The Value of Things explores the evolution of the department store and the public museum as perfect technologies for the sourcing, transportation, accounting, stocking, and exhibition of material things and the people and values that swirl around them. Unfortunately its out of print.

You could browse a hacked photocopy of the preface and introduction, download it from the foot of the page, or read on...

This is an extract from the introduction

The Value of Things

The speed and stunning profusion of modern material life has deformed the nature of culture. Values are no longer implemented from above -the influence and taste of a few- but ripple and fluctuate through a networked web of images, objects, spaces and media. On an individual and public, national and international scale we are described by an astonishing array of things; a growing mountain of clothes, tools, art, gifts, information, souvenirs, knowledge, electronic technology and rubbish piles-up around us.

This vast accumulation of things, from an ancient egyptian sandals to ‘new’ software exist in a complex mesh of competing narratives which dispute ownership, contest interpretation, disagree on value, and correct and incorrect usage. There is an endless struggle to control, classify and interpret objects, as they are inserted into and spill out of every shelf, cupboard, display-case, shop, home, gallery, museum, magazine, computer monitor and land-fill site.

In hindsight, our previous century unfolded as the endgame of the 19th century.

CompDoc 191058:

Partial record of Victoria and Albert Museum's Bicentenary celebrations, 19. 09. 2057

Composite performs a human performing a live-thread recall.

I participated in the inaugural workshop

Utopography: Imaging, representing and critiquing imagined worlds organised by the Arts and Science Fiction research group, the Department of Things to Come at the Baltic 39, 31-39 High Bridge, Newcastle, NE1 1EW,

 19th September - 20th September 2013

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had, and will never have.

Italo Calvino

I've been visiting the Shabako Stone, at the British Museum, for as long as I have been living in London, its a source of wonder.

In the twenty-fifth Dynasty, sometime around c700 BC, an Egyptian mythological text was incised for eternity in a basalt stela.  The text contains an account of the creation of the world by Ptah, God of Memphis and patron deity of craftsmen.....

.....For the very great one is Ptah, who gave [life] to all the gods and their kas through this heart and through this tongue, in which Horus had taken shape as Ptah, in which Thoth had taken shape as Ptah. Thus heart and tongue rule over all the limbs in accordance with the teaching that Ptah is in every body and every mouth of all gods, all men, all cattle, all creeping things, whatever lives,.....

Lost and centuries later refoud, the stela was repurposed as the base of a mill. A square hole was cut, the 'eye', to locate the mill shaft, and shallow radiating furrows to produce the flour from the milled grain as the top stone turned. Decades of grinding grain slowly obliterated most of the text.