Media archaeology of interactive exhibitions

One of the courses I had during this semester was in the area of media philosophy, more exactly about media archaeology. (We have to take at least one scientific module during our studies, this was mine.) Now, I don't have _any_ background in philosophy or different media theories. My programme is a very practical one, and all the other students in the course were from media sciences and media culture - they literally breath texts and theories. The course was also in German, which I don't have anything against, but academic philosophical texts do tend to escape me. Luckily we also had some texts in English. Still, most of the time I didn't have much clue what we were talking about. It was great! :D (I'm used to courses where I get bored, since I get the idea behind the lectures already in the beginning and then I just waste my time thinking of something else the rest of the lesson. It's a bad habit of mine.)

So it was nice and challenging, the course, and I got lots of new ideas and ways of thinking. Our semester contribution was to write 15 pages about media archeology about some specific subject we could select ourselves. I took naturally the science centres as my theme, even if I must confess I still don't exactly know what media archeology really is about. (Yes, yes, I have an idea, but I'm not sure if that's it all or if I missed some pretty important part.) I post my essay here, since I found some links and references that might help others who are interested in the same area. (Our teacher was nice enough to let me write in English - thank god!

Media archeology in interactive exhibitions

Hopefully it'll be of help for someone. :)

Skirt out of old jeans

Even if we don't have the lessons anymore it doesn't mean that there would be less work. I'm slowly working with the projects that need to be finished by the end of semester (31.3.). As mentioned before, I have some handcrafting to do for the Textilica course. Today, I finished a skirt I made out of old jeans. I mean to decorate it with some stuff that's relevant for the course (I'll update later), so it's not the skirt itself that's important. But I'm rather happy I managed to make it, since I've never done a skirt like that before. (I won't post the instructions here, the net is full of them, just google if interested.) It came out better than my normal things, maybe because I did everything really well, like ripped the seams instead of just cutting them. (It was a great idea, I wouldn't have hade enough fabric left if I cut them!)

Weimar is the heaven for any handicraft freak, since there are so many good shops for this kind of stuff. I even bought some thicker needles for my sewing machine for this (I've broken too many needles sewing jeans). Let's see if the rest of my plans work as well. :)