Archeology as a discipline has its earliest origins in 15th and 16th century Europe, and is a subfield of anthropology. In the 1960s New Archeology was introduced, a kind of anti-antiquarian archeology based on rigorous scientific analysis, which looks at large-scale patterns rather than individual people, buildings, artifacts etc. Most of the analyzing done on artifacts is done in the context of the assemblage, i.e. assemblage analysis.
A succinct definition of archeology is:
ARCHEOLOGY – The scientific study of the material culture (artifacts) of past human life and activities, in which the goals are to document and explain human culture, understand cultural history, and chronicle cultural evolution.
Because archeologists get an incomplete view of the past, they must fill in the gaps with other kinds of information, educated reasoning and imagination.
For the purpose of this research, I have narrowed the focus from material culture (which includes any and all physical remains) to ephemera only.
EPHEMERA – Written and printed matter published with a short intended lifetime. Common types of ephemera include event-oriented posters, transportation and show tickets, receipts, letters, and postcards.
Two other primary terms that this research looks at are Communication Design and Identity. For this purpose I have defined these terms as such:
COMMUNICATION DESIGN – A sub-discipline of design, which is concerned with how media (print, web, motion, interactive) communicates with people.
IDENTITY – The individual characteristics by which a person, place or thing is recognized or known.
Large-Scale Constructions from Small Precise Components – Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin uses ephemera as an organizing principle in his work, The Arcades Project, in which he creates a cultural history of 19th century Paris, building a biography of the city. He believes one can use individual moments to glean a larger view of the total event, and views history as a passing away, a transience. He proposes that a greater story can be told by what people forget or discard. In The Arcades Project, he states “A central problem of historical materialism that ought to be seen in the end: Must the Marxist understanding of history necessarily be acquired at the expense of the perceptibility of history? Or: in what way is it possible to conjoin a heightened graphicness <Anschaulichkeit> to the realization of the Marxist method? The first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle of montage into history. That is, to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event. And, therefore, to break with vulgar historical naturalism. To grasp the construction of history as such. In the structure of commentary. Refuse of History.”
Ephemera and the Cultural Heritage of Berlin – Alfred Döblin
The idea of using ephemera to investigate the cultural history of Berlin is not new. Alfred Döblin, in his 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz uses ephemera from the city as a method for telling the story. He incorporates brand-specific jingles and slogans from Berlin that capture the essence of its street life. These random phrases appear throughput the novel, and they are used as a way of conveying how much the city and its messages find their way into the minds of its inhabitants. The novel is a free-association story of the Weimar Republic and is told through the voice of ex-convict Franz Biberkopf who is influenced often by the variety of media and messages that circulate around him. He insists that he is an autonomous individual who makes decisions for himself unaffected by society, but in the end he realizes that the city affect his actions and beliefs more than he would like to admit.
Peter Jelavich, professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, describes the “novel is the perfect medium to describe the fact that consciousness is not something stable in the mind, that there’s things going around us every day as we walk down the street or turn on the radio. The novel, with its stream-of-consciousness bleeding between thought, ideology, and media clutter, is the perfect medium in which to explore how little of our mental real estate is un-homesteaded by advertisers and politicians.”
Business Language – Carey Young
Carey Young, an artist in the UK, examines business language and its role in our culture. Maria Lind in her essay All Inside has this to say about Carey Young’s work, “The massive growth in power of the global capitalist system is a development many of us watch and participate in with discomfort and fear. But if art is understood as something, which is intrinsically related to society in all its aspects, and business concerns and economic considerations permeate every corner of our existence today, then you have to take the issues Carey Young is raising very seriously. You could even argue that if art is to do with everyday life and everyday life is ‘businessified’ and increasingly commodified then her work operates right at the core of that situation.” I was inspired by her focus on language, and its relationship and ties to culture. This became a focus for me in my thesis research.
Figure C: Carey Young’s Exhibit titled: Consideration (2004-5). A series of mixed media works. Edition of 500 unique cards signed by the artist and to be signed by the viewer. Donorcard (front and back views).
Visualization of Information – Ben Fry
Ben Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as Computer Science, Statistics, Graphic Design, and Data Visualization as a means for understanding complex data. Fry’s work consists within the realm of Information Visualization. As stated in Fry’s dissertation, “A succinct definition of information visualization is the use of computer-supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data to amplify cognition. Information visualization is concerned with making an abstract set of information visible, usually in circumstances where no metaphor exists in the physical world.”
Figure D: Isometric Blocks, by Ben Fry. These groupings of patterns are sometimes referred to as “haplotype blocks”. The data was discussed in a paper (Daly, et al, 2001) that looked at a section of the genome of ~500 people in search of Crohn’s disease (Rioux, et al, 2001). The data from that paper is also used in the image above.
“The pursuit of qualitative representations is a practical matter, because it will be useless or impossible to consider individual quantities for very large, continuously changing data sets. Impossible because the mind is not capable of handling hundreds of thousands of individual quantities simultaneously. Or useless because only a small amount of the information will actually be useful, and time would be wasted in analyzing the unnecessary parts. Important part is a picture that provides the context that will vie meaning to specific quantitative values.” – Ben Fry
The inspiration I took from Fry’s work was his pursuit of qualitative representations and his focus on looking for the small amount of information that is actually useful. I hoped to create poetic moments as a way to see a city and a community through its advertisements and transactions – its moments that come and go and its language both eclectic and banal.
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