Diffracting Digital Images

Archaeology, Art Practice and Cultural Heritage

Ian Dawson, Andrew Meirion Jones, Louisa Minkin, Paul Reilly, Ian Dawson, Andrew Meirion Jones, Louisa Minkin, Paul Reilly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367486556
• eBook ISBN: 9781000509489
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Archaeology

Digital imaging techniques have been rapidly adopted within archaeology and cultural heritage practice for the accurate documentation of cultural artefacts. But what is a digital image, and how does it relate to digital photography? The authors of this book take a critical look at the practice and techniques of digital imaging from the stance of digital archaeologists, cultural heritage practitioners and digital artists.

Borrowing from the feminist scholar Karen Barad, the authors ask what happens when we diffract the formal techniques of archaeological digital imaging through a different set of disciplinary concerns and practices. Diffracting exposes the differences between archaeologists, heritage practitioners and artists, and foregrounds how their differing practices and approaches enrich and inform each other. How might the digital imaging techniques used by archaeologists be adopted by digital artists, and what are the potentials associated with this adoption? Under the gaze of fine artists, what happens to the fidelity of the digital images made by archaeologists, and what new questions do we ask of the digital image? How can the critical approaches and practices of fine artists inform the future practice of digital imaging in archaeology and cultural heritage?

Diffracting Digital Images will be of interest to students and scholars in archaeology, cultural heritage studies, anthropology, fine art, digital humanities, and media theory.

1 What is a diffractive digital image?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003042129-1

Ian Dawson, Andrew Meirion Jones, Louisa Minkin and Paul Reilly

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).

Diffractive images in the making

Digital images are produced through the detection and manipulation of light. It therefore seems appropriate to use a term derived from optics and the physics of light to discuss digital images: diffraction. The term diffraction has several meanings. In terms of classical optics, it refers to the way light bends around the edges of an object and produces interference patterns. In feminist theory and, in particular, the theory of Karen Barad (2014), diffraction also refers to the way in which phenomena dynamically intra-act; encounters produce a reconfiguration of what Barad describes as ‘spacetimemattering’ (Barad 2014, 168); and encounters produce a differencing. As Donna Haraway (2014) puts it, ‘to be a one at all you must be a many, and that’s not a metaphor’. This book examines the way digital imaging techniques embody many prior knowledge practices (the many in the one) while, through fresh encounters, helping to foster new and divergent kinds of knowledge (the one in the many).

According to Barad, diffraction ‘involves reading insights through one another in ways that help illuminate differences as they emerge, how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter’ (2007, 30). We employ the term here then both to denote the way light may work differently in the production of digital images, while also thinking about how the effects of difference are produced in diffractive encounters.

Why is a diffractive methodology necessary? Rosi Braidotti (2018, 15) alerts us to the humdrum character of much digital humanities research: she pinpoints a dominant narrative about digital humanities as media studies applied to humanities and particularly highlights 3D modelling of archaeological finds as a classic component of this normalizing narrative. We share Braidotti’s discomfort with the rapid and homogenizing rise of digital humanities (a ‘majoritarian meta-pattern’; Braidotti 2018, 15) and wish to argue for the more imaginative intra-active deployment of digital techniques in archaeology through encounters with other disciplines (such as art practice) and other situations (such as in cultural heritage contexts). Hence, our method is a diffractive one.

This book is not, then, a handbook of current methods of digital imaging for archaeologists. Nor is it a guide to digital practice for artists or a reference for those involved in digital applications in cultural heritage. This book instead explores the character and composition of digital images across a suite of related disciplines and practices, and seeks to understand how they creatively differ or converge. We believe that the best research outcomes are the result of diversity and the result of ‘playgroups and collaborative clusters’ (Tsing 2015, 285). Our understanding of the potentials of digital images is benefited by creative interplay and made stronger by differing viewpoints arising from multiple disciplinary positions.

Encounters are key to our discussion. Perhaps the best way of introducing the concept of diffraction in digital imaging is through a brief discussion of the encounters involved in the two projects that led to the making of this book. Andrew Meirion Jones had been working for several decades on projects investigating the mark-making practices of the British and Irish Neolithic (c. 4050–2300 BCE). This fascination began many years ago with his doctoral research looking at the decorated pottery known as Grooved Ware at the Neolithic village of Barnhouse, Orkney. This pottery is inscribed with designs also found at passage tomb sites in Ireland and rock art sites across North Britain. This interest in Neolithic design continued for many years with a long-term project looking at the rock art landscape of Kilmartin, Argyll, Scotland. The final piece of the puzzle of British and Irish Neolithic imagery lay in the numerous inscribed artefacts from across Britain and Ireland made of chalk, stone, antler, bone, and wood. To investigate these artefacts, he began the Making a Mark project, which ran between 2013–18. The project enlisted Marta Díaz-Guardamino as research assistant and was run in the company of Ian Dawson and Louisa Minkin. The project used digital imaging techniques (including Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) and Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry) to document a group of portable incised and worked artefacts from the Neolithic of Britain and Ireland. While these techniques have now become part of the standardized methodology of archaeologists (e.g. Historic England 2018a, 2018b), the Making a Mark project used these digital imaging techniques against the grain to reveal, for the first time, practices of erasure and reworking in Neolithic mark making (Jones and Díaz-Guardamino 2019; see also Jones, this volume). The novel use of digital imaging was one of the striking aspects of the project, but just as interesting was collaborating with Ian Dawson and Louisa Minkin. Our method was to meet around a shared image, place, or object. Learning and applying technical imaging processes meant that we spent extended time interacting with objects and exchanging thoughts and disciplinary positions as we did so. Through this project, Ian and Louisa were introduced to RTI and SfM photogrammetry, and began to use them in their own art practices, developing along the way wholly new techniques, including Dirty RTI (Dawson 2020), which subverted, inverted, and bent the standard RTI methodology to new and interesting outcomes. This is one sense in which we discuss diffraction; diffraction as an encounter that produces new and divergent ways of doing. Gradually over time, a fascination that began with the Neolithic transformed into a collective fascination with the ontology of (digital) images and the potential for digital imaging techniques to foster new kinds of knowledge practices. These engagements led us to consider the agency of a digital model both as evidential document and as creative material in formation.

The Making a Mark project was written up as a monograph (Jones and Díaz-Guardamino 2019). It also assembled itself into a discursive event-based exhibition form combining ancient and historic objects with contemporary artworks. Data capture and fabrication were staged in the Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins, London, alongside transdisciplinary speakers and performance events. Students, technical and academic staff, and researchers from a mix of disciplines took the same stage. The project, which took place over six days in 2017, was called Annihilation Event (www.kingscross.co.uk/event/annihilation-event). In particle physics, annihilation is the process that occurs when a subatomic particle collides with its respective antiparticle to produce other particles. A particle collision is a useful metaphor for the unruly and generative process of transdisciplinary exchange – the productive ground of cultural participation. Another kind of diffraction.

One of the outcomes of this event was an invitation from Josephine Mills, director of the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada, to develop a project using digital imaging techniques to document the Blackfoot artefacts in British museum collections. This second project titled Concepts Have Teeth/Mootookakio’ssin (distant awareness) involves collaboration between members of the Siksikaitsitapi (Blackfoot Nation) community in Alberta, Canada, and Montana, USA; artists and web designers from Canada and the UK; and an archaeologist (see Clark et al., this volume; Minkin, Allison, and Jones, this volume). This project adopts an archaeological technology, SfM photogrammetry (see Historic England 2018a), to document Blackfoot artefacts. It involves an intra-action of the properties of these digital technologies with Blackfoot concepts of knowledge transfer and display. Multiple diffractions are involved in this process. Not only is archaeological technology being employed in an art world context, but the art world context is also diffracted by Blackfoot practices. Through this project, we began the initiation of a complex, critical, and committed relation to issues of reconciliation and heritage through digital exchange.

Diffractive knowledges

What is diffraction then? A conversational method of knowledge production enabling generative thinking about the possibilities of democratizing technology and wider debate around decolonisation of knowledge? Encounters produce variants – practices through which we come to know are brought into question. An unfolding or misregistration of cultural lives manifested as vulnerabilities, exploits, blind spots, and exclusions.

Throughout our many engagements with digital images, we thought about digital anatomies, the file types and parts constituting a model, and their pathologies and ontologies. In making a digital model of an object, photographic or scan data is compiled. Conventionally, its anatomical development leads from a point cloud to a mesh of vertices and an image or texture, also called a skin file. The skin in itself may have several components – a normals map and specularity, for instance. These combine to make a surface responsive to different light conditions. An object compiled from data capture has one given materiality and one contiguous surface, though its subject may be made of multiple materials with different qualities (Minkin 2016). The image surface is rendered as one: distinctions in materiality, like shininess or dirtiness, bone or label, are produced through procedurally based rendering. The digital body, once composed, may be given properties: gravity, flexibility, or animation. What is produced is not a representation but a new object: scalable, malleable, and infinitely replicable. These new things sit dormant on drives or, set into motion, spin out iterations into virtual spaces, spawning on new platforms and moving through our human infrastructural spaces like rats in the sewer. Call them digital synanthropes or neophyte familiars.

The partiality of a singular viewpoint is diversified by contemporary imaging technology. Our eyes are opened to other wavelengths. We add more sensory structures to the optic. The technology itself is intrinsically transdisciplinary, built and moulded by experts and fans from an array of disciplines. Tasks here are collective, and information resides in the overlap. Pixel-matching and image-stacking are characteristic assembly techniques of contemporary data capture. Information is imbricated like the scales of a fish. Drop a photogrammetric model into the Unity game engine and every constituent image is produced as a camera. Data capture produces new objects – new knowledge. Informatic forms may be made physical in print or animated with game engine physics – given qualities, properties, and scripts. How does the workflow of, for example, physically based rendering author new content and figure new ontologies? In digital spaces, as in Indigenous thinking, object hierarchies are situational, and membership in a given class is ambivalent and unpredictable. Can these new kinds of data objects be useful in parsing the complexities of emotions for feeling out inconsistent realities?

The parsing of archaeological knowledge has recently been discussed by Jeremy Huggett (2020), with particular reference to digital and computer-based methods of data capture. Archaeological knowledge is always partial, and Huggett distinguishes between known unknowns and unknown knowns in his discussion of forms of archaeological ignorance. Most interesting for our purposes here are the series of forms of forgetting he discusses under the rubric of unknown knowns, which include forgetting through effacement, over time and by command, as well as the forgetting that arises from disciplinary divides (Huggett 2020, 7–9). If we view these issues diffractively, we begin to see that there is much more at stake to his discussion. The gaps in knowledge produced by disciplinary divides may in fact be productive of new kinds of knowledge if we consider that – through encounter – differing disciplines may enrich knowledge and produce wholly different kinds of knowledge. Meanwhile, the silences produced by repressive forms of forgetting are precisely the kinds of gaps in knowledge that an emphasis on diffraction is intended to expose. A diffractive methodology pays attention to how such differences in knowledge are made and focuses on what gets excluded and how those exclusions matter (Barad 2007, 30).

The silences apparent in archaeological knowledge are far outweighed by the silences and effacements engendered in colonial encounters (Simpson 2007; Glissant 2010). Here, we consider what is at stake when digital imaging methods confront the legacies of this colonial encounter. How do we go about establishing best practice around digital standards, legal issues around IP, and the hosting of files on platforms with commercial frameworks or transnationally problematic ideas of property? There are questions here of creative online interactions, technical innovation in regard to non-instrumental worldviews, shapeshifting, possession and dispossession, animacy, and material cultures (for an example of animacy in Blackfoot medicine bundles, see Zedeño 2008). There is both creative engagement and philosophical inquiry at work that must figure the ontology (or hauntology) of a digital model. The spectre of the ancestor and the return or coming back of the ghost destabilizes history and time, and puts them out of joint. Artist and Six Nations cultural theorist Jackson 2Bears (Leween 2012) glosses it like this:

... for Derrida, the sign of the specter becomes a way to re-envision the tenuous relationship between the past and the present, such that history is re-imagined to be a living, or better yet un-dead “Thing” that occupies, inhabits and haunts the present moment. And so, Derrida says, that while specters do not belong properly to the ‘living now’ they also do not nece...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents Page
• List of figures Page
• List of contributors Page
• Foreword and acknowledgements Page
• 1 What is a diffractive digital image?
• 2 Interstitial images
• 3 Engaging audiences with digital Blackfoot objects online and in the art gallery
• 4 Structure from motion: the movement and digital modelling of an artefact from the Blackfoot collections, British Museum
• 5 The paranoiac-critical method of reflectance transformation imaging
• 6 The work of the miniature in the age of digital reproduction
• 7 Temporal ripples in art/archaeology images
• 8 The inhabited frame: examining the archaeological image in the era of interactive media
• 9 Digitalising ephemerality: preserving and utilising the transient trace in Athens’ urban landscape through digital approaches in the field of line art
• 10 Four-dimensional and multidimensional images: diffracting archaeological and computational images
• 11 Commentary
• 12 Making the image a process - on commitment and care in entangled worlds
• Glossary
• Author index
• Subject index