Temporal Frankensteins and Legacy Images

Abstract

Digital images are produced by humans and autonomous devices everywhere and, increasingly, ‘everywhen’. Legacy image data, like Mary Shelley’s infamous monster, can be stitched together as either smooth and eloquent, or jagged and abominable, supplementary combinations from various times to create a thought-provoking and/or repulsive Frankensteinian assemblage composed, like most archaeological assemblages, of messy temporal components combining, as Gavin Lucas sums it up, as “a mixture of things from different times and with different life histories but which co-exist here and now”. In this paper, we take a subversive Virtual Art/Archaeology approach, adopting Jacques Derrida’s notion of the ‘supplement’, to explore the temporality of archaeological legacy images, introducing the concept of timesheds or temporal brackets within aggregated images. The focus of this temporally blurred, and time-glitched, study is the World Heritage Site of the Neolithic to Common Era henge monument of Avebury, UK (United Kingdom).