The chalk block from Monkton Up Wimborne, Dorset is a remarkable object. The block, measuring 34 cm by 25 cm and with a thickness of 20 cm, is an irregular lump of chalk. Several of the faces of the chalk block are worked with parallel lines and U-shaped grooves; designs typical of the passage tomb art of eastern Ireland. Some of these surfaces have been flaked and erased at some point during the block’s history. The reverse of the block has a large hole drilled into its surface, suggesting the object may have been briefly mounted on a wooden post.

The archaeological context of this block is almost as remarkable as the object itself. Excavated in 1997 by Martin Green, the Monkton Up Wimborne site is unique and comprises a large central pit surrounded by a ring of smaller pits. To one side of this pit is the burial of a Middle Neolithic family: a mother and several children, dating to c.3500 BC. Isotopic analysis of their Mendip hills, Somerset. Close to this burial a shaft 7m deep was dug into the chalk. The shaft is filled with plentiful evidence for mortuary feasting activities, including several bones of cattle and pigs and one piglet, as well as several bone of an adult male.

The chalk block was deposited at the very base of the shaft. It seems likely that the block was carved from the chalk at this depth, briefly mounted on a post, and then fairly rapidly deposited back into the shaft.

Neither the site, nor the chalk block, has a parallel in the British Neolithic. This makes the block an especially intriguing artefact for archaeologists as the discipline continues to be motivated by the scientific imperative to categorize. Working the chalk block is both an act of transformation and assembly: bringing together a group of designs on its surface, and altering it from unworked chalk. It seems likely that this transformative process was ongoing and part of a flow of activities associated with the site. Is the block complete, or simply a moment in a process of transformation? How are we to comprehend the purpose of this unique carved chalk block in the face of its radical otherness? Is this a deeply significant cult object or totem, is it simply debris from constructional activities at the site? How can archaeological recording methods – whether traditional or digital- illuminate its purpose and significance?

_{The Assassination Weapon: a Transmedia Quest for Reality,
J.G.Ballard. Originally staged at the ICA  August 1969.}


Working with students to remake historic art objects, apparatus and events as a research and teaching methodology.
This is a piece of experimental performance work, an experiential piece which tests the current conditions of production in art school and reception in gallery scenarios.
The performance itself involves sound, both live and recorded, a script, and four projectors which throw a set of still and moving image clips onto a central, circular screen. The screen rotates to catch and disrupt the imagery. The audience are arranged as a mandala facing the central screen, with aisles for the projection. Performers wear an ad hoc uniform of altered crash helmets.
A learning play, in the Brechtian model: going over and over a script or a set of instructions produces new configurations and new techniques.

Dr. Michael Doser is research physicist at CERN, working towards measuring for the first time the gravitational interaction between matter and antimatter through the use traditional photochemical emulsion. The AEgIS collaboration carrying out this experiment consists of 16 institutes and universities, and about 60 scientists from a very diverse range of physics expertise, among them atomic physics, nanotechnology, physical chemistry, plasma physics, laser physics, Rydberg atoms, cryogenic electronics, high energy physics, physics of positronium, microwaves and cavities, dilution refrigerators, ion cooling through lasers, ...

In 1891 a Nasrid wooden cupola, carved and painted in the 14th century for one of the Alhambra palaces in Granada, was dismantled from the tower in which it had hung for over 500 years. It was put on a train to Berlin, where it was reconstructed as the ceiling of a German banker’s villa in Charlottenburg. Today it hangs in the Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, as part of a display on the history of Islamic Spain. The project that I bring to the Bilderfahrzeuge group is a biography of this 14th century Alhambra cupola. I am interested not only in the materiality of the object, in the Nasrid context and carpentry techniques of its production, and its later transfer from an Islamic (by then Christian Spanish) palace to bourgeois Berlin, but also in the intellectual and cultural framework in which the movement of the object with all its associated meanings of the Orient, luxury and exoticism, could take place. In what context and with what impact could an individual identify and procure such a ceiling and set it up not once but twice in his different Berlin homes? What were the motivations and repercussions of such a move, both in the intellectual environment of Berlin and in the particular Alhambra palace from which the ceiling had been removed, and where a gaping hole in the ceiling was left to be filled? What did the cupola represent by the 1970s when the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin purchased it? These are some of the questions that I address in my forthcoming biography of the cupola.
This theme of image transfer (Bilderfahrzeuge) is central to my extended research that examines how Spain’s Islamic past has been constructed in visual imagery both within and outside of Spain. In particular, I am concerned with the art and material culture of mudéjar populations in post-Islamic Spain, and the subsequent revival/invention of this Islamicate style in the 19th century. Focusing on the work of Valencian potters and artists in the 14th century, I examine the migration of images and their contexts from Muslim to Christian centres of power in Spain, with a view to questioning the legitimacy of ‚mudejar‘ as a coherent or valid artistic style. I explore the role of rhetoric in understanding these motifs, and the extent to which the concept of a ‚mudéjar‘ style was constructed by historians, artists and architects in the 19th century as a way of understanding Spain’s Islamic past and present.

_{http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/about/people/anna-mcsweeney}

CSM academic staff member Naomi Dines will bring an element of her current research project to the Tate Exchange, setting up a portable, single-camera photogrammetry rig in the Switch House, and using it to create digital 3D models of a range of physical objects from the CSM archives. Naomi has been using the principles of industrial metrology and engineering to solve problems inherent in the photogrammetry process, and to reduce the cost, time and labour involved. Experiments with automated motion control, precise geometric alignment, assistive computer-coded devices and image focus-stacking, have helped to make the process more efficient, accurate, and predictable for the precise capture of challenging objects.

_{www.naomidines.org}

The models and animations of the Old Minster, Winchester were remarkable in 1984–6 for producing the earliest animated tour of a virtual archaeological monument. Thought to be lost, thirty years on the original model files were re(dis)covered buried under layers of now unsupported code and recovered. We describe how the models were initially developed in the 1980s and then subsequently retrieved, restored and re-purposed in 2015 by Paul Reilly, Stephen Todd and Andy Walter. The original project is re-evaluated in the light of contemporary best practice. In modernising the digital Old Minster this virtual model has also been translated into a material one in the form of a 3D-print. This physical instantiation of the model challenges conventional understandings of, and blurs the boundary between, real and virtual heritage. We contend that left unaddressed this lack of clarity is set to radically disrupt current best practice in the discipline.


Dr Paul Reilly is Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Department of Archaeology, University of Southampton. His primary research interest is in the theoretical - specifically ontological - implications of technology to archaeology in the digital age. Currently, his research explores how additive manufacturing technologies might disrupt current practice in archaeological field recording and representation. The Digital Old Minster is an example of the virtual and the physical in collision. The (im)material objects which emerge spawn new genealogical threads to their biographies, and can activate multiple new, and distinct, itineraries, hyper-jumping through the digital into whole new assemblages of being.

After Aby Warburg’s death in 1929 Fritz Saxl, his assistant for many years, took over the direction of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (or the Warburg Haus) in Hamburg that housed an extensive library, reading room, facilities for projection and lectures and photographic resource.  The Nazis came to power in 1933 and Saxl had all of the contents shipped to London and the KBW set up there as the Warburg Institute.  It was dependent upon the generosity of the British Government, especially in providing premises and later the patronage of Sam Courtauld who financed the building it moved into in 1952 and where it is to this day.  The war years were particularly difficult for the Institute.  Its scholars were German and many were Jewish and their work often esoteric and specialized.  Saxl addressed this situation by staging 4 photographic exhibitions during the war years. English Art and the Mediterranean was staged by Fritz Saxl, with Rudolf Wittkover, in 1941 at the Warburg’s then home in the Imperial Institute Buildings in South Kensington. The British government referred to the Warburg’s staff as ‘alien scholars’ and this project demonstrated how they were putting their expertise into service for the British War effort.  The scholarship was not only patriotic but also forged connections in forming a British, European identity -  an essential aspect of the war effort.  Kenneth Clark, the then director of the National Gallery, London enthusiastically supported the Institute and the project, giving an opening address on its first day.  The exhibition was a huge success. There was little to see in war time London, the major collections were stored in Welsh mines for their protection so this exhibition was a visual extravagance during the austerity of the period.  The exhibition used the resources and methodologies of past exhibitions the Warburg had staged in its Hamburg days and is importantly related to Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas in terms of establishing an image driven analysis and narrative.   English Art and the Mediterranean was comprised of around 500 photographs on 86 panels.  In 1948 the panels were used as a paste-up model for a publication entitled British Art and the Mediterranean that was republished in 1968. The photographic material is still in-tact in the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute.  The Annihilation event will interact with the material initially to ascertain the archive’s condition and then to engage with a selection its panels  This process will involve a group of students, teaching staff from CSM, the help of the CSM Study Collection and members of the Bilderfahrzeuge team.  With the latter, different members of the team will interact with different panels, according to their expertise.  Possibly an archaeologist, related to the wider Annihilation project, will interact with a pre-history panel.  The processing of the material is seen as a major step in activating this archive, bringing it into the present, in a context where it now, more than ever, has resonance and value.

The recent body of work AG2, investigates emerging composite imaging technologies and techniques aimed at recording and navigating large complex environments (for example automated and guided stitching applications for mega pixel output).  Iterative approaches to pipeline design are employed to explore the complex relationships between and across image datasets.  These input/output bases procedural workflows are tracked using ‘doped’ source material at capture and downstream. (e.g. omitted / replicated features, insertion of unrelated image data etc.). The images and image sets are aggregated into a series of comparative viewing spaces where the relationships between elements, within and between image groups are interrogable.

Imagine a current running through an electrical circuit.  Circuit overload, wear and tear are some factors that can undercut the current’s circulation.   

Imagine a similar kind of energy current running through your body.  Sensory overload, illness, age and violence can disconnect the body’s energy current.  

In order to connect my body’s disconnect, I place a hydrophone in my mouth, connect it to an amplifier and tap on my chest bone, skull and vertebrae.  My anatomical and physiological bodies absorb the pulses and translate it into subtle vibrations, reconnecting me.  I call this process, body_tapping | body_language.

I also question through body_tapping.  

2016:  humanity sees 63,5 million people displaced through war.  If our shared body_language affirms a shared circuited form, why are we destroying life’s current?