Diffracting Digital Images in the Making

This paper presents a diffractive dialogue between prehistoric imagery, digital or computational imaging, and art practices. Our dialogue begins by responding to Thomas Nail’s recent argument that digital images force us to recognize the ontological mobility and instability of all images, whether contemporary or ancient (Nail 2019). In tandem with this, Back Danielsson and Jones (2020, 4) develop the notion of ‘Images in the making’. By discussing images as being ‘in-the-making’ they underline an understanding of images as conditions of possibility, and as processes of assembly, outlining the way in which images draw together and bringing into relation the cognitive and material components of the world. Although, the original notion of ‘images in the making’ drew on digital images to make its argument, it did not explore the special character of digital images in any detail.

This paper develops the notion of images in the making in the context of the digital domain. It will focus on two digital imaging techniques developed within archaeology and cultural heritage– Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and Structure from Motion photogrammetry (SfM)- exploring how these techniques play out in heritage and art world contexts and practices. The paper will highlight digital images as unstable compositions, explore how digital images in the making enable us to reconsider the shifting temporal character of the image, and discuss the way in which the digital image forces us to disrupt the representational assumptions bound up in the relationship between the virtual and the actual; we argue that digital images are ‘phygital’ and are better understood as existing somewhere in the blurred ground between the physical and the digital (Dawson and Reilly 2019).

We argue that the diffractive moment in these encounters between archaeology and art practice disclose the potential of digital imaging to recursively question the complex ontological composition of images and the ability of images to act and affect.