illustrating object biographies
DESCRIPTION
Talk by Stuart Dunn at the PRATT and King's College London's Symposium: "Can Scholarship Show as well as Tell"TRANSCRIPT
The notion of biography is one that leads us to think comparatively about the accumulation of meaning in objects and the changing effects these have on people and events. This central thread of comparison however makes the variety od relationships between people and things in different cultural contexts even more apparent.
Gosden C. and Y. Marshall. 1999
Object biographies
Image source: http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/rpr/index.php/objectbiographies/
4
Chaîne opératoire
Chaîne opératoire André Leroi-Gourhan, 2006
6
• ‘Life history’ approach
• Biographical approach
7
• Static objects (e.g. monuments, buildings)
•Moveable objects (e.g. artefacts)
Cretan
Late Minoan
Late Minoan IB
Marine Style
Octopus
Date – more ambiguousLBA – ca. 1500-1450 BC
Pilgrim flask
Repair history
Palaikastro
9
Iconic images…
10
11
12
Image source: Frank Anderson, https://www.flickr.com
13
Image source: www.heraclitanfire.net
“The Sacred Made Real”
“Digital repatriation”
Image source: http://www.mhm.ucl.ac.uk/mhm-research/western-solomon-islands-war-canoe.php
15
Image source: http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/LX/ElginMarbles.html
The Parthenon
16
The Parthenon
17
The Parthenon
18
Image source: W. St Clair, ‘Lord Elgin and the Marbles’, 1998
19
Image source: W. St Clair, ‘Lord Elgin and the Marbles’, 1998
Images = objects = connections
21
Biography of a bridgehead
23
28
Some conclusionsObject biography can allow us to think in greater depth about objects…
…BUT they implicitly enforce textual narrative structures…
..SO imagery is essential…
…BUT ONLY IF IT IS PUBLISHED DIGITALLY!