This Is The Beginning Of An Art Project Called 'Mycenae'. At The End Of The Mycenaean Era, When The Palaces

This is the beginning of an art project called 'Mycenae'. At the end of the Mycenaean era, when the palaces burned to the ground, the permanent records of the people - written in leather - were burned along with everything else. But their temporary records, written in recyclable clay, we're fired in the heat and thus preserved by the same act that destroyed everything else. Life loves irony.

The project here is to take temporary communications (or things we perceive as temporary) - email exchanges, instant message conversations, text exchanges, even snail spam mail - things we don't mean to preserve, and imprint them on porcelain tablets, firing and preserving them.

I'll admit one tablet by itself really doesn't look all that impressive. This is a project which - if it works at all - will work because of the scale. Imagine hundreds of those tablets covering a whole wall, each one containing incidentally preserved fragments of peoples' lives.

QR sampler update. Letters A-D. Detail of C & D. C was so incredibly time consuming. It would take a lot to convince me I needed to do that again.

Each code is an individual letter of the alphabet; so far it's letters A - L.

12/36. One third done. It’s really nice to have a project that doesn’t take months/years to complete.

“THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A WOMAN ARTIST

This is one of our all-time favorites, which we did to encourage female artists to look on the sunny side. Women all over the world, not just artists, identify with it. One sent us $1,000 to run it as an ad in Artforum, a top U.S. art magazine.”

Guerrilla Girls, 1989.

And of course this is the other thing I spent my weekend working on. I'm about 25% done. Book 2 is the longest book of the Iliad, at 877 lines. I'm around line 220.

I'm working on this book a lot more slowly than I did book 1. But I wasn't also working for a PhD when I did book 1. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

I'm hoping I can finish this whole project at around the same time I finish my PhD, which gives me 3-4 years more.

Day 37.

This is something I made a few months ago now, whilst procrastinating and avoiding other projects. I guess it's a combination of my Iliad project, and another piece I was working on - The Text Gazes Back (of which there are photos on my website: www.theclassicist.co.uk).

It's the emotional states of characters throughout book one, represented by emoticons. Every row represents a different scene.