Harun Farockis’s film “War at a Distance” in @MoMAPS1’s #TheaterOfOperations Gulf War exhibit gave me even more to think about the ethics of digital recreations of cultural heritage destroyed in war, eg, #Palmyra: vdb.org/titles/war-dis…
Farocki points out that the guidance technology used for self-driving cars, manufacturing equipment, etc, was developed primarily to guide missiles.
The laser scanning technology that can measure a cultural monument is the technology developed to scan an enemy landscape and lock on to targets.
Farocki also explains that “war in the electronic age presents itself as being an event free of people.”
I’ve been thinking for a while about why it seems so problematic that digital reconstructions of destroyed cultural heritage rarely feature people (this quote is from my piece here: static1.squarespace.com/static/517aa1e…)
Farocki’s work helped me see it together - that the technology of destruction is also the technology of creation - and that both technologies elide the existence of people whose lives don’t interest those who control the technology.
@morehshin’s work has also repeatedly pointed out the connections between destruction and supposedly neutral digital recreation, like her spectacular lecture/performance here: vimeo.com/337394969
Arguing that tales of dragons are evidence that dinosaurs lived in human times - humm. Arguing that anything Herodotus says was literal truth - nope. (Nice buff H-man, there, though.)
“by funding scientific studies on Native American human remains… federal agencies have created incentives for institutions to hold on to ancestors in ways that undermine the goals of NAGPRA…”
It’s not that they didn’t think about consulting tribes - it’s that they thought doing so was a bad idea for their research. Holy moly.
Inscriptions friends... is pecking out a circular letter form instead of carving freehand weird for ca. 530 BCE? (Context in next tweet.)
So, John Marshall buys this stele in fragments from 1902-1913: metmuseum.org/art/collection…. Marshall was offering £10 a letter for further fragments of the inscription, or £500 for the rest of it.
In 1907, here's the part of the inscription he has (left) and two more parts he's offered by a dealer in Athens (right). The new parts have the cautious circles.
The Art Institute of Chicago knows about this photograph from 1970 of its Buddha sculpture embedded in the wall of a shrine in Nepal. It knows Nepal prohibited the export of such antiquities in 1956. And yet it's still working on whether to repatriate it...
The Art Institute currently holds at least four Nepali artifacts for which there are photographs or other evidence of theft - all donated by a single collecting couple, the Alsdorfs, who previously had to return nine other stolen artworks.
Even I didn’t think it was this bad: “Reporters reviewed the [Metropolitan Museum’s] catalog and found at least 1,109 pieces previously owned by people who had been either indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes; 309 of them are on display.” nepalitimes.com/here-now/in-se…
“A look at the museum’s catalogue of more than 250 Nepali and Kashmiri antiquities, for example, found that only three have any origin records explaining how they left the regions.” 😳