Druids in the Crash Zone

At Halloween the veil between worlds becomes thin, hauntings are played out, level violations occur and objects are beached. Metalepsis is a bleeding of the boundaries between narrative levels or logically distinct worlds. My project works through archaeology and gaming: prehistoric materialities and ‘post-historic’ informatic cultures and spaces of encounter.

To perceive an artifact in substitutional terms is to understand it as belonging to more than one historical moment simultaneously. A skeuomorph, etymologically a container-form, is a figure of anachronism: a temporal or material inconsistency of method and material. Skeuomorphs are familiar in digital interfaces. They disguise the monstrosity of transition between the digital and the analogue worlds. As an archaeological term skeuomorph denotes artefacts made from one material to imitate a form usually made from another. For instance, an axe-head fabricated from chalk - a violent object safely displaced into the symbolic. Material transpositions may shift symbolic registers and produce temporal slippages, proleptic encounters.

Data objects produced by 3D imaging technology share some characteristics with prehistoric ones, being mobile, portable, depositable and subject to assemblage. If prehistory is understood through materialities and process, the embedding of living and dying into a stratified landscape; post-historic informatic cultures produce othered materialities, constructions of self, weaponised images, hauntings and forms of grief-play. I am interested to develop Haraway’s [2016] notion of the thick now in relation to presencing as well as investigating the temporal inconsistencies arising from framerate and refresh rate glitches in gameplay.