 So, what I did not do in the pre-circulated version of this presentation is make explicit reference to the title of this session. In fact, before this presentation I don't think I have ever used the word post-human or trans-human in any publication or presentation. So I hope I'm not the only one who's completely new to this. And yet I realize that I have probably been post-human, a post-human, all my intellectual career. You know, when I think about celebrating my celebrating ambiguity and my love of turning anything established on its head and encouraging others to do so, to look at it upside down. And I also, I think a lot of post-human, you have to have a sense of humor. So don't start looking really serious as you listen to me, unless you can't understand what I'm saying. You're allowed to look serious then. Otherwise, you really can't be pompous or serious when you're being a post-human. It doesn't work. So through the graphic artist, James Walgrom, whose work you see here, I've discovered and enjoyed Karen Barad's 2003 post-humanist performativity, perhaps a little later than some of you, or most of you. But it has certainly made me feel more courageous about standing here in front of you and suggesting that stories about prehistoric imagined people can be created without putting words into their heads or mouths. She starts her article by saying, language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn. It seems that every turn lately, everything, even materiality, is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. Pre-imagined narratives are becoming more mainstream in the interpretation of archaeological material remains. Coupled with this is the power of such stories to enable a larger audience to encounter the intangibles of human life in the past, emotions affect gender, senses, queerness, and so on. Much of storytelling of the past involves putting words into the mouth or at least into the heads of long-dead people, giving them a voice. Having been in the middle of such a practice, I would be the last to deny the emotive power of such stories, especially when the archaeological or documentary empirical sources that lie in the background are made transparent. But I have to confess that the voices, as represented on screen or in printed text, have always been as deeply problematic for me as the visual representations of their faces, which maybe comes as a surprise if you know anything about the faceless blob business. What kind of emotional responses are we as creators hoping for? What is it that creates an emotional response in readers or viewers? I'm hoping and I'm pretty sure that Sarah has the answer to that and is going to tell us all about it and I do hope I don't have to leave to go and clone myself downstairs before she's done that. There is something that prevents the full suspension of disbelief in prehistoric conversations themselves. They are represented in familiar patterns of conversation that make their meaning clear and unambiguous. Conversations revolve around information rather than idle nonlinear banter or fillers, what have been called empty speech and speech disfluences that fill most everyday conversations. When we give faces to the blobs, there has been more experimentation in manipulating the imagery to blur details, leaving room for the ambiguity so that the imagination of the audience has not been smothered but is rather inspired. With speech, however, there has been very little such experimentation. My agenda is to think about how could we make those voices, especially the prehistoric ones, as opposed to the historic ones, less clear, more ambiguous and still be emotionally compelling and meaningful? Are there options that do not involve clear speech? The two inspirations I mentioned in the pre-circulated paper explore two means of such ambiguous utterances. The first one is by Giorgi Ligetti, who is originally Hungarian, who creates emotional pieces, operas with no words but plenty of meaning, ASMR or autonomous sensory meridian response videos seek emotional responses to close encounters with binaural whispered nothings in your ear and sounds of repetitive material contacts. Let me get that. Vinny Bob got tingling up here, not yet. So in the two short experimental demonstrations that follow, various multimodal electronic tricks have been used to express ambiguity by fogging the specifics and clarity of words, embodying the words so that their meaning and message is expressed by gesture, rhythm and tone of voice rather than specific words. This first demonstration is called digital dwelling, legalized after the legality we just saw in the previous slide. Now, because Alice Waterson has been thinking critically about the ambiguity of archaeological data and visualization of their interpretation, I feel comfortable in taking the liberty of manipulating her video that is based on her project, digital dwelling. I hope she won't be offended. I'm sure she'll let me know if she is. There is a part of the tour through the underground prehistoric village of Scarab Ray, where we begin to pass through an ambiguous cave-like sequence and end up in what is visually almost an ASMR video. The foggy visuals of the video are accompanied by a music score that personally does nothing for me to enhance the presentation. So this is the first, this is her from her video extractive. It creates very different emotive content, I think. The demonstration that follows is an adaptation of a recent chapter in a print book, Object Stories, edited by Steve Brown and Annen Clark and Ursula Frederick. The chapter is titled Dido on the Basket and comprises the story of a basket found in a burial pit of a 45-year-old woman at 9,000-year-old Çatal Huyuk in Turkey. The final section of this short article juxtaposes, you can see on the right, textual fragments, some now are taken directly from the observations embedded in the official project report, Last House on the Hill. Others under then are interpretations wrapped in the enticing clothing of imagined narratives of Neolithic events. In these three tiny films, I follow the structure of the chapter, but the digital on-screen format allows me to go way beyond the print version in terms of affect, especially in the third mini-movie. Not only that, but the basket participates throughout the movies with comments. Unlike the printed version, these movies are almost completely non-verbal. That one. Sorry. You can keep track of the dates on this panel. Center. And we have a piece of paper. At first I thought the balls in the center are too narrow compared to what's in the old. Think of how you make a basket. You have to start at the center, and you have to make this very small circle, so you start with a small bundle, which is higher up, and then the bundle will come a bit more big. And if you check, you'll see my friends of events we have here, and the length of what we have here, you sort of flip this back, you have an edge here, which goes here. I mean, if it has been conserved, I have to check it all, but it pretty much looks like it's quite precious. In this version of an interface for such stories, masquerading for now as an augmented reality layer is superimposed on the video reality of the archeologist. For now, excavation of the basket. On the augmented reality interface, the visitor is invited to choose to watch either expository textual description of the basket and the archeological data, or the spoken text of imagined stories about or by the basket. Or they can watch an interpretive video based on the imagined story designed to demonstrate the ambiguity of the data on which the story is based by manipulating both visuals and audio track that challenges the visitor's preconception of the past. More in keeping with the post-human idea, instead of the nicely ordered and categorized interface of the previous slide, I prefer this interface with the beginning of a mosaic. This one shows several things. Firstly, that many more expository narratives of the now, like you see in the white text-filled blocks, have been written. Secondly, that many creatively imagined stories have been written. They are the red text-filled, but that many, many more could and should be written, as you can see from the ones that have red blank or empty. Thirdly, that stories of affect the emotional, poetic, experimental, verbal, or not are very rare. These are the green image-filled ones, though they could be told in countless numbers that are the green blank or green solid squares. Finally, this interface is showing that one archeological event can spawn a huge number of stories created from multiple viewpoints and perspectives. As I said in the pre-circulated paper, if I was to answer the title of this session, I would say that these experiments are to make sure that what we do not know is not smothered by the enticement of certitude, even when we create fictional stories, by taking away clear visuals of reconstruction and by replacing clear text of a story with marginal aspects of language. I am reminding others that we do not have either a clear visualization of past lives or any idea of the words in their mouths or their heads. Moreover, it is possible that removing spoken content that has obvious meaning to us and focusing the story on the utterances makes us more aware of the powerful emotional evocation that is contributed by these marginal aspects of speech. We can't see or hear their details, but we can get very close to them to evoke their emotions.