Temporal Frankensteins and Legacy Images

Digital images are everywhere and, increasingly, everywhen. In addition to the amorphous phenomenon of “masses of images”, we are also witnesses to the denser, concentrated, phenomenon called “the mass image” (Cubitt 2021; Dvořák & Parikka 2021). Any internet search of a popular archaeological or heritage site (e.g. Stonehenge or Angkor Wat) will result in “an aggregate portrait tending towards a total image … extending in time (in spring; at dawn; in 1945)” (Cubitt 2021, 26). In other words, aggregate or mass images are complex, composite, multitemporal data visualisations. Zylinska (2017) reminds us that many images are derived from the cyborgic gaze of digital devices which have subsequently been assigned visual characteristics and presented in a format humans recognise as photographs. Images, however, have more in common with spreadsheets than photographs and are consequently equally manipulatable and infinitely revisable. Dostie (in press), for example, observes that Google's satellite imagery is cloudless because these images are actually mosaics of multiple images taken at different times and ‘the best parts’ have been stitched together. Rippling with multi and pluri temporalities implies these images are shot through with legacy data. We can think of these datasets as ‘temporal frankensteins’, a composite monstrous cyborg assemblage derived from many different sources, angles, resolutions and times.

Many iconic artefacts, buildings and their surrounding landscapes have been subjected to sustained cyborgic observation for several decades. Over that period the subjects of that sustained imaging have also changed. Despite appearances, archaeological assemblages, sites and landscapes are constantly in motion. Some like Palmyra will have been catastrophically destroyed, but more subtle changes happen all the time. Fields, for instance, are abraded by ploughing, climate variations will alter how buried landscapes express themselves as maculae, fallen trilithons have been re-erected, artefacts are weathered, and so on.

In this paper we wish to critically analyse widely-used digital imaging techniques by adopting a diffractive Virtual Art/Archaeology (Reilly & Dawson 2021) approach in order to deliberately dislocate, disarticulate, repurpose and, ultimately, disrupt the normative narratives they habitually evince and inflect them with more nuanced temporal depth.