The power of making – or what it means to do archaeology through creative experimentation with media

Poster by Ian Kirkpatrick

(Note that this post was produced for the Day of Archaeology & has been re-blogged here.)

I’m oodles of days overdue in contributing to the annual Day of Archaeology (11 July 2014). The delay relates in part to what I’ll discuss below – The Heritage Jam – and in part to the fact that I’m simultaneously prepping to leave for fieldwork at Çatalhöyük on Sunday, finishing multiple articles and reports, and preparing for the adventure that will be the next five months of my life, wherein I’ll be abroad for my sabbatical (more on that another time!). But being late in writing this post has given me a bit of time to reflect—and most importantly, to collate reports from others—on the event that consumed my Day of Archaeology, not to mention all of the days leading up to it, and all of the days immediately after.

On 11 July 2014, supported by the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, and the Centre for Digital Heritage, we hosted the first ever international Heritage Jam. The Jam was a variation on the jamming sessions common in the gaming industry, where adhoc groups congregate for intensive periods of time to produce game prototypes. But instead of games, we were keen to put a spotlight on the many different media that comprise the portfolio of heritage interpretation – from illustration and art to moving-imagery and animation to photography and design to sound and tactile interventions. And instead of live in-person sessions only, we were keen to open up participation to both remote and local registrants, weaving together the online and offline worlds.

Flo Laino and Julie Rugg discuss the York cemetery, gathering resources for the Heritage Jam

The Heritage Jam ultimately coalesced into a multi-part project, all of which is documented on our website, blog, Twitter and Facebook pages. The goal was for individuals or groups to create some kind of visual output (whose process of creation was also documented in a paradata paper) for upload to our online gallery and for physical display at the University of York. The entries were judged on a series of assessment criteria, and had to attend, in some fashion, to the theme of burial (literal or metaphorical, of humans or non-humans). For in-person contributors, we decided to focus the Jam Day efforts on a particular case study site—the York Cemetery—which was necessary to provide some focus to what was an otherwise vague directive (i.e., “work with an assigned group to make new interpretative materials”).

And our team created a series of multi-media resources to support understanding of that site, including videos, photos and compilations of archival records.

By my reckoning, the day was a success, attested to not only by the phenomenal outputs submitted by an incredible range of contributors, but also by the feedback we’ve received from those involved and those who’ve viewed the gallery, some of whom have documented the constructiveness of the approach & its outputs on their personal blogs & Day of Archaeology posts (see links below). Coupled with a specific social media use/evaluation plan that we’ve designed for the Jam, we’re analysing experiences and engagement with the project for a larger report that we’ll file at the end of the month. But the superficial numbers (which will soon be blended with qualitative data to provide a rich, contextualised understanding of participation) indicate that we had 92 registrants from most continents of the world, 17 official entries submitted by 37 contributors, 249 Twitter followers & 161 tweets, and 474 Facebook followers from more than 40 countries, speaking more than 30 languages, with a total reach of posts to over 6600 people. Given that we only launched the project in May, we’re pleased with the visibility it’s received—but more so with the quality of the entries, which are truly fantastic.

You only need to browse the entries in the gallery to see the remarkable talent that infuses the tiny proportion of the heritage sector that registered for the Jam. This is important, because there is ample evidence that creative experts working in the heritage sector are undervalued, underpaid, underestimated and often undermined. Part of the intent of the Jam was to expose the depth and breadth of expertise amongst the professional community, and the possibilities that come with actually investing in such expertise. My colleague Anthony has worked to summarise each contribution, and others have gone further, with the brilliant Archaeogaming blog (a forum for exploring video games as they intersect with archaeology) reviewing in detail the winner of the Remote Team Heritage Jam category – Tara Copplestone and Luke Botham’s Buried: An Ergodic Literature Game. Buried (created with the open-source, nonlinear, interactive storytelling tool Twine) is ingenious, thoughtful, fun and sensitive, and I encourage everyone to give it a try. As Archaeogaming’s Andrew Reinhard writes, “Buried is both a game and not a game. It is a playable book, and one with exceptional replay value. Archaeologists and archaeology are both portrayed realistically, and at the same time are neither boring nor sterile, proof that archaeology can stand on its own without resorting to gimmicks or stereotypes…Buried is playful, but also provides plenty to discuss regarding what is a game, and how our personal experiences are brought to bear on choices made within this kind of media, and on this story specifically.”

Equally astounding is the winning entry for the In-Person Group Heritage Jam category: Stuart Eve, Kerrie Hoffman, Colleen Morgan, Alexis Pantos and Sam Kinchin-Smith’s Voices Recognition. As Morgan summarises it on her and Eve’s joint Day of Archaeology post about the work, it was an effort “to create a cacophony in a cemetery — geolocated stories emanating from graves that would increase in intensity with the density of burials in different areas.” In true collaborative fashion, it drew upon previous experimental efforts by the great Shawn Graham in partnership with Eve, which Graham describes in evocative fashion: “I want to develop an app that makes it difficult to move through…historically ‘thick’ places…with a lot of noise when you are in a place that is historically dense with information. I want to ‘visualize’ history, but not bother with the usual ‘augmented reality’ malarky where we hold up a screen in front of our face. I want to hear the thickness, the discords, of history. I want to be arrested by the noise, and to stop still in my tracks, be forced to take my headphones off, and to really pay attention to my surroundings.”

This is exactly what Voices Recognition achieves in its prototype form, put together after a 30 minute trip to the York Cemetery and about 10 hours of intensive group work in a classroom at the university.

I have to admit that when the group presented their output at the end of the day, I was truly awestruck, so much so that it rendered me quite emotional. For it was a glimpse into what great things can be accomplished when you’re able to nurture the right context: an incredible idea (tested out previously with Graham) comes together with an incredible team of people (some of whom were strangers to one another), all converging here into something with a real and profound power to resonate. As I said to Morgan after the event, it was inspirational – and it really was; it made you want to learn how to do such work; it made you want to use the app; it made you want to join their team, and create with them, and be energised and motivated by their ideas, and to experience the cemetery through this lens that they invented right there, in the moment, on the Day of Archaeology.

These entries are just two of 17 that deserve your attention and perusal, so please browse through the gallery, and add your comments to the site or to our Twitter or Facebook feeds. There are contributions from around the world, articulated via a plethora of media, submitted by both new and established practitioners.

Touring the York Cemetery for the Heritage Jam. Photo by Colleen Morgan

I won’t pretend that all the comments we got about the Jam were positive (although the vast majority were), nor that there’s no room for improvement. It was a massive amount of work; it depended on a team of 11 organisers; it required openness to creating things quickly, which means making mistakes and wrestling with practicalities and exposing one’s process, and hence one’s potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses; it demanded doing just as must as intellectualising, which can be problematic given how theoretical much extant ‘archaeological representation’ discourse is; and the in-person event hinged upon teamwork, which as any educator will tell you, can go horribly wrong—but, in the best cases, can equally blow you away in admiration.

In our effort to provide some definition to the exercise of heritage jamming, we did consciously choose to focus on a particular site – the York Cemetery – and this caused some concern around why we were privileging that environment. But archaeology has these tangible dimensions to it, and as much as we wanted to leave the Jam brief entirely open, we also wanted to create a project that knitted the material and the immaterial, the online and the offline, the tangible and the intangible, the process of abstract thinking with the real-world, concrete act of making.

To have eliminated the cemetery would have returned the event to the intellectual exercise that the subject of ‘visualisation in archaeology’ has long been. Moreover, to have deprived Jammers of the opportunity to visit the cemetery would have meant depriving them of a series of experiences—from the reflectivity that’s encouraged through walking, to the camaraderie and knowledge that are built through shared embodied engagements with a physical landscape. In her blog post about the Jam, Holly Wright of the Archaeology Data Service, speaks about of the nature of the cemetery, a breathtaking and deeply reverberating space which is barely known in the York community (despite the fact that it houses the history of much of that community). There is value cultivated for heritage spaces through both our analogue and digital—and our physical and intellectual—engagements with them. The cemetery provided us with a site to experiment with the weaving together of it all.

I’m proud of what we achieved through the Heritage Jam and I would encourage others to consider this format for their own work, particularly if you’re directing the outputs into larger, targeted, useable resources. The fleeting composition of the Jam belies a venture with a longevity to it that extends beyond the Day of Archaeology, so I hope you’ll keep your eyes on the project to see how it develops from here.

Heritage Jamming at the University of York. Photo by Colleen Morgan, http://www.heritagejam.org

The Heritage Jam – and complicating the ‘public’ in ‘public engagement’

We’ve kicked off a new project here at York – The Heritage Jam – which has been kindly sponsored by our Department of Archaeology, with support from the Centre for Digital Heritage. The project aims to inspire innovation in heritage presentation and interpretation by bringing interested people (artists, designers, programmers, curators, illustrators, photographers, game developers, other creative producers, archaeologists, conservators, heritage professionals, educators, and anyone else) together in creative collaboration, working towards the production of new and different visual outputs. The concept is derived from ‘jamming’ events commonly held in the games industry, where ad-hoc groups meet for short, intensive periods of time to produce prototypes. Here, we’re looking to do the same with the range of media enrolled in the heritage industry, recognising that how the past is conceptualised – graphically, acoustically, haptically, olfactorily, vocally, and in other performative capacities – has a significant impact upon people’s understanding of themselves and of the world around them. It plays a role in how we value and care for our environment, the importance we assign to that environment, and how we build upon it for the future. Such representation not only affects public perception, but deeply shapes our research agendas, policy-making, protection and conservation programmes. To ignore it is to ignore heritage itself.

You can read more about the goals, vision and rules of the Jam on our webpages, as well as through Twitter and Facebook. And you can join in either remotely or in person via registering here.

The Jam has been in gestation for multiple years, the brainchild of my fantastic colleague Dr Anthony Masinton. When I arrived at York in 2012, Anthony mentioned the concept to me – I was immediately excited by it – and from there we began to draft a small-scale funding application to a major grant-giving body to bring the idea to light.

In its preliminary incarnation, however, that funding application was not at all successful. Its initial rejection was very hard for me to wrap my brain around because the project is an inexpensive one with a major potential return on investment. That return comes on multiple levels – from supporting creativity, cooperation, and development within the archaeology & heritage sectors themselves; to facilitating new ways for different audiences to interact with – and appreciate – these sectors. The casual dismissal that the project originally received made me despair, because if those people who actually give the discipline its visibility aren’t underwritten, the state of our field of practice overall seems quite ill-fated.

We had two sentences of feedback in our rejection letter (which, to be fair, is two sentences more than many people receive!). This feedback suggested that, firstly, our concept possibly had no relevance to anyone other than academics and professionals. And, secondly, that it was unclear how we’d actively engage the “wider public”.

I have to say that it was deeply saddening, on multiple levels, to read such criticisms. I have mulled them over for almost a year now, partly in conversation with colleagues of mine (thanks especially to the always stimulating Pat Hadley), and partly as a result of the funding that we eventually did achieve from York which has allowed us to launch the project and, therein, begin to consider whether it resonates with anyone at all.

I’m optimistic about the fact that, after a fairly soft debut less that two weeks ago, using only Twitter for the first 7 days to advertise the project, we’ve had a significant amount of interest in the Jam. Such interest has brought to the fore my concerns around the criticisms we received in our initial letter of funding rejection last year, because it was premised on a rhetoric that I consider to be essentialising and profoundly problematic. The notion that there is some singular “wider public” floating around in the world which we can engage if only we devise the most all-encompassing projects possible is now a pervasive one. And yet this conviction is frighteningly homogenising and deserving of deconstruction. It renders individuals into the meaningless ‘faceless blobs’ that Tringham (1991) so well interrogated nearly 25 years ago. It ignores effectively all of anthropological theory and practice which testify to the complexities within and between communities, and which have long complicated the idea of a uniform ‘public’. It also ignores a growing body of critique of the ideology that has come to consume public engagement, wherein – thinking through CCN+ – any sense of nuanced method and practice behind such engagement is eclipsed and often collapsed into little more than counting instances of delivery. As CCN+ have put it (in reflecting on the outcomes of a workshop on the discourses of public engagement), there is now a real “need to carefully identify communities not in relation to some sort of deficit (an assumption usually embedded in the rhetoric of public engagement) but in terms of [being] already connected and perhaps even meaningfully organized.”

My position is this: academics and professionals are, indeed, specific forms of public—they do heritage and they also participate in heritage; they have families and friends and networks of contacts outside their speciality areas who engage with heritage (or who may do so owing to such connections); they use multiple forms of media to advertise and comment on their practice; they are important epicentres of productivity for heritage because they are literally creative of it. In the case of the Heritage Jam, we’re seeking to bring together the very individuals who make it possible for many people in the world to see, experience and develop critical senses of awareness of heritage. They are by no means the only generators of visions/ideas about the past, but they are significant players in its various tellings, and as such, they are a public that deserves to be invested in.

More importantly, focusing on creative production is a worthwhile pursuit, because it necessarily draws together different publics—different specialists and non-specialists who make things or who circulate and consume those things. Visualisation and media (whether visual or not) are the intermediaries between many audiences; they are centrepoints, convergence points, in thinking, sensing, acting. Those who make these media are at the heart of such activity. They push ideas and knowledge out into the so-called “wider public” – their outputs are profoundly influential, be they games, film, exhibitions, TV, art, etc. So if we don’t invest in them and their creativity, we all suffer—our larger apprehensions of the world become more constrained; our recognition of possibilities and opportunities for change and experiment are curtailed; our sense of ourselves is limited. Without media and their many multidisciplinary creative producers, we’re left—literally—seeing and experiencing the same. And this is the flaw, as I see it, in much engagement work today: it reduces everyone to the same featureless mass and, in so doing, works at cross-purposes with the actual ethos of public engagement, wherein individuality and concern for the rights and capacities of every person are prioritised and respected.

We’re aiming to be specific in our engagement efforts with the Heritage Jam, and we’re setting in place short and long term evaluation efforts that will allow us to say something qualitatively meaningful about its efficacy on individual participants. We have a focused social media plan that we’ll post to our webpages in the upcoming weeks; and we’re monitoring our progress and will be presenting on it in the autumn, so others can pop along (date to be announced) to hear of our successes and struggles.

The Heritage Jam depends on an incredible network of people who are all now based here in York with me. They make my job phenomenally interesting; there’s honestly never a boring or uninspiring moment when we’re all together; and I feel truly lucky to be a part of such a galvanising and creative community. Massive credit, then, goes to Flo Laino, Gareth Beale, Colleen Morgan, Nicole Beale, Ian Kirkpatrick, Pat Gibbs, Tom Smith, Julie Rugg, and Neil Gevaux.

And thanks so much to the 50+ people who have already registered for the Jam: thanks for believing in the project, and for appreciating that public engagement can (and must, I think) be nuanced, targeted and cognisant of specific interested audiences that play centrifugal roles in our various understandings of heritage.

As we’ve noted on our website, The Heritage Jam believes that giving greater voice and recognition to creative practitioners is vital to supporting innovation, culture-building, and the sustenance of heritage and the historic environment overall. As we see it, it is a unique opportunity to have fun, while appreciating and reflecting on the power of craft skills. Most importantly, it is a chance to draw inspiration from the past to shape the future.

Please join us.

PS. Also keep your eyes on the Public Archaeology project which, as I understand it, has a similar spirit: “Public engagement and impacts will be defined by individual participants, but it is central to the project that meaningful public engagement can happen right down to the level of one-to-one conversations.” Some of my favourite people are involved, and it’s set, I believe, to make a major difference in how we value—and acknowledge the uniqueness of—different people, communities, audiences.

Tringham, R.E., 1991. Households with faces: the challenge of gender in prehistoric architectural remains, in Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory, eds. J.M. Gero & M. Conkey. Oxford: Blackwell, 93–131.

 

Taking time to think

Still frame from a video interview with K. Killackey – one of several artists working at the site of Çatalhöyük – used to inform “Crafting knowledge with (digital) visual media in archaeology”

I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. I’ve been thinking about how I think, and the time I need to think, and the battle I have in safeguarding that time.

This issue has been on my mind for ages–it intersects with my research interests and features heavily (although relatively implicitly) in some of the publications and conference papers on which I’ve been working recently. What concerns me is that to create, to play, to invent, experiment, make, write, and do, takes time. Whether you’re a researcher like me, or a creative producer like those with whom I work and study, you need time to craft and hone your art. Yet time is so elusive. It is occupied by so many niggling and pernicious demands. It is always slipping away, and always disturbed by a perpetual series of tasks that leave you frazzled and longing for even just a couple of unbroken hours to think.

In my quest to understand the relation between time and creativity, and time and productivity, I’ve read a lot of disturbing things. This began when I was in Rochester in September and a colleague began to reflect on the connection between time and experimentation (he’s blogged about it here), which in some (often privileged) cases leads to innovation, and in others, harassment and deep, debilitating oppression. Then I was given a copy of Jonathan Crary’s new book 24/7. (I’m a big fan of Crary’s visual culture volumes, Techniques of the Observer, and Suspensions of Perception.) While I found 24/7 to lack some nuance and come across as overly deterministic in parts, Crary makes a passionate and worrisome argument about the “systemic colonization of individual experience”(52) by an increasingly unremitting pace that is destroying everyday life, and is now threatening to eliminate one of the only remaining times of respite: sleep. Crary talks about the consequent reduction of individuals into “a site of non-stop scrutiny and regulation”(32), and goes on to suggest that “24/7 denotes the wreckage of the day as much as it concerns the extinguishing of darkness and obscurity…24/7 is part of an immense incapacitation of visual experience…24/7 disables vision through processes of homogenization, redundancy, and acceleration”(33).

After reading Crary, everywhere I turned I saw a bleak tale about time. Philip Nel published a piece in Inside Higher Ed where he dissects the poisonous logic and structural systems that lead academics (but, really, people in general) to work so much. Then a friend referred me to Claire Shaw and Lucy Ward’s Guardian piece on the rise of mental illness in academia, which is here partly related to poor work-life balance. Then another friend posted a link to an article by Konstantin Kakaes in Slate about the “absurdist culmination” of academic evaluation and publishing expectations that both lead people to rush and over-produce written work, and allow nonsense articles to survive peer review.

The subject of time came to a head for me recently when one of my colleagues asked me what I actually do as a researcher. The question was well-meaning, but it made me sad to think that what inspires and motivates me intellectually—and what drew me into academia in the first instance—is perhaps invisible to everyone around me. It’s easy to see how this could happen. I direct 5 different undergrad and Master’s-level university courses, and instruct on 2 others, and these all have a necessarily general orientation, catering to those who tend to be new to the topics of museums, audiences, heritage practice, media, visualisation and quantitative and qualitative research methods. This means that I often have to instruct at a level of abstraction that only scratches at the surface of the meaty and provocative ideas that underlie the larger thematic areas. While this seems to be productive for students—who then find a thread that interests them and push off to explore its epistemic depths—sometimes it leaves me feeling lost and distanced from my own research because I don’t have the time to actually get into it.

My favourite class of the year, though, is the one that reminds me of what I’m passionate about. It’s part of my colleague’s Master’s course Analysis & Visualisation, and I have two hours to teach the students about the history and future of realism, photorealism and hyper-realism in archaeology. In what’s been a particularly difficult term for me with regards to teaching workload and lack of time, that two hours that I had a couple of weeks ago with these Master’s students proved an incredible reprieve for me. I could teach again about the specificities of visualisation in archaeology that have been my concern for the past 10+ years. And it also gave me the final propulsion to complete an article that I’ve been having to piece together in small chunks of time carved out over the last six months.

That article is an important one for me, not only because it’s for a forthcoming volume edited by the inimitable Robert Chapman and Alison Wylie, but because it brings together a series of theoretical tensions around visual practice (especially digital visual practice) that I’ve been trying to work out for a while now. What’s critical is that it’s impossible to sort through those tensions without time—without committing yourself to making time for thinking, and without the support and respect of others who help to protect this time for you.

The abstract of my paper is below. I’m interested in the devaluing of visual skill in archaeology, and the implication of visual practitioners themselves in this devaluing. Digital visualisation, for example, is often disparaged as being less soulful, less skilled and purportedly less meaningful than hand-drawn imaging in archaeology. But here I demonstrate the continuities between digital and hand-based crafts(wo)manship, and link this to the very long (at least half-millennium-long) history that visual producers have in pushing forward paradigm change across disciplines. I make the argument that visual production (whether digital or not) has deep consequences for the continued development and basic sustenance of archaeology. And to be ignorant of these consequences, I think, is to set the discipline up for obsolescence.

This chapter grows out of a larger project linked to my work at Çatalhöyük where I’ve been studying the nature of reflexivity as it’s played out among the site’s visual practitioners since the Mellaart era, but especially over the past 20 years. I gave a talk about these ideas at the Institute for Archaeologists conference last April 2013 (titled: Debating the legacy of postprocessualism: Visual reflexivity at Çatalhöyük, Turkey). There, I discussed the deleterious effects (which are somewhat ironic, given the 25-year-long excavation permit) of the lack of time and relentless, constant demands upon practitioners, and I ended with a proposal for a “slow archaeology movement” that would value time, rumination and the privileging and creation of spaces and methods to think. This built off of some conversations I’d had with colleagues at both Southampton and York about such a ‘slow archaeology’, and I’ve been keen then to see that the excellent Bill Caraher has separately begun to articulate some possible dimensions of such practice on his blog (here and here).

The topic of time and making time is one that I’ll come back to in the future, but I’ll end by saying that one of the most exciting things that’s happened recently is the institution of a new ‘Heritage & Play’ group here at York, which has been spearheaded by Colleen Morgan. As Colleen described it in our inaugural email about the initiative, the aim is “to creatively experiment with cultural heritage and expression. Each meeting is loosely structured around a topic, theory, or making session, but focuses on Play as a productive means to engage with heritage in a new way.”

What I see as at stake here is, to borrow from Crary’s (2013:92) discussion of the film La jetée, the “indispensability of the imagination for collective survival…a mingling of the visionary capacities of both memory and creation.” To put it differently, I think that it’s in these playful moments that the best and most important things come about: friendships, collaborations, ideas and inspirations. They are the breeding ground for intellectual revolution and change. And, as this is what I would argue is one of the principle mandates of the university system, I believe we need to invest some of our work time in actually making these moments possible. Our thinking depends upon it.

Perry, S. (forthcoming) Crafting knowledge with (digital) visual media in archaeology. In Chapman, R. and Wylie, A. (eds.) Material Evidence: Learning from Archaeological Practice. Abingdon: Routledge.

Archaeologists have long drawn on the skill of visual producers (e.g. artists, illustrators, designers, photographers, filmmakers, etc.) to enable and extend their expert practice.  The success of these alliances, however, is a matter for debate, as visualisers have often been consigned to the discipline’s sidelines, their epistemic credibility and relevance challenged even by the visual community itself.  Such tension is apparent with digital graphic producers whose craft skills, contributions to knowledge, and reliance on new technologies are not uncommonly subject to suspicion and misunderstanding.  Moreover, these producers are often unaware of the extant representational scholarship—a predicament that exposes them to critique and to the reproduction of foreseeable errors.  This chapter seeks to challenge the status quo and expose instances where practitioners are truly changing the nature of thinking. It considers digital reconstruction in action, tracing the collaborative knowledge-making process between artist and archaeologist, and by artist-archaeologists.  I aim here to demystify this process, and in so doing, speak both to best practice in the application of visual technologies and theory, and to the epistemic productivity of visualisation in archaeology overall.

Reference:

Crary, J. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso.