Shanks has described an ‘archaeological sensibility’ as a particular mode of engaging with the world; it is a lens through which information about the world around us is consumed, categorized, and interpreted. When we think archaeologically, we foreground certain themes: the relationship between past and present, the social life of material objects, the narratives inscribed in the mundane detritus of everyday life. We re-evaluate relevance and irrelevance, as well as our understanding of place, time, and self (see Archaeological Imagination).

This project explores the relationships between archaeology, photography, and digital data storage. Graphical digital data can be stored in two ways: as vector data or as raster data. Vector data stores information as points, polygons, or lines. It is suited to communicate information about distance, direction, and pathways. Raster data stores information as pixels, where each pixel is a unit of information. Units of the same colour are equivalent. This could simply mean that in a photograph, all blue pixels are equivalent, presumably corresponding to the blueness of the object recorded by the camera. However, the pixel’s colour can encode other types of information; for example, blue might relate to temperature, or annual rainfall, or elevation, or geologic formations. Pixels are not only about colour; they are indivisible units of information.

Vector data is more efficient than raster data. Take the example of a simple black line. As vector data, that line is composed of two points that are connected, essentially two units of information with a code relating them to one another. No matter how long the line, the information required to process and display it is the same. As a raster, however, each pixel of the line is a unit of information. The longer the line, and the smoother you want it to look, the more information will be required to process and display it. We see here that vector and raster data are suited to different purposes: it is inefficient to code a map as a raster, and you can’t store a photo as vector data. For example, when you search for an address in Google Maps, its street maps are stored as vectors, while the satellite image of the area is raster data.

Archaeology and photography have a long history. Digital photography has enabled many developments in the way that we use photography to engage with the world, both in our work and regular lives. We can take hundreds of pictures on a whim, get instant feedback on how they turned out, and can manipulate them afterwards with unprecedented ease. This project juxtaposes an archaeological sensibility with a raster mentality to see how they overlap, diverge, and influence one another in the medium of visual representation. Fundamentally, this project is about thinking simultaneously about archaeology and pixels as means to visually categorize and interpret the world around us. Ultimately, I aim to subvert the objectivity of both the photograph and the pixel, arguing that both are real and artificial in their own ways.

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