Chasing Future Feelings: A Practice-led Experiment with Emergent Digital Materialities of Heritage

Abstract

High-fidelity imaging methods such as laser scanning and digital photogrammetry have captured public and professional audiences in a flurry of optimistic discourse about their capacities as forms of preservation and of archaeological recording and interpretation. With technical finesse and mastery, endangered heritage can, it is argued, be captured, re-materialized, and recovered from the forces that threaten it. As the plot concerning our ‘digital futures’ thickens, we discuss here an experimental project that offers an oblique approach to the practice of 3D visualization, one that subverts the dominance of neutral, technical field engagements. We examine digital materiality by exploring digital heritage objects as both method and site of ethnographic encounter. Orbiting the ruins of Asinou, an abandoned village in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, with our ‘low-tech’ equipment, we sought to observe the conditions of the ‘in-between’ of two makeshift forms, each as ‘real’ as the other. We focus our thinking on the tensions of translation that play on the surface of our technically crude digital assemblages, as spaces of generative potential for speculations about encounters with emerging digital materialities, their affective capacities and status as future heritage objects.

Current Digital Archaeology

“…Digital materiality is also the subject of an important, recent issue of Museum & Society (published in 2021); the contributions of these papers speak directly to challenges in archaeological interpretation of digital objects, covering affordances, assemblages, provenance, copyright, and embodiment (Arvanitis & Zuanni 2021, p. 143). Ireland & Bell (2021) examine low-performance digital things as "weak surrogates," to "creatively interrogate the conditions of the 'in-between' of physical and digital forms" (p. 150; cf. Morgan 2019).…”

Temporal Frankensteins and Legacy Images

“…The henge earthworks and stone circle do not stand in isolation but developed in a Neolithic landscape with a long history dating back to the 4th millennium BCE ( [43], pp. [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38]; the very fabric of the Avebury site was composed of elements with a storied past [44]. The Avebury site was (re)discovered by the antiquary John Aubrey in 1649; recorded in detail by William Stukeley in the 1720s; and restored in the 1930s to its perceived former glory by the marmalade magnate and playboy Alexander Keiller ( [43], pp.…”

“…It can now be activated, and put to new uses, through digitalised processes to which the prototype artefact was not amenable. Digitalisation also enables images from various times, scales, and resolutions, based on different technologies, to mingle and morph, and create not only improper materialities [23,24], but also improper temporalities. In short, they become 'infinitely revisable' [25].…”

“…In this paper, we adopt a collaborative, critical, diffractive, experimental, and disruptive Art/Archaeology approach to the phenomenon of the mass/crowdsourced image as the basis of teleologically flawed "weak surrogates" claiming to have captured and neatly fixed reality in "digital aspic" ( [24], p. 150). Art/archaeology, as conceived by Doug Bailey [28][29][30], aims to disarticulate, repurpose and disrupt "artefacts from their pasts and to release them into the contested dynamics of the present, through the making of new creative works, not traditionally seen as historic or archaeological in form, display or intention" ( [30], p. 700).…”

“…In accord with Tracy Ireland and Tessa Bell, we want to challenge "the transcendent authority of the original material objects" encapsulated in such models ( [24], p. 149). In doing so, we will not only explore the multiple materialities, including 'improper' materialities [23] of crowdsourced (or mass) photogrammetric models, but also the multiple different, supplementary, and improper, temporalities that can be etched on to them, and then repeated unchallenged as interstitial pluritemporal elements in the physical (re-)expressions of these improper but generative aggregated composite 3D models.…”