Eli Campbell Art & Design

The Historical Materialist Illusion Theater is an installation based on the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994), designed using CAD software and fabricated using CNC technology. Gimbutas, whose work was discarded by American archaeologists in the 1970’s, argued that the Neolithic cultures of Europe before c. 4400 BCE enjoyed millennia of relatively uninterrupted peaceful living and achieved high levels of sophistication in art and design in a non-patriarchal social order. Developments in DNA analysis over the past decade have vindicated Gimbutas’ Kurgan hypothesis, which explained the spread of Indo-European languages across Eurasia as the result of a massive migration out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.  

The form of the theater is an artistic composition inspired by Gimbutas’ work deciphering prehistoric art, but it functions as a self-contained exhibition of digitally-fabricated representations of archaeological artifacts. Neolithic art often features complex patterns or symbolic signs which are sculpted, painted, or carved on surfaces with precisely rendered curvature. Using a computational image-based approach, these forms and patterns are vector traced directly from images of Neolithic artifacts and fabricated with CNC technology. Artifacts are represented with recycled 3D-printed plastic, lasercut plywood, and displayed with a Pepper’s Ghost illusion.

This piece follows up a research project on the work of Gimbutas along with the work of anthropologist/activist David Graeber and economist/economic historian Michael Hudson. Critical scholarly works on the history of debt by Graeber and Hudson were written before ancient DNA analysis revived interest in the works of Gimbutas. My paper applies Gimbutas’ theories to the work of Hudson and Graeber to develop a “prehistory of debt”. You can download and read the paper below:

For more information about Marija Gimbutas, there are a number of publicly available documentaries and videos on Youtube, some of which are featured in the installation video: