Ecologies of the digital synanthrope: selkie wives and buffalo stones

This paper considers questions raised as an artist working alongside archaeologists on the Making a Mark project. This project looked again at the decorated and portable objects of the British Neolithic. The shifting relationships of field walking and narration as practices produced a set of encounters with things and sites, with their digital counterparts and technical images. Data capture produced new objects: things we compiled, fabricated, rigged and assembled. Bundles, pelts, skins and shells. Re-purposed proto-objects, unwrapped UV maps. Such engagements led us to consider the anatomy, pathology and ontology of a digital model. We developed a sense of the ecology of the digital synanthrope, neophyte familiars and pest species nesting in the midden, spinning webs in the dark spaces. Our method here is that of the fox, digging holes in the section, queering the strata for reasons of our own. We want to talk about the possibilities this project opened out for socio-technical networking: the activation of digital remnants - the taphonomy of expropriated artefacts in UK collections - by Indigenous art programme students in SW Alberta.