Shapesoftime

Marshall Mateer

Shapesoftime

Shapes of Time is the website and project of Marshall Mateer with a focus on the Spanish Civil War, the International Brigades and responses in Britain (UK) between 1936 – 1939.

  • the the stories of some of the people involved
  • evidence, memory, storytelling and history
  • how the media responded

My fascination in the arts, the media, history, film and photography and the wonder that’s in and around every little nook and cranny – from dust to destiny – carries through everything. 

  • practice to theory – and all the way back again
  • traversing the arts – heritage to futures – scratchy sticks to digital data 
  • marmalising the media – old tropes & new memes – issues and histories

I hope you find ideas and things of interest, and, perhaps, something useful to your own work.

Shapesoftime goes way back to childhood collections – bits of broken pottery from the bottom of the old garden, stamps, fossils from the coast and, from the little stream that ran alongside the estate, still live whirligig beetles in a jam jar.  Its media form reaches back to 1969 – the Hornsey years of film, animation, photography and (tape) video. Then it was the photocopying years in the classroom and all those highly detailed pen-drawn A4 worksheets. As web materials it reaches back to the launch of the internet in UK schools in 1998. 

The Shapesoftime website was launched in 2003. You can see snapshots of the developing site on the Internet Archive’s ‘WayBack Machine’ going back to 5th June 2005 which describes the schools Pathé Newsreel project – the first demonstrator of the power of broadband to provide access to film to schools in the UK. 

2024 has seen the latest resetting of the website to focus on the Spanish Civil War.

The Rattlebag menu provides room for a wider range of articles about art, poetry and the media.