There’s been an interesting collection of WTC ads made far before the events of 9/11 posted recently at copyrant. There’s nothing notable in the ads themselves if it weren’t for the events of 9/11 but that’s the interesting thing about them. As an artifact they were meaningless 1970-80’s magazine fodder that held little resonance for a modern reader until the events of 9/11 - now they can evoke a response in just about anyone simply because their chronology combined with a recent event makes them appear the work of some secret prescient author.

Yet as a reader I don’t (and I am guessing no-one else does) react with the thought of “how the **** did they know that would happen in 1979″. My interest in the ads is piqued not by the factor of time-shifting or prophecy but by the irony of coincidence, the significant meaning imbued on an otherwise ordinary object, and probably my mind sparking as it tries to make a seemingly logical connection (one is related to the other) with the incongruent dates.

The parallels to biblical studies are obvious I think… both in terms of how we mis/treat artifacts, chronology and history but in the way in which artifacts/events can both foresee the past and remember the future. It seems the focus is often on attempting to assemble artifacts into a logical relationship whatever that may be, rather than asking how those artifacts attract, create or adopt meaning. There is certainly interest in the latter, but it seems pursuit of the former never dies. To some it seems a coincidence that there are no coincidences in the biblical text…

via boingboing

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 11:08 pm by Paul Nikkel and is filed under biblical studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.