What is a diffractive digital image?

In the video introduction to the Blackfoot Digital Library, the Blackfoot Knowledge Holder, the late Narcisse Blood (Blood 2006), perfectly captures the themes we want to discuss in this introduction. He states, ‘New and changing technologies can work against the people or be harnessed and used in their own worldview’. In a statement powerful in its simplicity, Blood outlines the way in which we cannot assume that digital technologies are innocent tools, and we need to remember that these technologies are shaped by particular outlooks and worldviews (see also Cubitt 2014). We can either use these technologies as standardized methods of documentation, or we can unpack these technologies, harness them, and utilize them under a different guise for other purposes. We view this process of repurposing as diffraction. This book has two aims. First, it examines digital imaging through the divergent lenses of archaeology, art practice, and cultural heritage. Second, it looks at the ethics of the deployment of digital images as a form of data (and conversely, data processed to look like photographic images), particularly how digital imaging is shaped through collaboration with Indigenous communities. From the word go, we should point out that these two aims are related. We argue that ethics do not stand apart from either scientific or art practices (see e.g. Lyons and Supernant 2020 in archaeology); we do not practice first and add ethics to our practices at a later stage. Instead, as Karen Barad (2007, 393) points out, our ethics and our ontologies are intra-actively related: ‘intra-actions effect what’s real and what’s possible, as some things come to matter and others are excluded’. Ethics and responsibility compose the very fabric of our encounters: ‘Intra-acting responsibly as part of the world means taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help us and it flourish’ (Barad 2007, 396).

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