2022
PhD Dissertation: “Cult and Copper: Intra-Actions from the Bronze Age to A-Life”
Abstract: Some media archaeologist look to the Victorian Era as the starting point for the Digital Age because the nineteen century telegraph laid the conceptual groundwork for the internet and solved electrification. However, Victorian innovations relied on the conductivity of copper, and the Bronze Age is when humans first mastered wide-scale copper production. In the Bronze Age Levant, two closely related love/sexuality goddesses were associated with this production: Hathor (from Egypt) and Astarte (from Canaan). Thus this research project positions the Bronze Age period as the early dawn of the Digital Era, and it mytho-poetically re-casts these feminine deities as “proto-cybergoddesses” because of their role, as per ancient belief systems, in digital media technology history. This exploration of copper as an agential actor in the history of networked information systems (telegraph, telephone, internet) relies on methodologies from media archaeology, elemental media, posthumanism, agential realism, and archaeology.
This story then serves as a case study for a Virtual Reality cyber-archaeology game. Cyber-archaeology trends encourage the creation of multi-sensory projects that leverage the affordances of multi-media and strive to create embodied experiences. Few projects dare, however, to speculate about intangible heritage. As an exception, this game is the result of textual research in archaeology, cyber-archaeology, and human computer interaction; international archaeology museum research; documentary field work at archaeology sites in Israel and Cyprus; interviews with archaeologists and curators; collaborative design ideation using improvisational theater techniques; and a collaboration with Serious Games engineering graduate students to realize a playable prototype. In “Cult and Copper,” players use their own breath to control a smelting fire and ensure a successful copper smelt. Early smelting methods, which employed blowpipes to heat smelting furnaces, required deep and sustained breathing techniques. Thus this cyber-archaeology game probes, what if altered states manipulated by breath were one of the reasons shamanism and smelting were linked? The game facilitates an experiential awareness of smelting’s physiological effects via breath, encourages players to ask questions about intangible heritage aspects of copper smelting, and motivates further scholarly investigation.
See my Keynote Presentation, about my dissertation research, at the UC Santa Cruz Digital Scholarship Symposium, May 2022 (https://vimeo.com/734234841)
2021
“Cult and Copper: A VR Game Exploring the Intangible Heritage of Copper Smelting“
for Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology, Springer Press
Abstract: Cyber-archaeology trends encourage the creation of multi-sensory projects that leverage the affordances of multi-media and strive to create embodied experiences. Few projects dare, however, to speculate about intangible heritage. Thus this Media Studies paper describes the historical and design research, collaborative ideation, and collaborative prototyping processes used for creating “Cult and Copper” in order to encourage and inform similar cyber-archaelogy projects. A posthumanist, intra-active, Virtual Reality game, “Cult and Copper” suggests a relationship between Bronze Age copper smelting techniques and shamanism. Smelters seem to have held shaman status in the ancient Near East. Early smelting methods, which employed blowpipes to heat smelting furnaces, used deep and sustained breathing techniques. Today breathwork methods, such as those used in pranayama yoga, are associated with achieving altered states of consciousness. Hence this cyber-archaeology game probes, what if altered states manipulated by breath were one of the reasons shamanism and smelting were linked? In “Cult and Copper,” players use their own breath, via a breath interface, to control a smelting fire. The game objectives are to both achieve a meditative state and to ensure a successful copper smelt such that copper is “born” of the furnace. The immersive game’s unique interface design facilitates an experiential awareness of the physiological effects of deep, sustained breathing. The game design overall encourages players to ask questions about intangible heritage aspects of copper smelting and motivates further scholarly investigation.
2020
Dissertation Colloquium: “Cult and Copper: Intra-Actions from the Bronze Age to A-Life”
2018
“Mapping Hathor Through Canaan“
(Presented at “Digital Humanities, Egyptology & Heritage Preservation: A Comparative Perspective” at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, UC Berkeley; earlier draft presented at University of Bath, England’s VR/AR/MR interdisciplinary research group.)
I am interested in spatial storytelling via immersive multi-sensory experiences that bring history alive. I am also interested in how sensory archaeology can inform such storytelling. My current research towards these goals focuses on story-mapping the Egyptian goddess Hathor through Canaan. This mapping is centered in Timna Park, Israel. Timna is a site where ancient Egyptians under five pharaohs, starting with Seti I about 3200 years ago, mined copper and worshipped the goddess Hathor. Hathor was typically known as a goddess of sound, sensuality, sexuality, fertility, motherhood, and celebration; but the miners also sought her protection as the “Goddess of the Mountain.” Related to this moniker, Hathor was deemed a goddess of copper, malachite and turquoise. Archaeological stories, not least of all those centered around mining, take place in landscapes and establish an embodied sense of place. Thus through stories of Hathor worship I create a feminist methodology of socially aware, fluid, ground-based tales via sound, space and the body. I offer this story-mapping of social practice as an alternative to the convention of 2D, static, aerial mapping which is limited to a remote visuality and stakes its ideological roots in militarism and colonialism.
“In Search of Citizen Archaeology: Mapping the #NEWPALMYRA Project” [http://www.newpalmyra.org/]
Using the #NEWPALMYRA project as a case study, this paper explores ways in which crowdsourcing, online 3D modeling, and 3D printing of artifacts can be examined as forms of conceptual mapping, and how these modes of mapping relate to global citizenship. The #NEWPALMYRA project grew as a response to the tragedies executed against Palmyra by ISIL. Working with tech consultants in the United Arab Emirates, San Francisco, and the MIT Media Lab, #NEWPALMYRA is a crowdsourced, open-sourced, internationally collaborative project “dedicated to the capture, preservation, sharing, and creative reuse of data about Palmyra.” The project includes an online data repository whereby citizen archaeologists and cultural heritage enthusiasts upload their photos to the #NEWPALMYRA website, similarly to Project Mosul, then volunteers code the 2D images into 3D models. The models are released to the public domain under a creative commons license, and available for artists, teachers, researchers and others to reference, download and 3D print.
“Queering Binaries in “The Yacoubian Building”” (directed by Marwan Hamed, 2006)
“The Yacoubian Building” achieves its gradual tangling of binaries through the allegorical use of architecture and design, indoor and outdoor soundscapes, and poetics of lighting. Reading the film through such a lens, interpreting Hamed’s characterization of gay male relationships, specifically, becomes more challenging. At first read these relationships, rather than being radically “queered,” actually conform in some ways to established conventions within Egyptian cinema as outlined by Samar Habib. However, through the use of sound does the director perhaps go beyond Egyptian cinematic tradition to establish more complex social statements?
2012
“Sleuthing Clues About a Roman Mosaic Starring Ten Sporty Women“
In the Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily, a small chamber is decorated with a fourth- century c.e. floor mosaic depicting ten sporty female figures. It is casually termed “The Bikini Girls Mosaic” because the women all wear bikinis. Since depictions of female athletes in antiquity are rare, this piece inspired me, as a New Media artist and as a Boston-qualifying marathon runner, to create a contemporary homage to these ancient women, whether they were actual documented people or imagined figures. I did this reserach paper in preparation for creating simple 2D animations from the mosaic, and site-specifically geo-locating them using augmented reality.
In order to conceptualize my contemporary piece, I needed to engage in a dialogue across space and time with the ancient artist who created the mosaic. I was striving to hear what he (presumably, given the artist’s culture) was trying to say through the piece so that I could position myself to respond. Would I be debuting the artist’s message to a new, contemporary audience, or would I be offering a critical rebuttal from my own time period? In a sense, I was playing a volley-game with the original artist; but would that game be cooperative or competitive?
Thus, in researching this mosaic, I set out to interpret how the artist intended the ancient viewer to interpret it. Were these women athletes to be taken seriously, or was this image some sort of parody? Further, who can we determine that ancient viewer to be? Was this piece intended for guests of the villa or for residents? Was it in a location that only women would access, was it for general viewing, or was it perhaps even an ancient Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition objectifying the “bikini girls” for men? If the intended audience was women, was the purpose of the image to empower and encourage their fitness, to commemorate an event, to simply to serve as decoration, or something else?
2005
“Nonlinear Narrative and the Spatiality of Storytelling: An Artist Considers Cutural Heritage Visualization as Inspiration”
(also online at: http://www.pelefire.com/luxor_qurna_diaries)
The aims of cultural heritage teams and the aims of artists differ. The former seeks to offer creative models of what the past may have been like based on the material record; i.e., they are engaged in scholarship that seeks to be as “objective” as possible given available evidence. The artist may be inspired by history, but has license to be as subjective as he or she wants to be; such is the nature of art. Heritage teams may be motivated foremost my a quest for knowledge, whereas artists may be more motivated by emotional response. However, both can learn from one another to meet their different, but overlapping, goals.
2004
“Birds of a Feather: Gender Relations in The Song of Songs“
I hate gender stereotypes. I hate essentialist thinking about men and women, or “feminine” and “masculine.” I hate how people (including advertisers) try to box me in and make assumptions about what I think, what I like, how I should behave, what I am or am not good at based on these stereotypes. Looking at sources from different time periods and different cultures helps to demonstrate that gender is largely socialized rather than biologically predetermined, how gender is socialized reflects the values of a culture, and much of what we call “traditional” gender roles is only Victorianism. Sometimes ancient texts seem more “progressive” than the modern day. In some ways, The Song of Songs is one of those texts.
“Cyberfeminism, Third World Women and the Greening of the Computer Industry“
This paper was inspired by a collection of documentary photographs by Danwen Xing which I saw at the Whitney Museum of Art. I knew that e-waste was becoming an issue, but I did not realize the extent of this environmental and public health challenge. Upon researching it further, I found out how women are affected by the cradle-to-grave process of electronics manufacturing. I realized that cyberfeminism, while a fun and empowering addition to feminist discourse, had a big elitist blind spot: the health and safety of our sisters, mostly in the Third World, who make our toys and tools, then pick through the decaying corpses of them to get scrap metals to sell so they can feed their kids. (Note: Awareness of this situation has grown since writing this paper, and some laws and policies have been duly updated. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition is a good place to start investigating current policies.)
“Embodiment in the Work of Mona Hatoum“
Mona Hatoum is a Palestinian artist born in Lebanon and living in exile in London. For her, the most important element of her art is its relationship to the body. When Hatoum emigrated from the Middle East to England, she immediately felt a sense of displacement when she perceived a mind/body disjunct that contradicted her own cultural experience.
2002
“Project Proposal: Representations of Isis and Nepthys in 3D Animation“
This essay contemplates considerations of representation and interpretation for one element of a cultural heritage project.