The motif of Skinner’s room recurs through William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy as a place of refuge. It is a shack knocked together from salvage, suspended high on the bridge tower, a place where things and images, old tech and new tech are recombined into makeshift forms. A space for assimilation, where stories are woven together and electricity applied. It is the birds-nest vantage point of a post-devaluation community. In Gibson’s world metaphor is ‘a component like a capacitor’. Here the thought-form fiction of Skinner’s Room is the imaginary location to collect the works manifest in this real life show.
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The prefix arche (found in archive and architecture and archaeology) is Greek for beginning, origin, foundation, source, first principle, central location and origin of power, authority, sovereignty. It represents a starting point or founding act in both an ontological sense ("this is whence it began") and a nomological sense ("this is whence it derives its authority"). Archives are all about narratives of origin, identity and belonging, and the politics of ownership, organization, access and use.
ReplyDeleteMichael Shanks http://documents.stanford.edu/MichaelShanks/302