This past summer I excavated a series of paintings on a platform at Çatalhöyük, the
last being a spectacular series of five hands, negative white with a red
background, all pointing west. While collaborating on the archive report with my
fellow excavators, I decided to reconstruct the "red phase" of Building 49 in
Second Life so we could see how the building might have looked while in this
phase. The painting of the hands was part of the phase, and I began "fixing" it in
photoshop, removing animal holes and replacing patchy areas of the paint, so I
could import it into the virtual reconstruction.
The process made me uneasy, and very aware that I was not presenting a "real" or
a "fake" representation of the past, but something in the hazy middle, a third
space that does not exist for the archaeologists or the people of the neolithic, but
a space that exists digitally. I decided to push this boundary, and made an even
more figurative version, an unambiguous white and red representation that would
better suit the cartoonish world of Second Life. It would look more real, make
more visual sense in the context on Second Life than an if I had used an actual
photo, baked on to the texture of the platform.
The fourth image is what brought the photographs together--I happened to
glance up at one of the concrete buildings in downtown Berkeley, where someone
had stenciled a hand, in negative, with a red background. I felt a nexus in the
past/present/real/digital tangle come into sharp relief for one brief second, then
become hopelessly, wonderfully intertwined once again.
by 
