FOUR ARCHAEOLOGICAL ENGAGEMENTS WITH PLACE MEDIATING BODILY EXPERIENCE THROUGH PERIPATETIC VIDEO CHRISTOPHER L. WITMORE Through the exploration of a hybrid space between artist and archaeological production, this article discusses the implications of peripatetic video, a form of located media, as a means of moving beyond the limits of conventional representation. While critical of archaeological dealings with issues of bodily experience and place, the article suggests an alternative is to be found in the work of media artist Janet Cardiff. Building on Cardiff’s art, media are treated as modes of engagement for dealing with the articulation of bodily experience and place. This article works towards a notion of mediation through which qualities of the material world, normally left behind by traditional forms of documentation, are brought forth. To this end, it details the effectiveness of peripatetic video in dealing with material presence and bodily experience at four sites of cultural and archaeological significance in Crete, Greece. [Key words: bodily experience; mediation; modes of engagement; peripatetic video; place] INTRODUCTION In the mid–20th century, E. H. Gombrich in his essay “Art and Scholarship,” set an agenda for scholars by characterizing what he envisioned to be a profitable relationship between the fields of artistic production and the work of the academy. For Gombrich, what counts in the world of art “is the search, the constant probing, the taking of risks in experimentation” (1963:118). He believes that “in this respect scholarship can always profit from the spirit of art to venture into the unknown rather than to apply and repeat what has already been done” (1963:118). Following his argument, scholarship could in turn contribute to art through the application of its critical sensibilities. It could expose the roots of artistic endeavor and enrich its network of meanings to the mutual benefit of art and scholarship: “In clarifying the memory of the past, [scholarship] can pin down and render innocuous those catchwords which buzz around the artist’s ears” (Gombrich 1963:118). Despite the changing character and configuration of scholarly production in anthropology and archaeology, these sentiments continue to be relevant after 50 years. Still, Gombrich maintained a distinction between art and scholarship. He saw these as two disparate fields separated by familiar and hardened boundaries. Taking direction from Gombrich, this article has arisen out of an exploration of a hybrid space between art and scholarship in the context of archaeology.1 With this hybrid space I believe comes a change in the nature of the relationship between art and scholarship. In place of a contrast between two discrete entities, I deal with the blurring of boundaries and the articulation of connections. Further, I want to emphasize that through this hybrid space, sensibilities from art and archaeology have the potential to inform each other in ways that not only broaden our range of expression but also push our practical and theoretical practice in new and exciting directions.2 In what follows I explore the issue of mediating, more than merely representing, two fundamental nodes of archaeological thinking—experience and place (Shanks 1992:1; Pearson and Shanks 2001:121). Contrary to conventional modes of scholarly documentation and inscription, which rely on a model of linguistic representation, I offer a concept of mediation.3 While representation in archaeological production often gets caught up in closed narratives because of its affinity with language as the basis of documentation, mediation Visual Anthropology Review, Volume 20, Issue 2, pages 57-71, ISSN 1053-7147, online ISSN 1548-7458. ©2005 by the American Anthropological Association, all rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press; Journals Division; 2000 Center Street, Suite 303; Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. 08_Witmore.indd 57 57 8/12/05 5:47:39 PM encompasses modes that bring forth qualities of the material world that would otherwise be left behind in conventional forms of inscription. For archaeologists mediation, then, should be fundamental to our dealings with the material presence of the past. This assertion brings us to the question of whether we can adequately mediate bodily experience.4 In addressing this question, I begin by briefly touching on some ways in which archaeologists have dealt with issues of experience and place. I then move on to a discussion of how media—in this case a small digital video camera—can be used to enrich, complicate, and indeed confound our engagements with place and, more specifically, the material presence of the past. I reference as an example of good practice the work of Canadian media artist Janet Cardiff and explore the implications of what I call peripatetic video—a form of located, site-specific and interactive media—in the context of four case experiments from Crete, Greece. In a more critical vein, this article is a step in an ongoing reconsideration of our often complacent use of media technologies as tools, as a means to a particular end. With peripatetic video, I offer one example of how we may begin to conceive of media as modes of engagement. By this I mean that we no longer treat media as they are normally understood passively. Rather, we treat media as dynamic entities through according them an active role in our practice. Taken as modes of engagement, media become tools through which we act, think, and theorize. As modes of engagement media are active materials which have a stake in the production of knowledge in archaeology (Olsen 2003:88; Witmore 2004). MEDIATING THE EXPERIENCE OF PLACE As this article addresses the question of how one “mediates” (to be distinguished from “represents”) the experience of place, I will first take a step back and briefly consider the concept of “place” in relation to archaeology. For my purposes place is situated in the interstices between the collage of material articulations that encompasses our everyday lives and ourselves. Place is produced through a particular set of bodily relationships with the material world, through the immediacy of experience and association, through dwelling, inhabitation, and traveling (Casey 1993:203 and 1997:116–120; Tuan 1977:6)5. Indeed, archaeological production engenders a sense of place (Pearson and Shanks 2001:138–140). Furthermore, place is one of the constituting interests of archaeology. It was at heart of the earlier topographical and chorographical traditions out of which archaeology arose (Schnapp 1996; Shanks 1996:165). In the case of Greece, this tradition was characterized by Romantic travelers such as Comte Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier and Colonel William Martin Leake, both of whom were renown for possessing an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the ruins and antiquities that dotted the countryside (Constantine 1984; Shanks 1996:69–73; Witmore 2004). The Classical associations of particular locales espoused by such travelers serve as grounds for archaeological meanings that cluster around places in the landscapes of contemporary Greece. Place continues to be at the heart of many area studies in archaeology. Examples from the Mediterranean include regional survey projects such as Graeme Barker’s (1995) study of the Biferno Valley in Italy, John F. Cherry, Jack L. Davis and Eleni Mantzourani’s (1991) project on the Greek island of Kea and Michael H. Jameson, Curtus N. Runnels, and Tjeerd van Andel’s (1994) work in the Southern Argolid of Greece. Such projects mark the use of, and relationship between, contemporary and ancient sites, features, and other material traces across specific landscapes and through time. Even more recently archaeologists have begun to engage more critically with the experience of archaeological interventions into place. Much of this work has occurred in the context of archaeological “fieldwork” and Christopher Witmore is a Ph.D. Candidate in classical archaeology with the Department of Classics and the Archaeology Center, Stanford University and senior member of the Metamedia Lab at Stanford University. His research interests cluster around archaeological thinking, epistemology, materiality and landscape, media theory, critical aspects of new media, and Mediterranean archaeology. His PhD dissertation, Multiple Field Approaches in the Mediterranean. Revisiting the Argolid Exploration Project, challenges recent attempts to put theory into practice by the interpretive school of fieldwork in archaeology. It works toward a symmetrical archaeology where meaning is reconfigured within imbroglios of humans, materials and media through the integration of new (i.e. digital) technologies as modes of articulation and engagement with landscape and materiality. 58 08_Witmore.indd 58 Vo l u m e 2 0 Number 2 Fall 2004 Visual Anthropology Review 8/12/05 5:47:39 PM “practice” where disciplinary production is conceived as a type of located bodily praxis (Hodder 2000; Lucas 2001b:198–199; Shanks 1992). Given the centrality of place in archaeology I consider the question of how it is documented to be of fundamental importance. This brings us to the question of experience. Sensory, bodily experience is “at the beginning of our understanding” of place (Pearson and Shanks 2001:135; also Campbell and Ulin Witmore (2004)). For now I briefly consider the recent archaeological interest in perceptive phenomenology as one example of how the experience of place is dealt with in archaeological thought. Phenomenologies of place begin, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued, with the human body as the fundamental nexus of mediation between thought and the world (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Tilley 1994:13–14). The relationship between humans and any physical surrounding is seen as experiential (Barrett 1994) with the engagement between person and place characterized as a bodily one. Through movement, activity and interaction, and lived experience, places come to be constituted cognitively, and in the process they become meaningful. Indeed, we know them to be “saturated with meaning” (Pearson and Shanks 2001:156). For archaeologists, such as Julian Thomas and Christopher Tilley, the appeal of phenomenology lies in this emphasis upon the corporeality of lived experience centered on the human subject. Thomas in particular has emphasized that in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger lies the path to moving beyond the Cartesian framing of the world which has inhibited the archaeological endeavor of coming to terms with materiality (1996a and 1996b:11). For Thomas, Heidegger’s phenomenology emphasizes the relationship of the subject and object worlds as one where the subjective is the form that the objective world takes. Phenomenological approaches in archaeology have focused on how tangible places, such as monuments, physical locales, including rock outcrops or streams, or quotidian features, like pathways, are both constituted and constitutive of human activity in the past. With phenomenological treatments of the material world (beyond the issue of whether they work at all) there remains the question: how can human experience be articulated? Can this articulation be accomplished in such a way as to engage an individual on a “bodily” level? Part of the simultaneous fascination and frustration with place and human experience lies in the issue of representation with conventional forms of documentation and Visual Anthropology Review 08_Witmore.indd 59 Vo l u m e 2 0 inscription. Concomitantly, given the “destructive”, or, as Gavin Lucas terms it, the “transformative” nature of the archaeological process (2001a; 2001b: 202), the issue of mediating “place”, and perhaps more appropriately in this case, the archaeological mobilization of the material world, is necessarily of central importance within the discipline. Still, despite their emphasis on lived experience, archaeologists have, I suggest, failed to deal with the full realm of human sensation. Bodily experience can only be articulated through movement and participation, one’s sensory facilities, and living bodies.6 Bodily experience involves realizing the full corporeality of human practice. To this end, one cannot express it through text or through visual media alone, and one cannot adequately address it without implicating the body as a whole. This raises a conundrum: can we satisfactorily mediate bodily experience? If we take archaeology to be a “materializing practice” that is aware of its transformative and constructive capacity and which is constituted through forms of bodily engagement such as excavation and survey then this question must be addressed by the archaeological practitioner. Before considering the issue of mediating bodily experience, I will say a little more about the concept of “mediation”. Mediation can be understood in a double sense. It can have a broad meaning encompassing all forms of representation, that is, all forms of translation from the material world to the discursive whether textual, visual, or aural. I suggest that mediation should be understood in a more focused sense, as doing something fundamentally different from the semiotically-limited notion of representation in conventional scholarly forms of documentation and inscription. With each step in the archaeological process, from excavating a trench profile, drawing building phase sections, taking photographs, sampling, measuring, narrating, we lose “locality, particularity, materiality, multiplicity, and continuity”—aspects of the material world—yet we gain “compatibility, standardization, text, calculation, circulation, and relative universality”—qualities of documentation (Latour 1999:47). Mediation occurs across this series of transformations between material presence and media. Understood in its more focused sense, “mediation” allows one to contemplate ways of transforming aspects of the material past while at the same time bringing forth something of the locality, multiplicity, and materiality left behind with conventional Number 2 Fall 2004 59 8/12/05 5:47:40 PM Figure 1. The series of transformations and translations between the material past and our modes of documentation involve the simultaneous reduction of qualities of the material world and amplification of qualities of discursive media (Latour 1999:71:fig.2.22). Mediation occurs across this chain of transformation. processes of documentation and inscription (Figure 1). Mediation is a mode of engagement, which takes us beyond narrative, for scholarly narrative obfuscates the multiplicity of material presence. In this more focused sense, mediation is a means of translating things that we talk about but cannot adequately sum up. I argue, following Michael Shanks (1997), that it is a way of rescuing the ineffable.7 Moreover, mediation is a process that allows us to attain richer and fuller translations of bodily experience and materiality that are located, multi-textured, reflexive, sensory, and polysemous.8 In order for archaeologists to pursue such a notion of mediation, practitioners must become more familiar and creative with other forms of “documentation.” Artistic practices may provide a means of dealing with this issue; after all, Gombrich pointed us in that direction almost half-a-century ago. We can and should approach the art world to derive the critical and imaginative force necessary to invigorate our modes of engagement and practices of mediation. THE MEDIA ART OF JANET CARDIFF Beginning with these propositions I have been attracted by some of the site-specific work of Canadian media artist Janet Cardiff. Cardiff is perhaps best known for her multi-media installations and audio walks. Much of her work explores the realms of sensuality and the 60 08_Witmore.indd 60 Vo l u m e 2 0 Number 2 uncanny through modes that highlight the corporealities of the walking body in step with the electronic and virtual.9 For example, in 1996 Cardiff created an audio walk for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. The participant is given a Walkman and with, “Hello, do you hear me? I want you to walk with me through the garden,” Cardiff’s Louisiana Walk # 14 begins (Christov-Bakargeiv 2002:68). This sitespecific work takes place in the adjoining gardens of the museum. One walks and listens to the following: Some of the trees look like they have eyes, like this big one to the right. There is a headless woman in a bush up there. Do you smell that? Wet, decayed wood, like after a fire. Some trees have fallen down. One’s over the path. Step over it. Here’s a little path to the left. There is a sign, covered a bit in dirt. What does it say? “George Trakkis, Self Passage.” Let’s go down the stairs. [Christov-Bakargeiv 2002:69] While Cardiff instructs the participant on where to walk, she also works in collages of music, film audio sequences, birds chirping, a man whispering into the walker’s left ear, even a lecture as it is taking place. At times, her footsteps accompany the walker along the path. Cardiff is always present in the non-place of the digital realm. As one walks through the garden the Fall 2004 Visual Anthropology Review 8/12/05 5:47:42 PM aural properties of place surface—the sound of water lapping against the shore, crushing leaves beneath the feet, footsteps upon wood, stone, metal or bare ground. The participants’ awareness of the corporeality of their bodies is heightened through the activity of maintaining pace with the artist. Cardiff further explores sensory evocation by creating moments of intimacy with the participant through narratives of her dreams and desires. A hallmark of Cardiff’s art is the way in which she layers digital media over active bodily experience. As outgrowths of her earlier audio walks, Cardiff has to date created two “video walks”: In Real Time, 1999 and The Telephone Call, 2001. These video walks are intended to complicate and “confound” sensory perception and, in a sense, trick the participant into believing that they are also part of Cardiff’s lived experience within the spaces of a museum or library. Cardiff asks participants to synchronize their movements through the same locale with her prerecorded journey by maintaining their pace and carrying a small digital video camera as if they were filming the same sequence. This creates the illusion of “live” recording. The video walk is played back visually on the camera’s LCD video screen and aurally through the headphones. The effect is one of media overlay whereby the digital media are superimposed upon the corporeal background. Throughout the walk the body of the participant (the listener-viewer) and the artist occupy the same space and perform the same movements. It is in the disjuncture between the two experiences that Cardiff experiments with the uncanny, and moments of disorientation reach full relief. Crucial to such effects are the rich collations of sound media, which Cardiff adds to the visual component of the video walk. “Sound is the primary focus of Cardiff’s practice, although she also shapes visual experience and perceptual realms to create complex works that explore narrative, desire, intimacy, love, loss, memory and the mechanisms of the brain” (Christov-Bakargeiv 2002:14). Aurally the participants are largely closed off from their immediate surroundings—sound is controlled. Cardiff is able to suggest 3–D space acoustically by using a method known as binaural recording. This is “achieved by placing two omni-directional microphones in the position of the ears on a dummy head, and recording in stereo while moving the head through space. Played back on a headset, the sounds seem to come from the actual surrounding” (Christov-Bakargeiv 2002:22). Like other Visual Anthropology Review 08_Witmore.indd 61 Vo l u m e 2 0 forms of media technology, such as television and film, space and time are collapsed into aural and visual simultaneity. Moreover, outside the intended cinematic context of these technologies the folding of the past into present occurs in the same locale. PERIPATETIC VIDEO Not all video walks are intended to work as those of Cardiff’s. In place of video walk I use peripatetic video to refer to the work Cardiff has produced. The “peripatetic” emphasizes the activity of walking prior to the form of media, the “video” as in video walk. Peripatetic video as a form of locale-based mediation involves the active overlay of different (contextually, temporally, etc.) modes of engagement. One, digitally mediated via the visual and aural fields, another translated through lived experience. The combination of the onscreen visual element of the LCD screen of a digital video camera and the closed off aural environment created with a high quality set of headphones produces a situation in which material background and digital foreground converge and any distinction between the two experiences (the mediated and the lived) is blurred (Figure 2). Textures, smells, and other wider sensory evocations are encountered by the participant. The full realm of bodily sensation is implicated. Indeed, much potential lies in emphasizing any disparity between these Figure 2. Participant with video camera and high quality headphones. Photo: Christopher L. Witmore. Number 2 Fall 2004 61 8/12/05 5:47:46 PM layered experiences. Above all, the idea is to appeal to the senses on a bodily level, to evoke the ineffable qualities of place. Sound is the most decisive aspect of peripatetic video. On the one hand, in the distancing and “objectivizing” sense of seeing, as Wolfgang Welsch has argued, “we are affected least of all corporally... Hearing, on the other hand, does not keep the world at a distance, but admits it. ‘Tone penetrates without distance’” (1997:158). For Welsch, “vision sets things at a distance and holds them fixed in their place” (1997:158) whereas hearing brings the material world into greater proximity (Heidegger 1971:26; Ingold 2000:244–250). If we wish to close ourselves off visually we use our eyelids, whereas our lack of “earlids” leaves us acoustically vulnerable.10 This acoustic vulnerability can be played upon with peripatetic video. This is an especially vital aspect in mediating the corporeality of place. Of course, when we hear sounds we are actually hearing things (Heidegger 1971:26). Even so, sound is a neglected property of the material world—a vast oversight for a discipline focused upon materiality.11 The “aural primacy” of peripatetic video constitutes a critical and necessary auditive check upon the visual dominance behind not only the great majority of archaeological media in particular, but also most technoscientific media in general (Welsch 1997:150–167). It is the closed aural environment of a high-quality pair of stereo headphones that is the key element of sensory immersion within the mediated experience. More specifically the aural field of a human being encompasses areas outside that of the visual. If we were to hear footsteps approaching from somewhere over our right shoulder, or hear a person calling from the same direction, ordinarily we might turn to bring the source of those sounds within our visual field. Binaural recording mediates the 3-dimensionality of a person’s aural field. Given the appropriate staging one can be tricked into believing someone is behind them and thus, an important property of corporeal experience is mediated.12 It is precisely here, where we must remember that the corporeality of place extends from the crunch of dried foliage under one’s feet, to the wind rustling the leaves in the nearby carob, or the shrill cry of the cicadas on the olive branch above. These make up the ceaseless and unrelenting background noises of any locale. These sounds are philosopher Michel Serres’ belles noiseuses. The multiplicity of background noise 62 08_Witmore.indd 62 Vo l u m e 2 0 Number 2 is fundamental to our experience of place and, for Serres, it “may well be the ground of our [very] being” (Serres 1994:13). These noises, resistant to inscription, are mediated through binaural recording and revisited by the participant in peripatetic video. The visual component of peripatetic video is a secondary but, nevertheless, important facet of both tricking and guiding the participant. Normally an individual uses a video camera in a standard manner to record an activity, event, place, experience, etc. The novelty of playing back a tape on the video camera (Figure 3) and reiterating the movements involved in recording that original sequence in the same locale adds to the confusion. Peripatetic video takes advantage of the illusion of live recording. Of course, the activity of producing a medium for playback in a video camera as opposed to a television, computer or large screen may be novel for only a limited time. This potential loss of novelty has important implications. Figure 3. Close-up of the video camera with LCD screen used to record and deliver peripatetic video. Photo: Christopher L. Witmore. Since peripatetic video infuses aural and visual mediation into the corporeal activities of movement and interaction, I wish to discuss the implications of confusing digital appearances of the electronic world with lived experience, that is “being” in the material world. In other words, where will this blurring of the boundaries between mediation and reality take us? This is a rather complicated matter. In one sense the blurring of boundaries is one of the effects of our long-term interaction with electronic media (Welsch 1997). In as Fall 2004 Visual Anthropology Review 8/12/05 5:47:50 PM much as “the real is being measured more and more against ideal media conceptions” (Welsch 1997:181), reality and electronic media simulations coalesce in everyday experience. Ideal bodies presented in popular media are copied through bodybuilding or plastic surgery (Haraway 1991). How many American teenage lifestyles are predicated upon those of Brittany Spears or Justin Timberlake? Of course, no one would confuse the disparity between the digital and the real in the short-term. One can simply change the channel or turn off the television completely. The same is true with peripatetic video, as it is predicated on the participant’s willingness to go along with the demands of the mediated experience. This indulgence on the part of the participant facilitates the possibility of blurring the boundaries. One has to “want” to be tricked. Yet this potential is what separates peripatetic video from electronic media such as television—peripatetic video demands active bodily participation not passivity.13 Therefore, peripatetic video facilitates the potentiality for the reiteration of past experience through the sitespecific mediation of its re-presence. Somewhat ironically, it is through this blurring that I believe we can begin to realize the richness and complexity of the material world. Digital experience provokes a return to, and deeper appreciation of, lived experience (Welsch 1997:196). As we know, digital experience cannot replace the lived experience of walking along a promenade of cafes next to a Venetian harbor in Crete and feeling the cool sea breeze upon your face or inhaling the fresh catch on ice in the display case, but it can be utilized as a supplement to that experience.14 Since peripatetic video is a means of folding our mediations into lived experience, the digital and the bodily engagement on the ground can play off one another. In this way, the frictions and disparities between these experiential modes can potentially spawn connections that would have otherwise not arisen. For not only is it in this confusion that subtle idiosyncrasies of locality, multiplicity, and materiality are thrown into relief, they are also mediated (Figure 4). THE CASE EXPERIMENTS Through experimentation with peripatetic video in the context of four sites of cultural and archaeological significance in Crete I have come to believe that this form of active media overlay constitutes a more fulfill- Figure 4. Located media such as peripatetic video, in contrast to more conventional modes of archaeological documentation including text, map, plan, diagram, illustration, etc., mediate aspects of a particular engagement with the corporeal setting of the “original” experience. This active media overlay on the place of focus involves both exchange and disjuncture between the mode of engagement and the material context focused upon. Visual Anthropology Review 08_Witmore.indd 63 Vo l u m e 2 0 Number 2 Fall 2004 63 8/12/05 5:47:52 PM ing means of interposing the lived experience of the archaeologist with that of the participant. Sequences for peripatetic videos of 10–20 minutes in duration were filmed at each of the four sites within a three-week period from July 15 through August 6, 2001. Here I briefly discuss key themes of the peripatetic videos (routes, sounds and scripts) and the four sites they mediate and overlay. I am going to freely juxtapose descriptions of locale and video in each site summary. Of course, in this article I am doomed to fail to relate adequately what I am able to convey through the located medium of peripatetic video. Nonetheless, it is worth the effort if only to highlight the disparity between conventional forms of documentation and peripatetic video and, therefore, the utility of peripatetic video. The routes I chose at these places were predefined in that they incorporate certain emblematic features of the particular place. Nevertheless, in breaking with the standard, I also tried to incorporate the all too often neglected textures associated with the place along these routes. These include, for example, the abject— surface garbage on a Peak Sanctuary or the smell of a dead and decomposing goat carcass at the bottom of a ravine at Eleutherna. They may also incorporate the melancholic—in one version of a peripatetic video from the Old Town of Rethymnon I include a funeral service. Sound is critical as I have already emphasized. The sounds incorporated in the peripatetic videos are derived from various sources. They may be traces of site-specific activity, such as archaeological excavation. They also include my own voice and those of others layered with cicadas or goats bleating, in addition to sounds evocative of past events, such as the clank of armor in battle or the roar of WWII machine guns in the distance. At times the video sequences are layered with footsteps and music. The scripts that I have worked into these walks at the moment follow a similar formula to those of Cardiff. Along with instructions, there are contextual descriptions including, where possible, notebook entries from excavation reports. Incorporated are discussions of scholarship or some other text written about that specific place, descriptions of particular feelings, discussions of memories triggered by a specific connection, dialogues between me and others or myself and the participant. 64 08_Witmore.indd 64 Vo l u m e 2 0 Number 2 Site One A Greek Orthodox chapel of Ayion Pnevmon is situated atop the Bronze Age “Minoan” peak sanctuary of Vrysinas.15 It is constructed of cement and local stone, a blue-gray limestone. It is whitewashed. At 585 meters above sea level the white chapel is visible from dozens of kilometers away. Beneath Ayion Pnevmon a later terrace, perhaps associated with the construction of the chapel, has obscured what is left of any potential architectural fabric linked with the Bronze Age sanctuary. These remains have also been partially transformed by the cutting of two cisterns into bedrock north of the chapel. A date, “1909”, Figure 6. Outcrops of stone protrude into the path at the rear of the small chapel of Ayion Pnevmon. Photo: Christopher L. Witmore. Figure 5. Rusted enclosure gate at Vrysinas. Photo: Christopher L. Witmore. Fall 2004 Visual Anthropology Review 8/12/05 5:47:54 PM Ancient Eleutherna is especially renown for its Archaic, Hellenistic and Late Roman periods. Today it is a landscape of moss covered stone, patina and ruin. Ancient olive groves stand among parallel stone terraces, step after step, up the sides of slender ridgelines amid deep valley bottoms of karst. Here and there, sections of much older walls either break, or are reused in, the terrace lines revealing a much deeper temporal presence. A worn trekking path, the E 4, weaves its way among rustic stonewalls, excavation and ruin. Local tourist agencies play to travelers’ romantic sensibilities in what can be characterized as an idyllic Cretan landscape— a Theocritean arcadia. Since 1985 archaeological excavations at Eleutherna have been implemented under the auspices of the University of Crete at Rethymnon in several areas of the city—Katsivelos, Pyrgi and Nissi hills and Orthi Petra (Themelis 1992). One may witness these taking place during the summer months. A Hellenistic tower sits at the apex of Pyrgi ridge (Figure 7). On the left a path of smooth timeworn cobblestone descends to the north. He must keep pace across this cumbersome surface. He must divert his attention from the LCD screen to mind his step. This pathway ends in a junction. To the left a trail leads at a downward angle along a terrace to the rock-cut cisterns. The twisted trunk of an olive and boulder frame a worn dirt path to the right (Figure 8). Figure 7. The walk proceeds along the cobble surface up and to the left. Photo: Christopher L. Witmore. Figure 8. A portion of the pathway framed by a stone terrace and a carob tree. Photo: Christopher L. Witmore. Visual Anthropology Review 08_Witmore.indd 65 Site Two is etched in the concrete atop the easternmost cistern. Traces of the stone walling of the sanctuary nevertheless extrude from the surface in places. Archaeologists have identified the site as a “sanctuary” on the basis of artifacts found on the peak including ceramic figurines (human and animal) and other broken ceramic vessels (typically cups, large shallow dishes and libation vessels—see Jones 1999). From the earliest investigations, the concept of the “peak sanctuary” has held a unique (perhaps romantic) attraction for archaeologists (Peatfield 1990; Rutkowski 1986 and 1988). Their materialities and localities have been assessed within the optic of the ritual and religious, hence the term “sanctuary”. From a lower terrace a worn path leads uphill to a metal gate (Figure 5). Breathing gets heavier; the pace slackens a little as one approaches to lift the latch. An enclosure of stone and rusty wire mesh surrounds the area of the chapel and sanctuary. Wayward flocks of sheep and goats are kept out. It is a foggy morning. The wind is cool and moist. During some times of year the smell of thyme permeates the air. The pungent smell of goat dung is ever present. A wall of hoary mist forms a background to the immediate area of the enclosure. Bells clang on the necks of bleating goats unseen in the distance. A voice urges the walker to circumvent the chapel in a clockwise direction. Broken bits of ceramic, stone and contemporary rubbish litter the area. Footsteps change in tone across concrete, gravel and bedrock. There is someone waiting inside the chapel (Figure 6). The peripatetic video builds up to a chance encounter in this remote locale. Vo l u m e 2 0 Number 2 Fall 2004 65 8/12/05 5:47:56 PM “Make a choice. Fast-forward the tape to this point again if you choose to go right.” Together the walker and I reach a comfortable pace as we proceed along the path. Voices are heard from somewhere down the hill to the left—archaeologists excavating at Orthi Petra. The trail winds on between outcrop and drop-off. It is overcast. The breeze is light and playful. He continues walking. The terrace flattens out. The ridgeline recedes. In the midst of an ancient olive grove appear exposed walls of stone— cemented rubble and ashlar. “Walk on to the break in the wire fence.” At the center of a large courtyard stands a double vaulted church constructed in the Mannerist style (Figure 9). It is enclosed on all sides by the cells, storerooms and cloisters of the monastery. The outermost walls of this enclosure are over a meter thick. It is a fortress. At times it served as a refuge. Arkadi was the site of “heroic” resistance against Turkish oppression during the revolution of 1866–1869. The monastery has been appropriated as a potent symbol of the Greek nation-state. An image of the façade of the church featured prominently on the 200-drachma note of the former currency of the Greek state. Cultural politics, religion, nationalism and heritage clash head on in the space of the monastery, which along with the Old Town of Rethymnon, is one of central Crete’s most popular tourist attractions. It begins at the vaulted entrance gate. A man asks for payment at the desk. A voice instructs: “walk toward the staircase on the right”. The path follows along the second floor cloister. A cat meows from beneath a chair on the right. A monk’s memory of a calico that lived twenty years is iterated. The cat is still under that wood and wicker chair. A back staircase leads to a narrow alleyway that opens onto the courtyard. The smell of fresh flowers greets the walker at the courtyard’s edge. “Beyond the church façade, to the left of the red doors is an archway. Walk directly to it.” Pink stucco stained yellow here, gray there—residues of countless activities through the seasons. “Pass your hand across it. Decay, patina and ruin are aspects of an archaeological aesthetics.” This surface awaits the walker on the far side of the courtyard in the direction of Juktas, the mountain birthplace of Zeus. The sun is relentless. A desire is shared—the shade in the archway of the cloister (Figure 10). The walk continues to the gunpowder room in the northeast corner. On November 9, 1866, a horror unfolds in this room. Rather than suffer a cruel and gruesome death at the hands of the Turks, dozens of men, women and children blow themselves up by setting the powder kegs alight (Provatakis 1986). Figure 9. Tourists pause in front of the church of Arkadi. Photo: Christopher L. Witmore. Figure 10. The welcome shade of the western cloister. Photo: Christopher L. Witmore. Site Three 66 08_Witmore.indd 66 Vo l u m e 2 0 Number 2 Fall 2004 Visual Anthropology Review 8/12/05 5:47:58 PM Figure 11. Named for the seventeenth century benefactor who reconstructed it, the Rimondi Fountain is a popular stop in the heat of summer. Photo: Christopher L. Witmore. Figure 12. Restaurant keepers prepare for patrons by the Old Venetian Harbor. Photo: Christopher L. Witmore. Site Four The Old Town of Rethymnon is one of the best-preserved examples of Renaissance Venetian architecture to be found outside Italy. A maze of alleys connects barrelvaulted houses converted into tourist shops, cafés and restaurants. Wooden Turkish window boxes juxtaposed with ornamental Venetian stone carvings and crumbling plasterwork grace many façades. Some houses are recently renovated while some continue to decay. Fortress, Loggia, churches, mosques and minarets, Rethymnon has a number of spectacular monuments. This is one of Crete’s most popular tourist destinations. The Old Town of Rethymnon, slated as a national heritage monument of the Greek state, is also home to hundreds of Cretan residents. As Michael Herzfeld writes, “turning people’s homes into a collective monument forces this socially anomalous objectivism into the most intimate recesses of their lives” (1991:10). She begins in front of a fountain, the Rimondi fountain. Water pours into a green algae-coated basin from the central of three lion-like heads (Figure 11). It is a soothing sound. A little girl looks on from the left. She wants to know what she is doing. “Turn left and walk through the archway into the alley” says a voice. The route weaves towards the Venetian harbor among cafés and tourist shops at different times of the day. Some are full, some empty. A car horn blows Visual Anthropology Review 08_Witmore.indd 67 Vo l u m e 2 0 from the right. Care should be taken crossing the street. The alleys bustle with tourists. One of them wants to know the price of a beach wrap. At the entrance of the harbor a waiter approaches, he wants to entice her to sit down for a meal. She continues along the edge of the harbor weaving among table and tourist, waiters, and returning fishermen (Figure 12). She walks to the end of the harbor where a Turkish canon covered in multiple layers of black paint is turned up on end in the pavement. A fisherman casts his line in front of her. MEDIATED FUTURES The point of this layered chorography is not only to emphasize the ways in which an archaeologist might negotiate and interpret a place but also to attempt to break free of the orthodox inscriptions of place by emphasizing disparate textures of corporeality, by embracing the belles noiseuses and working toward multiplicity, through other modes of articulation and engagement. Imagine the practical implications for Cultural Resource Management and the issue of archaeological documentation. Consider filming along routes that will eventually be used by visitors to a particular site, but Number 2 Fall 2004 67 8/12/05 5:48:00 PM while excavation is still taking place. This footage can then be incorporated into peripatetic video for later visitors to the site. Imagine the potential of peripatetic video as a way of mediating the unique and singular experience of excavation. The excavation of a particular feature can be visually superimposed onto that very same feature many years after the primary excavation on site. Even virtual reconstructions can be incorporated through live overlay, thereby alleviating the need for tangible (re)constructions within the site. All of this can be accomplished now using a video camera with a suitable LCD screen. Even so, such site-specific work has the drawback of limited accessibility. Travel is a major issue. And despite falling prices digital video cameras and the high quality sound systems needed for binaural recording are still prohibitively expensive and not easily available in many areas. This unevenness of access to travel opportunities, equipment and technology, creates a crux. Yet these are still early days. Technology is rapidly developing in the form of “wearables.” To be sure, prices will decrease, and combinations of virtual and bodily experience will become ever more common in the near future. My argument is that in the context of archaeological practice and CRM the benefits of peripatetic video outweigh the costs. For this form of mediation brings us to new levels of intimacy between archaeologists and their audience. Disparities between different individuals’ negotiations and interpretations of place are set in high relief when they themselves surrender to the experience of another. What is more, peripatetic video will enrich our forms of disciplinary production while speaking to issues that crosscut not only the categories of art and archaeology, but epistemology, ontology, theory and practice. This is not about looking to art for alternative forms through which we can articulate archaeological content. Distinctions, such as that between content and form, merge. In other words, media and meaning are intertwined. Recall McLuhan’s dictum, “the medium is the message;” in other words, meaning is at all times due to its entanglement in the media. CONCLUSION Gombrich did not question the issue of boundaries. He never crossed the path towards a hybridized space where both scholarship and art existed simultaneously, free from the limitations of territorial circumscription. 68 08_Witmore.indd 68 Vo l u m e 2 0 Number 2 This space is created and maintained by flushing out and emphasizing particular connections and helping them to grow organically. This is a space of experimentation. Still, I would highlight that this hybrid space is potentially dangerous without some level of reflexivity. Art and archaeology, and this should be extended to science and philosophy, must maintain a healthy degree of estrangement. In this alterity lies the potential for disruption and invigoration. Hence the hybrid space between art and archaeology is the locus of a productive tension that should be called upon with a certain frugality. This article is a ballast to my work with peripatetic video. This text and the peripatetic videos do fundamentally different things. The article is part of my own appreciation of the value of reflection in the context of our own doings. Yet it is also clear that inscriptions alone (combinations of text, plan, map, diagram, illustration, etc.) will never encompass locality, materiality, multiplicity or experience (Olsen 2003; Webmoor 2005; Witmore 2004). Taken individually, various media translate the idiosyncrasies of the material world in different ways. In the place of any complete transparency of the material world we are left with degrees of opacity. Given the singularity of events in the material world—we cannot for example re-excavate an archaeological site—it is critical that we employ as many forms of documentation as possible. A compromise may be attained through the notion of mediation. Such convictions can be realized, as in this case, simply by rethinking what one does with a video camera. Through peripatetic video we embrace artful forms of mediation that do service to the material and bodily praxis that is archaeology. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This article was developed from two earlier papers presented at the 2002 Meetings of the European Association of Archaeologists, Thessoloniki, Greece and the 2002 Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans. I thank Douglas Bailey, Ewa Domanska, Ian Hodder, Donald Lavigne, Børnar Olsen, Michael Shanks and Timothy Webmoor for their insightful comments and welcome criticism on various versions of this article. Many of the ideas expressed in this article have developed out of my collaboration with Michael Shanks, Timothy Webmoor and Bjornar Olsen. Fall 2004 Visual Anthropology Review 8/12/05 5:48:01 PM I wish to express my deep gratitude to the three of them. Lastly, I am indebted to Corby Kelly for introducing me to the media art of Janet Cardiff. Any shortcomings remain my own. NOTES For other work in this hybrid genre please see Coles and Dion 1999; Pearson and Shanks 2001; or visit http://metamedia.stanford.edu/~mshanks/threelandscapes, accessed July 8, 2005. 1 For more synergies between archaeology and art see Hamilakis, et al. 2001; Renfrew 2003; Tilley, et al. 2000. 2 Here the term inscription “refers to all the types of transformations through which an entity becomes materialized into a sign, an archive, a document, a piece of paper, a trace” (Latour 1999:306). 3 This question arises out of a personal frustration with how archaeologists have dealt with place and the bodily experience of it. My work, which falls under the rubric of landscape studies in archaeology, has focused upon the problem of mediating place. I am interested in conceptual, experiential and methodological dealings with landscape as an ideological construct and the corporealities of place. At the same time I wish to express my hesitation and caution in exploring the terms “experience” and “place”. Both “experience” and “place” are deeply problematic and baggage laden. I explore them specifically in the context of a particular school of thought in archaeology and put them into practice through peripatetic video. To enter a philosophical discussion of these terms would detract from this endeavor. 4 This ambiguity may be frustrating for some, but this is not the “place” for an extended discussion of the term. 5 Initially, I wanted to focus on the issue of embodiment. Yet the notion that something is “embodied” presupposes some separation prior to lived experience. Embodiment is a term plagued by that crux of modernity, the Cartesian mind-body dichotomy. This aspect of the term proved to be excess baggage when utilized in a context such as this where bodily experience is conceived of outside of that duality (cf. Olsen 2003). Indeed phenomenology is open to a similar critique in 6 Visual Anthropology Review 08_Witmore.indd 69 Vo l u m e 2 0 its asymmetrical embrace of subjectivity (Latour 1993). I discuss it here solely as a familiar example of how archaeologists have dealt with issues of place over the last decade. Refer to Shanks 1997 for a discussion of photowork and the ineffable. 7 For more experiments in the mediation of place refer to: Webmoor 2003; Witmore and Adler 2004. 8 The “uncanny” aspects of Cardiff’s work surface in her transformation of the utterly familiar so that the viewer feels estranged and awkward. For example, the quotidian act of walking along a pathway can appear subversively different and disturbing through her use of voice and intimate memory. 9 I do not wish to place vision and hearing into an unnecessary binary opposition, rather I wish to emphasize the importance of sound rhetorically by situating it in relation to vision, that “cognitive sense par excellence”. 10 Why, for example, do archaeologists not take into account the acoustic properties of ceramics? Work is being done, however, in the context of landscape. An example is the auditory archaeology developed by Steve Mills (2001) in the Teleorman River Valley of southern Romania, where he identified auditory character areas, such as woodland, river bottoms, grasslands, etc. The sounds generated in these areas were treated as properties of the corporeal environments of people’s everyday lives. Mills argued that sound was an integral component in generating social relationships in the past. 11 Footsteps are good examples of the acoustic properties of the material world. Footsteps are the aural articulation of both the footwear and the pavement a person walks upon. Change the footwear or the pavement, and subtle differences in the aural field will occur. Such aspects of the material world constitute fruitful grounds for study. 12 Of course, television is not completely passive. People make choices as to what they watch and when. Changing the channel is a bodily activity. 13 14 On this point also refer to Bolter and Grusin 1999. 15 The Cretan Bronze Age dates from roughly ca. 2900 B.C.E. to 1150 B.C.E. Number 2 Fall 2004 69 8/12/05 5:48:02 PM REFERENCES Barker, Graeme 1995 A Mediterranean Valley: Archaeology as Annales in the Biferno Valley. London: Leicester University Press. 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Wilson Myers, Eleanor E. Myers and Gerald Cadogan, eds. Pp. 91–95. Berkeley: University of California Press. Visual Anthropology Review 08_Witmore.indd 71 Vo l u m e 2 0 Number 2 Fall 2004 71 8/12/05 5:48:03 PM “We are reconciled, I think, to too much.” Social hour gathering (49). Photo: William C. Clarke. Quote is from “The Lark” by Mary Oliver. 72 08_Witmore.indd 72 Vo l u m e 2 0 Number 2 Fall 2004 Visual Anthropology Review 8/12/05 5:48:05 PM