Raised Eyebrows

I'm standing in front of a ‘painting’ by Niki de Saint Phalle called ‘Green Sky’. It happens that I'm standing in front of it in Tokyo where the intense nihon-spectral activity on my eu-retina might indeed make the sky green. Authored commentary paper

Agents of Deterioration

When applying risk management strategies to museum collections, risk is broken down according to ten agents of deterioration that pose threats to collections. Nine of these risks are physical (physical forces, fire, water, criminals, pests, pollutants, light, incorrect temperature, and incorrect humidity) and the tenth is custodial neglect, for example where a collection item may be disassociated from provenance. Museums generally suspend objects from use, touch and intervention in order to freeze or hold things in a state of torpor, preventing interactions in order to preserve. Many Indigenous peoples challenge the idea of preservation as a greater good, instead affirming the right to renew and use, enliven and care for objects as part of community life. The Prisoners of Love (PoL) project aims to connect UK collection items with their trans-national home peoples and bring emerging artists from in the UK, curators and researchers into conversation, to work responsively with complex histories and material practices. The group have been working with the Economic Botany Collection at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew; Horniman Museum and Gardens and Compound 13 Lab in Mumbai; India; Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and the Department of Archaeology at the University of Ghana in Accra; Hastings Museum and Art Gallery and the Mootookakio’ssin project on Blackfoot homelands at the ULethbridge, Alberta, Canada. In September this year UK project participants shared a residency at OPENing, the Art Programme artist-led space in Bank. The OST residency exhibition was documented as a 25min video by Helen Robertson and produced OSTzine with essays by Lennon Mhishi and Esi Eshun. Work developed at OPENing was subsequently exhibited at the Hess Gallery, University of Lethbridge, Canada. The exhibition Mootookakio’ssin: Creating in Spacetime, was developed in partnership with the Indigenous Art Program at UoL. This current exhibition invited contributions from all project participants

Parts and Holes

Commentary Paper for: Images in the Making: Art, Process, Archaeology. Ing-Marie Back Danielsson and Andrew Meirion Jones Eds. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Developed from sessions at TAG, Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference 2016 and Art, Materiality Representation: Royal Anthropological Institute Conference 2018

A is for front line

Artist project with Louisa Minkin. We are thinking about plate designs and motifs. We are interested in modes of communication and contagion. We wish to display a number of designs and works-in-progress of plates and associated tableware. We ask whether pictures are windows or objects, we wonder about the relation between taste and morality. Objects of thought or taste, pictures as windows onto another way of living. We are interested in the notion of a taste for life; an inclination and a penchant — 'a leaning, an attraction' — that informs our thinking, our acting and our living. We include in this issue plans for the production of ceramic objects that pose some issues on a plate or a cup; such as the forced choice between commodities and counselling or the lived relation between anomie and agony. Morals to eat from, situations to drink down

‘Concepts have teeth’: capacities and transfers in the digital modelling of Blackfoot material culture

Remarking on the way that colonial encounters produced complex entangled networks between indigenous communities and Euro-Americans, the Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson (2007, 69) writes that ‘concepts have teeth and teeth that bite through time’.She is writing about the differential power of one account over another in establishing the terms of being seen or being present.This paper explores the way in which these kinds of concepts and encounters produce certain kinds of affective capacities. This paper introduces an archaeology-art project concerned with digitally modelling Blackfoot material culture in UK museum collections, using photogrammetry and Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI). Blackfoot sacred artefacts, such as medicine bundles, are involved in a series of complex exchanges and transfers (Lokensgard 2010). In this paper we argue that the transfer and exchange of medicine bundles offers a paradigm for thinking about material encounters. What capacities are revealed by the various exchanges involved in the project? The project is based on a series of exchanges: between academics and members of an indigenous community; between Canadian and UK institutions; between Universities and museums; and between academic disciplines and their associated practices and techniques.How do the series of encounters involved in these exchanges make a difference to the outcomes and trajectories of the project; how do capacities emerge and extend through the networks established and created by the project? References Lokensgard, K.H. 2010 Blackfoot religion and the consequences of cultural commoditization. London: Routledge. Simpson, A. 2007 On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’and Colonial Citizenship, Junctures 9, 67-80

Pictures Not Homes

The project Pictures not Homes is the result of the partial excavation of Taplow House, a South East London estate block earmarked for renewal and ‘bettering’. This is a documentary project using contemporary archaeological recording practices; photogrammetry, reflectance transformation imaging [RTI] and 3D laser scanning. Pictures not Homes is material documentation of the urban regeneration process enabled by new-imaging technologies; the wreckage of place salvaged as file types. The title is a reversal of the slogan ‘HOMES NOT PICTURES’ daubed by protesters across ‘social’ artwork on a demolition site hoarding. This work wanders about appearance and dwelling, through pictures and homes, divisions and productions, data-sets and concrete abstractions. It is also a way to frame questions of what pictures do: questions of capacities, anxiety and ambivalence. It evokes an environment of barricades, sandbags, file types and data as ruin

Multiple Viewpoints and Other Digital Collaborators

Collaboration is a process in which different perspectives matter. Who, what, why, where, when, and how, are a few registers indicating the diffractive possibilities surrounding the notion of collaboration. These imbricated factors, over which some actants have disproportionate impact, responsibility, and authority, fundamentally affect the direction projects and other matters of importance will take. Here, we endeavour to extend the knowledge derived from collaborations into a much richer multivocality, surrounding two artefact assemblages, both held in institutional settings with restricted access. One is a carved stone, called the Nessglyph, currently lodging in the University of Southampton. The other is a distributed assemblage of Blackfoot belongings held by several UK Museums. We helped make both these collections available to invested collaborators via remote viewings employing in the first case an open crowdsourced collaboration model, and in the second we consider some of the dynamics of a closed collaborative group. We conclude that both collaborations require an openness that is only afforded through constant work and constant re-working as the artefacts and images in these projects constantly fold into their own omissions so that the work can respond to the politics and ethics of image making

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

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