Senses of Places: Remediations from text to digital performance. Draft 1 March 1, 2007

 Ruth Tringham

Michael Ashley
(Prepared on behalf of submission to the on-line format of Visual Anthropology Review)
In the 15 minutes allotted to us at the Annual Meeting of the AAA in San Jose in December 2006, we orchestrated a performance of the Remediated Places Project. This is the first draft of a revised version of the paper that accompanied that performance, incorporating the script of the performance with its modifications, as well as a more structured examination of media database, the interface as well as the database narratives that are emerging from the project.
Pdf version: Beyond EText: Remediated Places (Tringham as well as Ashley) Draft 1
In this paper, we present:

The nature of the Remediated Places Project itself
The context of the content that is used in this performance of the Remediated Places Project
The theoretical context of the Remediated Places Project as well as the performance in terms of digital technologies, hypermedia as well as New Media creativity, the process of historical construction, as well as the remediation of places of significance on behalf of cultural heritage
An outline of what  happened at the “performance”

Introduction

The idea of Remediation of archaeological as well as heritage places was inspired by the book Remediation by Jay Bolter as well as Richard Grusin (Bolter as well as Grusin 1999). Remediated Places has nothing to do with the traditional root on behalf of the word (remediare – to heal) but is created from “mediate”, with “re” expressing the idea of mediating what has already been mediated by media. It is based in the aesthetic of hypermediacy - the semi-transparency of looking at reality through a window or mirror as seen an estimated all recently in the WWW interface style, Mac (and later Windows) interface, as well as computer games. Hypermediacy has much in common with hyper-reality, discussed by Baudrillard (Baudrillard 1983), not surprisingly since the latter (see below) also appeals to our visual senses. In their book, however, Bolter as well as Grusin point to some of the social as well as sensorial causes of the attraction of hypermediated products. Hypermediacy provides an increase in

speed/immediacy of delivery (immediate satisfaction of desire)
interactivity (point as well as click navigation as well as exploration, traveling through the network)
potential transparency vis-a-vis source
control of sensual (sight as well as sound) experience; touch is also involved
ability to experience multiple sights as well as sounds simultaneously
ability to multi-task

Thus the aesthetic of hypermediacy seems to have great appeal to voyeurism, emotions, passions (maybe because of the fact that numerous senses are involved); a fascination leading to addiction. However, before we pass judgment on the Internet as well as computer games as the nemesis of the intellectual enterprise, we desire in this presentation to argue through “digital performance” that digital technologies as well as media can be harnessed to engage multiple senses in the experience as well as exploration of places in ways which engender more creative re-contextualization than text (even if an e-text) alone or even text with images ever could – in ways which are less explicit, more complex as well as much more subtle.
In Remediation, Bolter as well as Grusin identified two strategies on behalf of remediation:

Respectful Remediation: in which other media are represented in digital form without apparent irony, critique, manipulation, or challenge in the mediation. The remediated form enhances the authority as well as authenticity of the original.
Radical as well as revolutionary remediation. This is the strategy claimed by the “real” WWWebbers as well as New Media artists as well as performers who seek to critique as well as improve on other media in the process of mediation.

For the an estimated all part, archaeological participation on the WWWeb has been respectful as well as the remediation of the archaeological process as well as the construction of the past through archaeological data in popular as well as professional discourse has an estimated never strayed from the highly respectful. We believe, however, – as well as the Remediated Places Project strives to put this into practice – that “Radical Remediation” is much more likely to give rise to the realization of Ian Hodder’s turn of the century dream on behalf of multivocality at Çatalhöyük (Hodder 1999). Radical remediation returns to some of the more original theoretical principles of hypertext (Joyce, et al. 2000; Joyce as well as Tringham in press; Landow 1992) that encourages “writerly” texts in which what the author writes changes when read by a reader who then re-uses this in her posses writing. In this kind of writing (hypertext/hypermedia production) the author’s writing is respected, but can be challenged by another author, as part of the de-centering – nothing is sacred; the construction of knowledge is essentially collaborative as well as cumulative. Even the sacred ground of databases is subject to radical remediation, which is another principal of our project.
The Remediated Places Project

The project aims to share the multisensorial experience, construction as well as memory of places, specifically Cultural Heritage sites. Media through which this challenge is approached include VideoWalks, Video(Pod)casts, audio recordings, interviews of remembered sensations. The first site in which the project has been developed is the 9000-year old mound of Çatalhöyük, Turkey.

The project was created in the Fall of 2004 with video interviews of Çatalhöyük archaeological team members on their memories of sensorial experience at this place in the middle of Turkey created each summer by a team of over a 100 people. The idea was to create a database of these memories as well as add to them multi-sensorial memories of imagined residents at the site 9000 years ago. In July 2005, we added the dimension of layered videowalks that were filmed during the excavation season. At this point the project was referred to as CatalVideoPlace project.
In May 2006, all of us (who are “we”) got combined in San Francisco on behalf of a month. The project expanded to include the San Francisco Presidio, which was in continuous utilize as a military post from 1776 to 1994, spanning the Spanish, Mexican, as well as United States periods. It is now a National Historic Landmark District. At this point we renamed the project the Remediated Places Project.

In addition to media, (photographic as well as drawn images, video, GIS maps, texts, numerical data) that have been created during the course of archaeological excavation as well as other research by the various teams working at Çatalhöyük, we have created specific media on behalf of the Remediated Places project, including a complex of videowalk legs (otherwise known as peripatetic video, Witmore 2004) recorded with binaural microphone, video conversations with members of the archaeological team at Çatalhöyük on their remembered sense perception, ambient sound clips, voice-over commentaries. These Remediated Places media from Çatalhöyük have been took combined as well as incorporated with the media from the Çatalhöyük archaeological project into a database that is part of a larger project: “Remixing Çatalhöyük” [1]. The media in this database are “tagged” to express their relevance to themes that we consider significant on behalf of our understanding of the past, not only at Çatalhöyük. In this respect the Remediated Places Project is expandable both chronologically as well as spatially. In the original iteration of the project we had identified three themes or “layers”: information, memory, as well as sensorial experience. As part of the larger “Remixing Çatalhöyük” project, these three themes have been transformed into four: Life Histories of People, Places, as well as Things (incorporating memory), the Senses of Place (incorporating the sensorial experience), Viewing the Past at Multiple Scales (incorporating information), as well as Communicating as well as Collaborating with the Public (which lies at the heart of the Remediated Places Project).
There are numerous “multi”s incorporated into the Remediated Places Project: multiple voices, multiple viewpoints, multiple scales of meaning as well as view, multiple databases, multiple media formats, as well as so on. We also assume that there are numerous different ways of learning as well as finding creative satisfaction. To that end, not only do we present this “paper” in a number of different ways, but we trust that the project can be a number of different formats in which this database of media might be remixed as well as explored to create narratives that share an understanding of place at these archaeological as well as heritage sites by different kinds of audiences:

·      On-site installation, on behalf of example at an Interpretive Center; you are a visitor to this famous site of Çatalhöyük. You’ve read about it, seen pictures, even movies, bought a guidebook, seen the intro movie in the Museum. Now you take a small video camera (or – more likely - a video iPod or even an iPhone) in your hands as well as don a pair of headphones as well as take the path. Before you set off you can opt on behalf of from several “theme” options:

You may have chosen the theme which gives you a “sensuous tour” of the site. This shall give you an experience enriched as you walk across the mound by references (in your ear) to the scents of the early morning; the sound as well as feel of the snow underneath your feet in another season; the sounds of birds, wind, as well as - as a contrast to your feasable current physical experience in the scorching sun – cool moonlight or even a winter’s day as well as the sound of rain (to remind you that it is not at all times like this); you shall hear other sounds of people walking contigous to you as the team escorts you to the excavation with their posses experiences being expressed; you shall see intimate close-ups of the excavation where you can't go; you can walk (virtually) amongst the actual remains of the houses as well as experience the rhythm of excavation in the hands as well as tools of the archaeologists, as well as hear the multi-lingual quiet chatter of voices.


Or you may have chosen the “life-history” option in which you get to experience through voices, diaries, images as well as videos fragments of the memory of past excavations as well as archaeologists in these places as well as the lives of past villagers as well as houses, so that you experience a continuum of time as well as place. Before your eyes as well as ears the houses shall go through a life-cycle, as well as so shall the excavations.


Or maybe you shall be more conventional in your desires as well as opt on behalf of the “multiple view scales” option, a tape in which the mound as well as the excavated areas are given meaning in terms of the regional landscape, in terms of multiple scales of social organization, social as well as economic evolution as well as the beginning of a sedentary way of life. You shall learn a lot of useful information. But be careful – even in this tape we can't avoid some amusing subversive remediation, slipping into multiple interpretations as well as arguments with other archaeologists, or a reflexive musing on the meaning of all of this archaeology in terms of its local as well as global position as a place of cultural heritage.


Finally you may desire to take your videowalk with archaeologists telling you about their lives as well as why they think this work is important; to see the efforts of Çatalhöyük to become a World Heritage site; to hear the voices of people living in the villages as well as towns around the site as well as what they think about the place of Çatalhöyük as well as the work of the archaeologists




·      On-line Internet version. You are a visitor to the Remediated Places Project website which you have reached via the Çatalhöyük website or from other links or Google. You desire to take a virtual tour on your computer or your TV monitor. As we show in the movies linked to this presentation, the interface on behalf of the on-line format mirrors that on behalf of the on-site format that is seen on the video iPods.

o      You could observe a “straight” video tour without any montage or collage or interactivity beyond written or spoken information. Such tours already exist, on behalf of example, on the Çatalhöyük website as well as the “Mysteries of Çatalhöyük” website created by the Science Museum of Minnesota. A sidepoint here's that both the above-mentioned website tours manufacture utilize of Quicktime Virtual Reality in which a user progresses in an illusion of forward motion by utilize of a “zoom” feature. This is very different from being behind the eye of a camera that is actually moving forward.

o      We would suggest that you opt on behalf of a theme as well as a walk, as well as add “screens” in which images, sounds as well as other videos enhance your virtual experience. Although the options mirror the on-site version of the project, in the web-based version the visual additions are more easily viewed as well as you have the choice of jumping to the excavation nodes - as in the more conventional tours – without the physical necessity of walking the several hundred yards between. In the excavation nodes or places, such as the area of the BACH (Berkeley Archaeologists at Çatalhöyük) area – now filled in as well as invisible - there's a focus on intimacy as well as close proximity, as well as a slow pace of movement, a focus on hands as well as trowels as well as feet to express the sense of touch, the sounds as well as slow pace of excavation; we are interested in the process of excavation when all is ambiguous as well as confusing, before the end-product of clarity as well as cleaned up features.

o      We encourage you to spend some time walking along the paths between the excavation places, in which there's an opportunity to be less distracted by the intense activity in front of you, to muse listening to commentaries, voiceovers, ambient sounds, as well as diaries, as well as watching other videos that guide you to think laterally about the video-walk that you are “following”.

Live performance. At the Annual Meeting of the AAA in San Jose you might have attended the performance of “Sensuous Çatalhöyük” - as outlined at the end of this paper - something between a play, an opera, as well as circus. The performance combined the on-line Internet format with the movement experienced by participants of the on-site walk. We like to think that what we gave you was a taste of what Sarah Pink calls a “cultural performance…..’more like improvisational theatre than a play’ because of the fact that ‘the reduction of culture to text systematically excludes the embodied as well as the sensory knowledge that is at the core of culture’” (Pink 2006, p.49 quoting; Ruby 2000).

The context of the content that is used in this on-line presentation of the Remediated Places Project

Sharing the multisensorial experience of a place, especially one constructed in the past from archaeological investigation, is a challenge which is taken up in this presentation through the example of the current archaeological project at the 9000-year old settlement of Çatalhöyük, Turkey in which we have been involved since 1997. Ours was a project from the University of California at Berkeley (BACH) to excavate a single building, Building 3, under the umbrella of the predominant project directed by Ian Hodder of Stanford University. The predominant project represented a renewal of work from 1993 at the site made famous on behalf of its painted elaborations of the plastered walls of its mud-brick houses in the 1960s by James Mellaart (Mellaart 1967).
Video-recording of the archaeological process at Çatalhöyük was considered an important aspect of the “reflexive methodology” of archaeology (Hodder 1999), as a record of the process of discourse that goes into the construction of knowledge at the site. Video-recording of the archaeological process was started in 1996 by a team from the Staatliche Hochschüle für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe as well as the University of Karlsrühe, Germany (Brill 2000; Cee, et al. 1996). These were filmmakers who were interested in using the video-camera as an intimate gazer. Their project finished in 1998. Their video record was combined with Virtual Reality visualizations of the prehistoric buildings into a hypermedia CD-ROM (”Catal Höyük – als die Menschen begannen, in Städten zu leben”, CD-ROM, published 1998. Currently out of print as well as unavailable). The Science Museum of Minnesota also recorded the archaeological process from 1999-2001 as part of the development of a website as well as an exhibit about Çatalhöyük. The videographers were in general museum professionals not archaeologists.
The BACH team filmed the complete archaeological process in their area from 1998 to 2004. The videographers in this case were students trained in archaeology (including Michael Ashley) or – on occasion – the BACH field director (RET as well as Mirjana Stevanovic). The BACH video record is very detailed, as well as includes a daily diary, special notes on behalf of the archaeologists, as well as the discussions with specialists (Ashley-Lopez 2002; Stevanovic 2000, Tringham in press). There are also existing re-mixes of videos as well as images, on behalf of example the RAVE series, created by Michael Ashley, Jason Quinlan as well as Ruth Tringham. This video record has continued to be created at the end of the end of the BACH project in 2003 in the new cycle of excavation.
Other groups have made videos of the work at Çatalhöyük as part of creating films on behalf of popular consumption. A movie was made in summer 2004 on behalf of the Discovery Channel taking advantage of the physical full-scale replica of a Neolithic house constructed by the Çatalhöyük team as well as volunteer “actors” as well as props to re-enact “life” 9000 years ago. It is likely that the replica as well as the scenes shall have a powerful effect in fixing in popular imagination the place of Çatalhöyük

An alternative to video images are the digital Virtual Reality imagery of the excavation process, which was first done by me (RET) in 1996, to give others a sense of place in Building 1. Much more elegant examples followed created by the Science Museum of Minnesota team as well as by Michael Ashley of the BACH team. As on numerous other websites, these QTVRs are used on websites as the medium on behalf of a tour of the different excavation areas of the site.

Ideally these media would be incorporated into an integrated searchable database of all of the audio-visual media, geospatial media, texts as well as numerical data from this very large project. This enterprise is in the process of development on a number of fronts. Currently, at least three platforms are used to manage the Çatalhöyük data; the videos are cataloged using CatDV; the images are cataloged using Extensis Portfolio, as well as the other data are in an MS Access relational database. The interfaces developed on behalf of the Remediated Places Project articulate with the entry into the Çatalhöyük databases developed as part of the Remixing Çatalhöyük project mentioned above.
The purpose of the Remediated Places project is to enable the user – at whatever level of experience as well as skill - to draw out these innumerable fragments of multisensorial places, memories, life-histories, as well as interpretations of the archaeological data at multiple scales, that reside in this knowledgebase as well as recombine or remix them into tours with narratives that are not random but manufacture sense since they are situated within categories as well as organized according to predetermined associations to share past as well as present places. A key point of the project is to demonstrate transparently the intentionality of authoring as well as the shared experience of author as well as audience that is created through interactivity.
Inspirations on behalf of the Remediated Places Project

Many strands of thinking by authors in addition to Bolter as well as Grusin, mentioned above, from a variety of disciplines have provided the inspiration on behalf of different aspects of the Remediated Places Project.
Database Narratives as well as Digital Histories

The interfaces that we are designing with endless options as well as configurations of media with which to build narratives of place as well as history are based very closely in the idea of database narratives (Manovich 2001, 2005), as well as especially in the utilize of database narratives of history, as suggested by Stephen Anderson (Anderson in press). In his article “Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives as well as Recombinant History”, Anderson recognizes two directions in which historiography has taken advantage of digital technology. These same two directions are applicable to film theory as well as also to archaeology and, we would suggest, ethnography. On the one hand is the idea of amassing the “total” historical record of events, facts, as well as media through accessible networked interoperable databases. Out of these databases can be created “fixed pieces of knowledge as well as of history as positive retrieval” (quoted in Anderson Past Indiscretions) that give the illusion of objective facts that speak on behalf of themselves. On the other hand “digital technologies have enabled strategies of randomization as well as recombination in historical construction resulting in a profusion of increasingly volatile counter-narratives….and histories with multiple or uncertain endings” (Anderson in press, p.1).
Database narratives (or “digital histories” as Anderson calls them) take advantage of both of these aspects of digital technology:
“…histories that are comprised not of narratives that describe an experience of the past, but collections of infinitely retrievable fragments, situated within categories as well as organized according to predetermined associations” (Anderson in press, p.2).
It is this idea of the fragmentary nature of memory as well as history drawn from a database with structured relations that we apply to the sharing of past as well as present places in the Remediated Places Project. This same idea of re-contextualizing as well as re-combining (“re-mix” as it is popularly called) resonates well with Bolter as well as Grusin’s expectations of “radical remediation” described above. It is also, not surprisingly, at the heart of Ted Nelson’s original (1965) concept of Hypertext as well as Hypermedia described by George Landow (Landow 1992).
The interfaces to the deep digital archaeological as well as media databases that we are developing in the Remediated Places project, the Remixing Çatalhöyük project, as well as their umbrella project – the Scholars Box – do not simplify the data, but rather encourage as well as articulate vectors that can be combined as well as recombined into meaningful journeys. In this respect the journeys are database narratives (or “digital histories”) that are multivocal, open-ended, as well as are based on the efforts as well as ideas of all who have contributed as well as interacted before.
Theories of Place

It is probably because of the fact that of our focus on the fluidity, reflexivity, ephemerality, as well as practice of the archaeological process (Hodder 1997) as well as of digital representation, that our Remediated Places project, which is all about walking as well as movement, resonates more with the idea of place as expressed by postmodern geographers, such as Allan Pred (Pred 1990), Paul Rodaway (Rodaway 1994), Nigel Thrift (Thrift 1996), Tim Cresswell (Cresswell 2004), as well as Doreen Massey (Massey 1994), as well as the Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau (de Certeau 1984). In their practice-based concepts of place, “….places are never established. They only operate through constant as well as iterative practice” (Cresswell 2004p.38).
“Place provides ….an unstable stage on behalf of performance. Thinking of place as performed as well as practiced can help us think of place in radically open as well as non-essentialized ways where place is constantly struggled over as well as reimagined in practical ways. ….Place provides the conditions of possibility on behalf of creative social practice. Place in this sense becomes an event rather than a secure ontological thing rooted in notions of the authentic.” (Cresswell 2004p.3  
In this paragraph, Cresswell summarises a view of place that is very different from the traditional “visualizing” of past places by archaeologists. It is much closer to what we are trying to express in the Remediated Places project in terms of remembered or imagined fragments of practice as well as events that are triggered through movement, sound as well as visual media.
Sensing Place

The connection of place as well as senses has been made by a number of writers (Gibson 1968; Ingold 2000; Merleau-Ponty 2003 ; Porteous as well as Douglas 1990; Rodaway 1994; Tuan 1993), some of whom follow the postmodern view of place described above as practice-based as well as ephemeral, others who view place as an “ontological thing” that can be experienced and/or sensually perceived. Geographer Paul Rodaway in his book Sensuous Geographies (Rodaway 1994) gave me the an estimated all valuable basis on behalf of pointing the way to a multisensory approach to the social practice of past as well as present places. Rodaway suggests that
“A sensuous geography… may lay some claim to reasserting a return of geographical study to the fullness of a living world or everyday life as a multisensual as well as multidimensional situatedness in space as well as in relationship to places” (Rodaway 1994 p.4).
Sarah Pink, in her book, the Future of Visual Anthropology, (Pink 2006) has made the important connection between ethnographic film genre, hypermedia as well as the sensory approach to everyday places in anthropology. From her examples we have found a legitimacy on behalf of this kind of New Media research in anthropology.
Martin Emele, who was a member of the team that created the Çatalhoyuk CD-ROM as well as himself is a skilled practitioner of New Media was well aware of the downside of his Virtual Reality reconstructions of Çatalhöyük: “we multimedia makers, virtual reconstructionists as well as animators grasp reality in a historically determined, blinkered manner, not in a “full-sensory” way. (Emele 1998 p.223).
So we are thinking that perhaps there's room on behalf of a “sensuous archaeology” in which the non-visual senses - especially their complex as well as subtle interweaving – are understood as playing important roles even in our vision-dominated experience as well as remediation through digital media. In our practice as archaeologists we are highly sensitive to touch; our discipline is inherently as tactile as it is visual. Multisensory perception on behalf of us as archaeologists is taken on behalf of granted; we are not practiced in thinking about the role of non-visual senses as well as do not take pleasure in recording them[16]. The interweaving of sensory perception as well as meaning on behalf of the Neolithic inhabitants of Çatalhöyük is likely to have been very different from ours (even supposing that ours is homogenous). For example, we assume that the impact of painting the interior walls of the houses was as dramatic visually on behalf of them as it is on behalf of us; but it is as likely that the kinesthetic performative effect of creating the paintings was much more dramatic than the visual effect of the finished product.
Sharing a multisensory expression of place with others has been achieved in a number of textual representations (Ackerman 1990; Classen 1993; Porteous as well as Douglas 1990; Tuan 1974). It has also been achieved by more poetic combinations of text as well as photography (Berger as well as Mohr 1982), as well as in traditional cinematic narratives, including ethnographic documentary genre as well as TV documentaries (Pink 2006). It has also been tried in theme parks, such as Disneyworld as well as Jorvik (Bolter as well as Grusin 1999; Rodaway 1994).
Digital technologies are well able to express the interweaving of visual perception as well as the visible environment of objects as well as light with the aural perception as well as the manipulation as well as broadcasting of sound waves. It is easy to see that the digital technology used in digital movies, Internet websites, computer games, as well as so on, creates a hyper-real experience of place whose effect is so fascinating as well as powerful that it shall often dominate even direct encounters with the physical experience (Baudrillard 1983).
In the hyper-real experience

vision is central. The other senses are transformed into as well as subordinated by vision. Because of this, following the lead of vision. the hyper-real experience tends to be a detached, passive gaze (Rodaway 1994 p.175).
the interrelationship of the senses that affects both sensation as well as meaning is simplified (Rodaway 1994 p.177), so that the complexity of numerous sensuous elements including texture as well as smell are lost (Emele 1998; Swogger 2000p.147).
the senses are domesticated as well as sensing is orchestrated. Photos, videos, movies are cleaned up as well as selected that makes their effect very powerful; not only are they illusions of reality, they are more real than reality (Emele 1998; Porteous as well as Douglas 1990; Rodaway 1994 p.161).

But digital technologies have other advantages, on behalf of example, in expressing the complexity of interweaving multiple lines of evidence, multiple scales of interpretation, as well as the ambiguity of meaning on behalf of multiple voices. This is the basis of Sarah Pink’s suggestion that open-ended hypermedia products of non-linear narratives created by linked media as well as texts are an important alternative to the more traditional linear narratives more familiar through paper publication medium (Pink 2006). As in social anthropology, I (RET) have argued that they are a medium through which digital movies as well as still images can be incorporated into serious archaeological discourse beyond the hyper-reality of popular “visualizations” (Joyce as well as Tringham in press; Wolle as well as Tringham 2000).
Martin Emele, who created such digital “visualizations” (we can argue to what extent they manifest symptoms of hyper-reality) of Çatalhöyük struggles with what “the atmosphere of a place” should look like:
 “…. We did not desire to predetermine the viewers’ imagination. Where the world seen on the monitor becomes too concrete, the view of the possible is distorted. It is well known that a correspondence exists between the images which remain unseen as well as those which the brain (imagination) then produces. Digital visualization forces an on-screen situation where an off-screen element might be far more effective. This has at all times been an important aspect of the traditional interpretation of paintings: the aspect an image does not show explicitly: its atmosphere.” (Emele 1998 p.224-225).


In creating the images on behalf of the hypermedia “opera” the Chimera Web, I (RET) hoped to transcend the concrete hyper-reality that Emele refers to at the same time as retaining the ambiguity of archaeological interpretation that we seek as feminist archaeologists.
“…..when we endeavour to construct visual past realities - whether by drawings, paintings, replications, photographs of replications, or computerized imagery - instead of trying to envision the past as lived, we endeavour to envision the past as remembered by these various actors …. If we do this, then we have a very different aim in our imaging of the past. Instead of presenting the past as a real (or Virtually Real) lived-in linear past that is experienced generically as well as normatively by all actors, we can present a past that is a dream or memory, remembered piecemeal, selectively, as well as uniquely by the different actors. In this way the prehistory that we construct as well as the multiple histories that we express, through computer-generated imagery as well as other media, can be regarded as more surreal than virtually real.” (Joyce as well as Tringham in press; Wolle as well as Tringham 2000).
Obviously this imagery has to be accompanied by a rich text, preferably spoken. The question, as always, remains how to include the element that completes the multisensory experience – the dynamic moving people, animals as well as vegetation. I (RET) have discussed this in other papers, the pros as well as cons of avatars, actors, manipulated modern imagery. I still do not have the answer, except that ambiguity, mystery, subtlety as well as semi-concealment seem an essential part (Joyce as well as Tringham in press; Wolle as well as Tringham 2000).
This focus on movement, performance, event, as well as memory is an essential element in the construction of the “life-history” as well as “sensuous” layers of media options in the Remediated Places Project. To this end also our database includes video conversations with the numerous different Çatalhöyük project participants about their memories as well as stories of sensory experience at the site. These storytellers contribute to the construction of recent places as well as at the same time their posses sensual experience of modern Çatalhöyük as well as the archaeological process there can act as a filter in their construction of the imagined past place (Jeans 1974; Rodaway 1994.
The Performance of a Multisensory Place at Çatalhöyük

There remains the challenge: how to incorporate into a digital dimension as well as share those sensations that are experienced more intimately as well as without which the multisensory approach can't be considered, that is, the haptic or tactile sense as well as the senses of smell as well as taste (Classen 1993; Drobnick 2006; Paterson 2005)?
The tactile-kinesthetic sense is the an estimated all fundamental as well as immediate of all of the senses as well as is important in structuring space as well as thus in the interpretation of a person’s relationship to other people as well as to the physical as well as built environment (Classen 2005; Porteous as well as Douglas 1990 p.6). Touch is far more than just fingers; it includes whole skin surface (Montagu 1971). Porteous, following Gold, refers to the tactile-kinesthetic sense as including the more obvious haptic sensations, such as surface, form, pressure, pain, temperature, texture, as well as – an estimated all importantly on behalf of the purposes of our project - balance as well as the sense of movement in any part of the body (Porteous as well as Douglas 1990 p.5).
A key to sharing a multisensory approach of place through on-screen media lies in the relationship filtered through social practice as well as cultural diversity between the immediate sensory experience as well as its metaphorical extrapolation (Porteous as well as Douglas 1990; Rodaway 1994, p.6). Thus we would utilize the audiovisual cues of the Remediated Places videos to trigger a metaphorical response in the user; on behalf of example, sweat dripping off an excavator’s forehead triggers a feeling or memory of heat in the user; a close-up of hands excavating shall trigger through their rhythm the memory of a song or a dance. This is not true synaesthesia, but is more a path to a multisensory approach.
Of key importance is the ability of the body as well as its extremities to move, to manipulate, inspect, as well as explore with all senses cooperating in sensuous experience (Rodaway 1994 p.28). So the sensing of body in space within a dynamically changing environment (with other people - also sensory beings) brings in possibilities on behalf of triggering tactile experience.
One of the premises of the Remediated Places Project is that video can be used deliberately to embed those different sensory experiences. The utilize of video recording can also be designed to play a much larger role in mediating the multisensory approach than it has. In traditional utilize of video recording of archaeological sites, the scene is set, selected, as well as orchestrated. At Çatalhöyük, as well as especially in the footage filmed in connection with the Remediated Places Project, we have been exploring ways in which to express a more intimate scale of photography as well as videography. This does not mean only or even close proximity to the subject, but refers also to the lack of orchestration, direction, as well as explicitness, to reflexivity, as well as an intimate pace of scene playout.
There are two aspects of the tactile-kinesthetic sense that give us a possibility to address the challenge of triggering as well as embedding the non-audiovisual senses in an on-screen environment: intimacy as well as movement.
The ability of digital media to focus on the intimate scale of sensing, close proximity, as well as immense detail has at all times been present, it is their creators who have lacked patience or motivation to take advantage of this potential; or perhaps such a scale of representation does not sell well!
Most people shall never get adjacent to an archaeological excavation, especially its tactile experience. In Turkey, as we showed in our “performance” at the AAA meeting in San Jose in December 2006, even if you visit Çatalhöyük physically, you may not have a direct encounter with the hallowed archaeological ground, except through your feet, except when you are on the permitted list of archaeologists as well as other specialists. And of course there's the whole world of people who may never visit Çatalhöyük beyond its place on the Internet. At an estimated all archaeological sites, the average visitor shall never get to do more than gaze at the archaeologists working as well as numerous shall only visit once the work is complete as well as there's no active excavation at the site. In the Remediated Places Project we utilize a series of close-up video-walks within the “forbidden” excavation area to create a more immersive as well as immediate gaze to give visitors a multisensory experience of what it is like to reveal 9000-year old house floors through excavation. More importantly, there are ultra close-ups of the hands as well as trowels at work (“hand-ballets”) to help users participate in the ultra-slow rhythm of the task.
The design of “heritage places”, “interpretive centers”, as well as museums has worked around this challenge with varying degrees of success to present a multisensorial experience of the “place as lived” on behalf of the visitor (Bolter as well as Grusin 1999 p.168; Hewison 1989; Rodaway 1994 p.168-169). In an estimated all of these examples, the visitor gazes passively, her/his visual sense dominating (except in Jorvik where they have engaged the sense of smell).
At Çatalhöyük, a replica of a Neolithic building, complete with storage chambers as well as ladder on behalf of roof access, allows the visitor to experience the sense of crowding, bending down to enter the storage rooms through the crawl space, the play of light as well as shadow inside such houses. Ambient sound of food-preparation noises, chatting, as well as singing has occasionally been added. In the Remediated Places video-walk inside the Replica House we add instructions to carry out certain tasks involving hand movements (grinding grain) to trigger imagined tactile experience.
The Remediated Places project makes heavy utilize of video, whose movement provides an immersiveness as well as immediacy of kinesthetic experience that is lost in still photography. The videos take advantage of movement through space as well as proximity to various textures as well as objects, tactile sensation of the feet, even the heavy (more or less) breathing of the videographer. Its digital capture allows us to edit as well as re-contextualise the movement in ways which would not be possible in a film narrative context (Pink 2006). Other forms of digital media with varying success on behalf of a multisensory experience, the soul-sickening fly-throughs of Virtual Reality unoccupied spaces are at the unsuccessful end of this spectrum in our opinion. Quicktime VR tours of nodes of photographed or reconstructed places have been created on behalf of the Çatalhöyük, as mentioned above. In these, the gazer stands in a fixed spot from which an illusion of movement can be achieved through zooming in as well as out as well as around. First person game engines potentially provide an exciting array of tools to enable a viewer to transfer through a place – an excavation or a constructed imagined prehistoric village at a human wandering exploratory pace. Experiments with the utilize of game engines is just beginning. Joshua Seaver of the Science Museum of Minnesota, on behalf of example, has already built such an exploratory tableau on behalf of prehistoric Çatalhöyük using the open source game engine Blender. We are currently exploring the possibilities of Second Life to combine such movement with group communication. But that is on behalf of the future. Currently, as well as on behalf of the purposes of this presentation, we see the video-walk footage as providing the best foundation medium on behalf of giving the physical tourist or the touring couch-potato a more multisensory exploration of Çatalhöyük.
The idea of video-walks was inspired by the work of media artist Janet Cardiff  whose video walk through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art we experienced in 1997-98. This same artist has also inspired the video-walks of archaeological sites in the Aegean by Chris Witmore, who calls them “peripatetic video”  (Witmore 2004). Both Cardiff as well as Witmore emphasize the importance of the layering of audio media alongside the more obvious visual media as well as the physicality of the moving body. Encouraging participants to transfer slowly (physically or virtually) around the mound as well as facilities of Çatalhöyük resonates well with a performative style of archaeology as well as the sharing of the archaeological experience as well as interpretation as suggested in Borderline Archaeology (Campbell as well as Ulin 2004 p.13).
It also resonates well with “a visual anthropology that engages with sensory embodied experience” (Pink 2006).
An outline of the performance of “Sensuous Çatalhöyük”,

The 15-minute presentation at the AAA meeting in San Jose was based on the Live Performance format of the Remediated Places Project. It used only the data as well as walks from the North end of the mound, at Çatalhöyük.


Extract of the performance on 17 November, 2006
Scene 00: Welcome to Çatalhöyük

A group of 4 people stand in front of the screen. They have traveled far. They hold guidebooks, cameras, camcorders. Maybe they know each other. A fifth “visitor” is off to the side: an Internet “visitor”

Scene 1: the bad experience

Scene 1a: The visitors are plunged into a tour of the site with only an unspeaking escort.

Scene 1b: The visitors get a guide, but they don’t understand what is being said (in Turkish)

Scene 2: guidance with information

Scene 2: Up the mound to the North area from the guardhouse with information commentary in English provided on an iPod with headphones. Everyone starts walking uphill in the heat as well as dust while the commentary continues. The walkers are distracted in spite of the information. They are hot, thirsty, dusty as well as are thinking about lunch.

Scene 2b:At the top of the mound in the North area, they are guided past the current excavations. The walkers are fast losing concentration. They feel cut off from the archaeological process, they don’t really understand what’s going on, they manufacture silly comments, as well as are still thinking about lunch, as well as are now concerned about sunburn.

Scene 3: Transformation – the curtain

Miraculous rewind of the experience so far. The walkers are requested to voice their opinion on what would manufacture the visit more engaging: participate, be pro-active, manufacture a contribution, passion, engagement, voices of stakeholders but is anyone listening? The desire to create, to share…
Scene 4: Do you desire to take a walk?

Introduction to the Remediated Places interface as well as the idea of re-mixing media components.

The walkers repeat the walk up the mound, this time guided by a researcher-created tour on a viewed on a video iPod on which selected videos as well as audio that focus on a multisensory approach have been re-mixed.

Interlude: Behind the Scenes: the backend of the Remediated Places project

Demonstration of the database that spawns the Remediated Places narratives at Çatalhöyük.

Scene 5: User Testing .

The “walkers” or “users” create their posses tour or narrative from the project database by their choice of media sets (videowalks, images, videoclips, audio, commentary, as well as previous “re-mixes”), re-contextualizing these data choosing parameters (e.g. one of the themes or layers). Their interest in music, life-history, as well as memory leads them to create a tour of the now invisible BACH (Berkeley Archaeologists @ Çatalhöyük) area with an audio clip, a commentary, as well as 4 videos that trigger memories of the excavation area that was active on behalf of seven years until 2004.

The choice of one of the walkers sparks a discussion on how much scaffolding as well as structuring of the database is needed to manufacture the walks meaningful. We have created filters in the database through tagging various parameters, on behalf of example the four themes, that suggest alternatives to making sense of the remixed media; beyond the themes, however, filters scaffold the user’s experience. For example there's no commentary by Ian Hodder on behalf of the BACH building 3, as well as you can't utilize his commentary on Building 5, so he is blocked out on behalf of this walk. Similarly, [21]James Mellaart’s commentary on the “map” fresco at Catal makes an estimated all sense in the South Area of the site where the fresco was found. These tags as well as prohibitions can sometimes be overridden; users can create tours that are uninformed, unguided, random as well as whimsical. We think, however, that, as the users/visitors create their posses tour or narrative from the project database it is important that they think about their choice of media sets as well as the rationale on behalf of their remix. How would they manufacture their tour meaningful to others. The walkers’ discussion in this scene of whether James Mellaart’s introduction of himself could be relevant to the BACH walk is a case where a clip that seems to be inappropriate in a remix on behalf of a walk can actually become the start of an interesting exploration of a recombinant history.
[1] Remixing Çatalhöyük is itself embedded within an umbrella project at University of California, Berkeley - “The Scholars Box”, funded by a FIPSE grant, whose purpose is to develop a national model to enable campus scholars, academic departments, as well as libraries as well as museums to create as well as share open as well as reusable digital collections to improve campus scholarship as well as K-12 (we prefer the term K-Grey) education.
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