This project had two components: taking photographs with a self-consciously archaeological sensibility, and then manipulating them with Photoshop, when necessary, to draw out both their archaeolgical dimensions, and their relationship with a raster-based system of orgainzation.

Armed with my archaeolgical sensibility (see Archaeological Imagination), I visited New York City on a rainy weekend in April and took photos. There was no particular reason to choose NYC, although its very public layers of history, multiple realities, and hyper-realities lent themselves easily to my project. I expected my self-imposed archaeological sensibility to draw me towards landscapes, gutters, and garbage. I tried to avoid obvious visual clichès about the past or the act of excavating; nonetheless, despite my best efforts I found myself drawn to grids, as well as to ideas of loss or erasure, of reflection, and of reconstuction.

In the project's second component, I processed the photographs I had taken in an attempt to highlight and extend the confluence between their archaeological and digital dimensions. Even though I have described this as a two stage process, it's worth pointing out that for some of the images, I knew how I wanted to process them while I was taking the photograph, while for others, it wasn't until later that I decided how to pull out their archaeologcal and raster-based attributes. Several of the photos didn't require any processing, or rather, to process them would haave taken away from, rather than added to, their impact.

For each photograph in the Results section, when appropriate I have included the original photograph and a description of the second-level processing I performed in Photoshop.

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