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Thought you might be interested in responses to contemporary archaeologies by art
practitioners. In late March I attended the Locative Media workshop in Helsinki. This
brought together a range of media artists (from video artists to database
theoreticians to people working with mobile technologies and GPS) plus Mike
Pearson, Lotta Svinhufvud and Victor Buchli to collaborate on re-thinking the central
railway station in Helsinki. Mike and Lotta did some work  on the archaeology of
sound, exploring ideas around continuities of sound *artifacts*. Victor was following
the cleaners when I last saw him so perhaps he might like to update us. I did a series
of timed fieldwalking exercises and photographed and collected everything I could
find at floor level (except, i have to admit, the dog poop that happened to be there in
my time slot before the very efficient cleaners magicked it away).

But the other people involved in the workshop are more broadly involved with
questions of location/place and material residue and there is certainly potential for
future interesting collaborations between archaeologists and arts-based
practitioners (in the UK the work of Louise K Wilson with English Heritage at
Spadeadam is noteworthy). Check out http://www.pixelache.ac/locative/.

In the Baltic, there's been some interesting work done at Karosta in Latvia. Check out
Sara Kolster's and Derek Holzer's work at http://karosta.edworks.net/index.cfm?id=1.
The Baltic countries more generally seem particularly active in the interweaving of
new media and other arts practices with the standing remains and material culture of
the Cold War.

And anthropologist Anne Galloway http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/index.php has
also put together interesting material for those of us concerned with the emerging
archaeologies of now.

I know that Cornelius and Dan are probably more engaged with current practices
than I am (see esp. the recently advertised sculpture_archaeology conference), but it
certainly seems that just as performativity dominated academic metaphor through
the 1990s, archaeology seems like the hot ticket for non-archaeologists at the
moment.

Something to think about.

Angela