisioning Landscape: Situations and Standpoints in Archaeology and Heritage. One World Archaeology, 194-225.
Zielinski, S., T. Druckrey, and G. Custance 2006: Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, The MIT Press.