The Banana Peel Project

In my (ongoing) attempt to stay awake tonight long enough to catch the lunar eclipse, I noticed that today’s Seed includes a really fun discussion between contemporary artist Lynn Hershman Leeson and cultural archaeologist/modern historian/really smart guy Michael Shanks, in which the two discuss the concept of presence–experiential, spatial, temporal–in terms of history, art, and digital technology.  I had the great pleasure of speaking with (well, mostly listening to) Michael a lot through Stanford’s Metamedia Lab last year, and it’s really great to see work like his and Lynn’s covered in such a popular online journal.

From Seed:

MS: As an archaeologist, I’m interested in what comes after the event, as it were. What you do with the remains of the past, to somehow try to get back to where they originated.

LH: I don’t know that you can ever get back to that point, but you can go forward, using them as context for the future. The trail and the remains may be dormant, but they exist, waiting to be revived or resurrected into something else.

(…)

MS: How we document the past connects, obviously, with all sorts of technologies and instruments now. Instrumentalities relating to information, information flow and organization. The whole field of documenting ourselves is changing as our tools change.