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Journal of Material Culture
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Vision, Media, Noise and the Percolation of Time

Symmetrical Approaches to the Mediation of the Material World

Christopher L. Witmore

Brown University, USA

Why in the articulation of archaeological knowledge have wider sensory properties of the material world been over looked? This article considers this question in relation to sound. It argues that the neglect of sound is partly the product of human transactions with instruments and media in practice. Moreover, the denial of sound as a relevant category of archaeological inquiry arises out of modernist notions of space-time that reside at the heart of the discipline. So while the visual is linked with spatial properties that are resistant to change, the aural is connected with the temporal and is considered momentary and fleeting in nature. Still, it is argued that sound as a quality of things is fundamental to human sensation - to being. In building upon a non-modernist notion of time where entities and events quite distant in a linear temporality are proximate through their simultaneous entanglement and percolation I suggest we might learn what we can understand from tuning into the acoustic properties of the material past. But rather than reproduce an unnecessary dualism between seeing and hearing, this endeavor will require us to relearn how to see and hear at the same time through other, complimentary modes of articulation and engagement.

Key Words: belles noiseuses • located media • media • percolating time • vision

Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 11, No. 3, 267-292 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1359183506068806
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[Abstract] [PDF]