Search results for ""Author Dragoş Gheorghiu""

Architectures of Fire attempts to present the entanglement between the physical phenomenon of fire, the pyro-technological instrument that it is, its material supports, and the human being. In this perspective, the physical process of combustion, material culture, as well as the development of human action in space, are addressed together. Fire is located at the centre of all pre-modern architecture. It creates the living or technological space. Fire creates architectures since it imposes geometry, from the simple circles of stone or clay, which control its spread (and which are the geometrical figures of its optimal efficiency), to cone trunks, cylinders, half-spheres, half-cylinders or parallelepipeds, circular geometric figures that efficiently control the air-draught process required for combustion. All these forms involving the circle are determined by the control and conservation of thermal energy. We should not imagine that the term ‘architecture’ evokes only constructed objects that delimit human action. Architecture means not only the built space, but also the experienced space, in the present case around the pyro-instruments. Pyro-instruments involve an ergonomic, kinesthetic and visual relationship, as well as the rhythmic actions of feeding or maintaining fire at a certain technological tempo. The technological agency is structured both by the physics of the combustion phenomenon, and by the type of operation to be performed.

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The present volume shows the archaeological thinking as a form of art, revealing the poetics of the archaeological imagination. It shows that, in their work, archaeologists, without being inspired by contemporary artists, use creative methods, and their analysis of the art of the Past goes beyond the material culture of the art objects, into the realm of the mental processes of creation. Consequently, the purpose of this book is to present the archaeological research functioning as a sort of artistic creation, proposing new perspectives on the archaeological imagination. It offers an exploration of the creative processes, the possibility of finding inspiration in experientiality, and the approach to the act of creation as a subject for archaeological research. When analysing the art of the Past, or when using art methods to approach the Past, we are facing an act of creation where imagination, emotion, and creativity combine under the form of an experiential instrument of investigation. The book offers a vision of archaeological research, a means to understand the complexity of the human nature, and consequently, to approach the human thinking structured on similarity and symbolism, being able to detect cultural and psychological subjects ignored until today, and, at the same time, to offer a series of visions of art, seen from the perspective of archaeology.

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‘Artistic Practices and Archaeological Research’ aims to expand the field of archaeological research with an anthropological understanding of practices which include artistic methods. The project has come about through a collaborative venture between Dragos Gheorghiu (archaeologist and professional visual artist) and Theodor Barth (anthropologist). This anthology contains articles from professional archaeologists, artists and designers. The contributions cover a scale ranging from theoretical reflections on pre-existing archaeological finds/documentation, to reflective field-practices where acts of ‘making’ are used to interface with the site. These acts feature a manufacturing range from ceramics, painting, drawing, type-setting and augmented reality (AR). The scope of the anthology – as a book or edited whole – has accordingly been to determine a comparative approach resulting in an identifiable set of common concerns. Accordingly, the book proceeds from a comparative approach to research ontologies, extending the experimental ventures of the contributors, to the hatching of artistic propositions that demonstrably overlap with academic research traditions, of epistemic claims in the making. This comparative approach relies on the notion of transposition: that is an idea of the makeshift relocation of methodological issues – research ontologies at the brink of epistemic claims – and accumulates depth from one article to the next as the reader makes her way through the volume. However, instead of proposing a set method, the book offers a lighter touch in highlighting the role of operators between research and writing, rather entailing a duplication of practice, in moving from artistic ideas to epistemic claims. This, in the lingo of artistic research, is known as exposition. Emphasising the construct of the ‘learning theatre’ the volume provides a support structure for the contributions to book-project, in the tradition of viewing from natural history. The contributions are hands-on and concrete, while building an agenda for a broader contemporary archaeological discussion.

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Recycling is a basic anthropological process of humankind. The reutilization of materials or of ideas from the Past is a process determined by various natural or cultural causes. Recycling can be motivated by a crisis or by a complex symbolic cause like the incorporation of the Past into the Present. What archaeology has not insisted upon is the dimensional scale of the process, which operates from the micro-scale of the recycling of the ancestors’ material, up to the macro-scale of the landscape. It is well known that there are direct relations between artefacts and landscapes in what concerns the materiality and mobility of objects. An additional relation between artefact and landscape may be the process of recycling. In many ways artefact and landscape can be considered as one aspect of material culture, perceived at a different scale, since both have the same materiality and suffer the same process of reutilisation. This book invites archaeologists to approach the significant process of recycling within the archaeological record at two different levels: of artefacts and of landscape.

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