An Epistemology of the Virtual: or What Can Concealing Reveal?

Lance Winn

As someone who has been trained in and who teaches in the visual arts, I am hoping to approach material and visual culture through the lens of a maker, and as someone who often needs to consider the modes of display that might best get at what an object or image is trying to express. I find in contemporary art that we are often considering the space around things and how it might impact a viewer’s experience; be it simply understanding the general height of embodied eyes when hanging a painting, the distance of perception, or the scale of the body in relation to space or objects. With my students I often speak of the history of painting as a slow stripping away of the finish and refinement that was supposed to hide the construction of the painting until we reach the point where the construction of the painting is the meaning of the object. It is this stripping away of artifice in order to get to some sort of essence—the aesthetics of the material culture of difficult histories—that is central to what I am trying to consider with regards to digital technology and the display of information in this chapter. I will start by outlining some artistic practices that specifically deal with removal or absence to reveal embodied understanding, then share a project that I have been working on with a group of computer-vision scientists who create 3D models of spaces by stitching together flat images to show how the digital can deal with absence, and conclude with how these things might present new ways to think about an aesthetics of the virtual, particularly with regards to the display of difficult and often devastated objects.

I was invited, along with several other scholars, to attend a workshop considering the objects contained within the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collection—which is worth noting was not conceived to be a collecting museum—followed by a symposium on the material culture of the Holocaust. As an artist, I approached that remarkable and delicate collection from the perspective of how to draw out the stories that lie in those objects and images, how to reveal the knowledge that is hidden in them, and how to let things speak that need to speak. In a certain way, thinking around the objects from the lens of a maker was not entirely dissimilar to the perspective of the conservators there, who are charged not with preserving and cleaning up the things but truly conserving and maintaining the things in whatever condition they are in, as that is their material state, their material history, and the source of their information.

Removal, Absence and Embodied Understanding

In considering how to get at the information harbored in the collection it struck me that one of the things that curators and museums need to examine is where we locate knowledge or how we come to know things. The museum experience seems to provide the possibility of a more sensual knowledge: a coming to know through the senses. Of course, there are other means of coming to knowledge, like books or the internet, but the museum, as a form of display in which the body is in physical relation to stuff (not that books are not stuff) is a unique experience. I was thus trying to approach things from the idea of coming to “know” something in a way that it might be the most impactful and, especially concerning the Holocaust, where we pass this knowledge on—or fail to pass it on—with significant consequences. Of course, museums often want to provide both conceptual and sensory knowledge, but I would like to approach this idea of where we situate knowledge from where it might have the most powerful, and perhaps visceral, effect.

With the ever-increasing ability to embed content into displays or databanks, I find the current trend in both museums, and the realm of the digital, seems to be to add greater and greater amounts of information. While this has obvious benefits to research and traditional learning, it occurred to me that it may also “distract” when coming to know about things in physical relation to stuff. I also realized that much of what I learn from the digital is due to the removal of certain types of information, to get at a more—strangely since it is virtual—physical sense of an object or image. As a layered construct with almost all software working through “layers” and many explicitly with a hide command, the digital makes it much easier to remove information and quickly imagine something in another state. In thinking about an example of the strange construction that must take place in the virtual, I was reminded of a proposal that I submitted in response to the discussion around civil war monuments. The concept involved removing the confederate soldiers from the horses instead of removing the entire sculpture, thus leaving a very strange scattering of horse monuments throughout the country as places for conversation about history.

The animals, after all, were not involved in human ideological conflict. I quickly found a three-dimensional (3D) model of a horse and rider and proceeded to simply erase the rider from the horse. I knew upon completion that I would have something very similar to the hollow space found if one took an acetylene torch to cut a bronze sculpture, as bronze monuments are cast shells and almost all 3D models are hollow meshes. I was able fairly quickly to achieve a working model for the proposal and was also conceptually reminded of Nietzsche’s provocative response to the iconoclast’s desire to remove public monuments, which was to leave them in place so that they could be touched by a hammer in order to reveal their hollowness.

What I am trying to explain is the difference between a bodily or sensory understanding of something versus an intellectual or conceptual understanding, and how these differ; wondering how the removal or absence of information can promote understanding. Should we privilege one over the other? Or do they overlap? Could the space for “imagining,” as described by writers like Didi-Huberman, alongside a requirement for some kind of “effort,” be a sort of bridge between these ways of coming to “know?” I have been thinking about this approach as a kind of time–space for imaginative work and what that might look like in the virtual. Could we think of digital space as capable of rendering material objects in a way through removal or absence where the sensory meets the intellect, and again which types of understanding or knowing might be more impactful, moving us from something like a “cold” knowledge to a hotter, more embodied knowledge. An experiential understanding might matter more when thinking through things that come out of traumatic events.

All of this may have to do with a certain sensory way of looking, not as passive “watchers” but as witnesses. Didi-Huberman wrote specifically in reference to the Sonderkommando photographs from Auschwitz, “In order to know, we must imagine for ourselves.” Effectively sketched out by Susan Crane in her review of Images In Spite of All: “In a certain sense, all historical understanding requires an intuitive leap into the abstraction of historical distance…this intuitive leap is not easy; it requires imaginative “work,” which must not be confused with irresponsibly assuming that one can “feel” or “identify with” the trauma that others felt or experienced.” Considering this complicated notion, Didi-Huberman approaches the problem of removal or absence from the other direction, concluding that an important part of those legendary photographs had been made absent from the form of the material negatives, if you will allow, by the removal of too much information via cropping. For the photographs to have the impact that they demand as some of the only photographs of the killings that were to survive the attempt to wipe away the “Final Solution” and the memory of a people, they needed to be displayed and seen together, uncropped, and leveled in order to focus people’s awareness on what was happening inside the camps by providing the larger context, since much of the story the photographs tell might be at the edges of the picture or in the full “form” of the photograph. These four photos were taken on a camera smuggled into the camp, shot off-the-hip, and then the negatives smuggled out in a toothpaste container. Two of the photographs are framed by an external door to the gas chamber, which suggest a backing away, grave danger, and just enough information to verify the horrific. A third captures mainly sky and trees. It was a rushed photograph that just captured bodies at its skewed angle in the lower left corner. A fourth is barely discernible as just trees and sky and was perhaps an accidental shot and certainly not perceived through a viewfinder. Didi-Huberman reminds us that every piece of visual culture from the Holocaust is also a piece of material culture and that there were no analogue images without a material container, and that form might tell us as much or more than what we typically dissect as content. While we know that the digital still has to be stored in some physical space, that space might have very different information than the analogue material, the physical ground of the negative or printed photo, of the visual culture of the Holocaust, to which I will return later. Considering this imaginative work as the critic Dave Hickey might, this act of being able to “imagine” can have very real consequences, as in the case of mass school-shootings, which he illustrated in his essay A World like Santa Barbra, “…what one perceives most profoundly in these killer children from the suburbs is their absolute lack of imagination and affect. They can't imagine obliterating a million hopes, dreams, and memories by squeezing a tiny metal trigger; they can't imagine the empty place they are making in succeeding generations; they can't even imagine their own futures.”Hickey believes that we must learn to feel anxious without resorting to violence, which he believes is something that we can learn from being around difficult works of art: “The world of art and letters is the site upon which we hone these skills, acquire the responsiveness, imagination, and flexibility to deal with this world, where we learn to appreciate its anxieties.” Perhaps this is not dissimilar to Didi-Huberman’s notion of giving attention to the photograph or working through the photograph and giving time and attention to things that do not have a necessary resolution. History has taught us that there is always a lack of imagination if one is unable to “see” people as part of an infinitely vast network or to see people as people.

Art, Experience, and Absence

As an artist (and generally a person) I know that I experience some things and come to “know” them sensorily. I experience a Van Gogh physically—not to mention a James Turrell. I have an experience of something without coming away saying, “I know this.” In fact, I do not know what a Van Gogh means, but I do know what it is. This characteristic is one of the reasons that I am driven a little crazy when so many people say they don’t “get” contemporary art. It is not something that you “get” most of the time versus something you often experience through the senses—physically. If you do “get” a contemporary work, it often times may not be a very interesting intellectual experience.

So, what might museums learn from artists and their consideration of “installation”? Installation and site-specific art practices have often looked at the politics of stuff and institutions through a deconstruction of their forms (or formal distinctions). For example, Duchamp’s Fountain takes an everyday, often unperceived, object of design (i.e., a urinal), depletes it of its use-value, places it on a pedestal, and thus forces us re-look at it and reconsider its value. It might be important in thinking about Didi-Huberman’s notion of “imagining” to remember that it was Duchamp who did not consider an artwork completed until it had been worked on by a viewer, claiming “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds [their] contribution to the creative act.”

Before discussing digital approaches to dealing with absence, we might first examine the many contemporary practices resulting from the existential questions of the 20th century—many from the horror of the Holocaust—that deal with absence; artworks examining what we cannot know and what we know only through gaps and aporia. I would like to generate a short history of the practices of concealing or shifting perception in art that runs from Duchamp to someone like Christo, who uses the act of wrapping to reveal new conditions of the object by concealing it. Consider Christo’s wrapped motorcycle, which makes the motorcycle unusable and forces us to look at the thing anew. Christo takes this object of motion, the motorcycle, and asks us to see its “form.” The same is true for his other works, like the wrapping of the Reichstag, whereby covering the structure in cloth and removing its ornamentation and those things we might call “building,” one can witness—or dare I say “feel”—the scale of power. By removing information, one is finally able to see scale and appreciate it sensorilly. Similarly, Charles Ray, by meticulously recasting each part of a demolished car in flat gray plastic resin—perhaps mimicking the gray primed cars waiting for a final paint-job in the auto-plants—allows a visceral response to the power of speed and the force of colliding metal. A more enigmatic piece is Ray’s Hinoki, in which he shipped a large fallen tree that he came across on a hike to Japan, had an exact reproduction made by the finest Japanese wood-carvers, and then shipped it back to the gallery. What does Ray want from this object? Does he believe that the process—its history—will somehow emanate out of the still object? Speaking of the process Ray said: “I…had a difficult time bringing this work to completion and allowing it to go out into the world. When I asked Mr. Mukoyoshi about the wood and how it would behave over time, he told me that the wood would be fine for 400 years and then it would go into a crisis; after two hundred years of splitting and cracking, it would go into slow decline for another 400 years. I realized then that the wood, like the original log, had a life of its own, and I was finally able to let my project go and hopefully breathe life into the world that surrounds it.” I do not have an answer for this conundrum. Ray is asking a lot, but artists—myself included—are all prone to a bit of “magical thinking.” Almost any work of art is some prayer that what went into its production might come out of it. This idea is perhaps pushed to the extreme by someone like Tom Friedman and his piece of paper stared at for a thousand hours or the space above a pedestal that he had cursed by a witch—think what you will, but when my then four-year-old son saw the piece in a terrific show on the invisible at the Hayward, he skirted the edge of the room to avoid it.

Considering the work of the contemporary artist Dahn Vo, who tends to purchase at auctions objects that have been at or around some historic event. Objects that were “there” but maybe not central actors. They were on the periphery but were perhaps exposed to the same air? Thinking of some current digital technologies, like mass spectrometry and proteomics, which I will return to in a bit, that air is increasingly becoming palpable. Vo takes things like three chandeliers from the Hotel Majestic, the site of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, or the typewriter that Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) used to type his manifestos, and simply re-presents these objects to the audience with little to no manipulation and little information. I cannot answer to the effectiveness, but it is the selection of objects and their placement in space (and some kind of time?) that interests me, as recently written about: “Vo is obsessed with the memories and auras that objects harbor. The actual black typewriter that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, used to type his manifestos sits on the ground of one gallery. Lit from behind in a wall is a letter from Robert McNamara accepting President-elect Kennedy’s offer to become Secretary of Defense, setting the stage for him to become the architect of the U.S.’s involvement in Vietnam. The wooden skeleton of a chair once used by Kennedy cabinet members stands alone along a wall.Terror and destruction have flowed from the people who touched these simple things. We could gather as much seeing these displays in a history museum with an explanatory placard, but in Vo’s deadpan presentation of them as art, one has a glimpse of the horribly arbitrary nature of history—the way that, especially today, the most minor actions lead to unpredictable forms of devastation. A letter gets typed and signed, a package gets mailed, and somewhere people are displaced, maimed, maybe even killed.” The condition seems comparable to Walter Benjamin’s thinking about the “aura.” Kerr Houston describes Vo’s works as: “that unique and irreducible physical facticity of an original thing…. These objects are literal indices—physical traces, that is—of brutal, disruptive events, and their sheer presence is fascinatingly disquieting, for they make the past concrete but cannot ever quite communicate the entire reality of that past. Loaded with associative significance, they are in the end also only inert things that seem incapable of supporting such weight. Did the typewriter, which seems so humble and contingent, really produce a screed with such disruptive consequences? Can a nib really have led to the wholesale destruction of life and landscape? The idea is both laughable and horrifying: the punchline to a dark joke about history.” How is it that approaching and giving objects a certain lens might provide that dialectic flash that Benjamin so hoped to describe and articulate in which this mute, still thing might be the key that unlocks some deep recognition about the workings of our world?

The Virtual, the aura, and the invisible

Recent developments in digital technology leads us much closer to this notion of the “aura.” The idea of the “aura” seems strangely linked to the very cutting edge of digital detective work happening now in the realm of mass-spectrometry and proteomics, in which researchers are beginning to dig into the history of proteins left on objects. Michael Whitmore of the Folger Shakespeare Library claims that there “is the shiver of proximity” in what can now be considered as bio-archives as well, with “the proteomic analysis of books and cultural objects as a way for libraries and museums to re-imagine the collections—and to reanimate the past—in an era of mass distraction and digitized content.” As one of the field's leading practitioners, Alberto Melloni, said of the “aura’s” strange weave of space and time, “you have in your hand the manuscript, but also the stories that the manuscript is carrying.” In one particularly fascinating piece of historical detective-work Gleb Zilberstein (Melloni’s collaborator) sampled ten pages of Bulgakov’s notes and found morphine on every one. The heaviest traces were on an outline for The Master and Margarita from 1937 or 1938, which was written on cheap, square, note paper and included drawings of blue and red crescent moons and an arrow pointing to “the witches sabbath.” Zilberstein relates that he felt like he was using a magnifying glass to find hidden information in the novel. Could it be that the things seemingly hidden or absent are what allow for the aura? That the sense of absence opens up a space, that workspace of the experiential?

Might this be what visual–material culture looks like in the future? Perhaps the future even of the “image”? It brings to mind the notion of the sensorium: those senses that seem so important to embodied knowing. Bill Arning, who helped curate an excellent show called Sensorium at MIT’s List Center, described the idea of the olfactory as a little piece of the object you were smelling actually going up your nose, which is perhaps a slightly gross way to think about “knowing” but also powerfully akin to Kristieva’s notion of the abject as one of the deeply aesthetic experiences where we lose the sense of the self separated from the world and understand our selfness as a porous condition with the world entering and exiting in all sorts of ways. A loss of a distinction about where the body ends; perhaps this is the space or site of the “imagination”? The experience of a certain closeness to the material to the point of a loss of the subject and object? Perhaps even close to a type of trauma from history itself that Ankersmidt more abstractly describes as sublime historical experience, “this dividing up of an all encompassing present into a (new) present and a past involves the loss of large of that hitherto all-encompassing present. This is why this kind of historical experience is always an experience of loss—and, hence, of trauma. You then truly lose parts of a (former) identity—and can one get closer to death than by losing one’s identity?” Is it possible that we need to work to get the material world to enter the body closer to the way that smells do, to get matter to engage the senses in the more visceral way of smell, in which we take a little piece of things with us? Maybe the closest analogy is the retina burnt by staring at a solar eclipse.

How can creating absence (e.g., covering, displacing, removing) reveal something new? As Vo infers, how much “space” might an object need to allow it to take on the weight of its history? How are the senses awakened by the removal of “content;” much in the way the brain quickly reorganizes itself when a sense is lost or damaged? Or maybe considering the space and time that it might take to “imagine.” As Didi-Huberman considers in his response to his iconoclasts interlocutors: “…for those that want to know, and indeed for those who want to know how, knowing offers neither miracle nor respite. It is knowing without end: the interminable approach of the event, and not its capture in a revealed certainty. There is no ‘either–or’: no ‘yes or no,’ ‘we know all or we deny,’ revelation or veil. There is an immense veil—due to destruction itself, and also the Nazis’ destruction of the archives of the destruction—a veil that is furrowed or even lifted slightly, that overwhelms us every time a testimony is listened to for what it says through the very silences, every time a document is looked at for what it shows through the gaps. For this reason, in order to know, we must imagine as well.” Didi-Huberman is arguing that those “silences” and “gaps” are the form of the archive of the Holocaust. How do we stand back and prepare ourselves to encounter these things?

The answer may lie in thinking about how we ‘know’ or understand things. We live in the “information age” the age of content, but many artists subvert our ideas about content by removing it to reveal form—this often abstract, bodily, sensory way of knowing, like knowing the scale of a space by having your body in physical relation to it or semi-consciously feeling your body being positioned by your chair. Considering how our physical body, in relation to other bodies and spaces, may take in sensory information in a less specifically conscious way that nonetheless is being processed and considered. There might be a lot to be learned from how artists respond to objects and the museum, and perhaps some of these questions about how we ‘know’ might be carried into the virtual, which is absence and presence embodied, and where we might be able to learn from some of the aforementioned artists how to take advantage of the simulacra rather than to mourn its implications.

Describing the Digital

Because the digital is “fake” all the conditions of reality must be imposed on it. Considering the virtual as a construction thus might allow us to take its fictions and potentially use these things to our advantage. Rather than consistently reproducing the hyper-real, we might strip away some layers to reveal new conditions. In considering something like the Smithsonian’s amazing series of high-resolution 3D scans of the collection, you can see the dream of the virtual model perfected—the idealized object of study—but they have also been sufficiently insightful to let you study the object in a variety of ways. If you explore that archive, you recognize these virtual things largely as outer surfaces, as that is what photogrammetry and 3D scanning is generally able to capture: surface. What might it mean to see things as surfaces, with the interior, often the housing of content, removed. What does it mean to see things as triangulation, as point-cloud, wire-frame, x-ray, or monochrome, like Charles Ray’s car crash, where the removal of color may exacerbate the sense of force and materiality? How might the limitations of sensory information, or loss of information, as is the case with the Holocaust, be visualized? Or, on the other hand, finding information where we had not been looking, like, in a virtual model, the possibility of seeing the top or the bottom of something that with the real physical object must, because of gravity, be hidden because it must “sit” or “hang” somewhere—we have learned at very least from Antiques Roadshow that lots of information happens to be on the bottom or the back of things. One “formal” question thus might be how we can remove information to reveal hidden formations, how can we “see” or “look at” information and data, those now ubiquitous 1s and 0s? And finally, how we can reveal and share this information in new ways.

Considering some current digital projects, like Rome in a Day, in which computer scientists constructed a 3D model of Rome generated from thousands of photographs that tourists posted to Flickr, how can a failure to perfectly recreate the world tell us something or show us information that we had not expected to find? Where information might be found in the ground and not the figure itself; found in the blank, uncaptured spaces that become not a mapping of the world but a mapping of a collective unconscious of how we are taught to look at the world. In projects like the Rome in a Day project, you get the “wow” of big data, crowdsourcing, and digital stitching and reconstruction, but what you are really getting is an extraordinary mapping of how and where we are taught to look.

What is every bit as interesting as the spaces captured is the spaces that are not. My collaborator, Jason Ferguson, and I first worked with the model generated of the Colosseum. With the huge number of pictures scavenged to reconstruct the building, it is fascinating to see that it has no back—and it is a circle. Imagine something like the façade of Notre Dame, which we have also worked with, and think of how much of that building is missing. In fact, so much is missing that we hoped to print it large scale and lean it against a wall.

What kind of digital ruin might outlast the original ruin? In some speculative future, would these incomplete images be all that is left to remember the original—that dream of techno-utopic perfect virtual mimesis. Again, in the attempt to try to encourage these objects to speak to their empty spaces, we have been considering how to draw the absent spaces out and bring them back into 3D space. In essence, how to make 3D prints of the data, theorizing that it is difficult to imagine–feel empty space when viewing something on a screen; that to know empty space it might have to be experienced in relation to the body. We wondered what were the material, scale, and other very physical conditions that would get at the impact that these virtual files had on our own imagination. This back and forth between the virtual and the physical, how we get information into the computer, and how we get objects out of digital space seems rich with the possibility of considering how to translate subtle information and hidden details of form where new content might be found.

It is important to note the discourse around all of these digital representations, perhaps stemming from the fact that they look very “new”, the stuff of sci-fi or science. The language, visual and other, of something like the “cloud” has become a potent metaphor. As James Bridal puts it, “today the cloud is the central metaphor of the internet: a global system of great power and energy that nevertheless retains the aura of something noumenal and numinous, something almost impossible to grasp.” How can we find something like the form of the languages of the digital? The point cloud, as seen in the model of the Rome in a Day project, has a haunting quality, not something generally associated with 0s and 1s—I cannot help but think of the molecular and wonder how those inherent qualities might be used to show the connections between things or perhaps even the space around things rather than the things themselves? We can certainly imagine, from the generated models, the difference between empty space and objects to simply be a matter of density. This idea is exemplified by the last artist to be considered, Rachel Whiteread, who casts the spaces that we might think of as “empty” between things. Her work is evocative of new forms of empty space, like the interior of a house slated for destruction, or the spaces between the bookshelves in a library, or the Vienna Holocaust Memorial, which is a memorial building that cannot be entered made of the negative space of shelves of books whose spines face away from the viewer and cannot be read. I am reminded of a belt that we examined in the USHMM’s archive that had additional holes created by hand as its owner, the prisoner Zelig Appel, lost weight. It is described in the online catalogue as: “Brown leather belt worn by 21 year old Zelig Appel when he was a prisoner in Buchenwald concentration camp from January 1945 to April 1945. Dark brown leather belt with a polished top surface and a rectangular silver-colored ring buckle and prong at one, looped end. Beside the buckle is a separate leather loop stitched in place with off-white thread. The other end has a curved tip, five original punch holes, and three additional handmade holes; the third is closer to the buckle end. The belt is scratched and worn from use.” While highly detailed and observant writing, words cannot do justice to the object in this case. When we were able to analyze the object at the USHMM’s Shapell Center. It was laid out on a table, and I asked the conservator to place the belt in its bodily state as a circle connecting the buckle with the final hole, making its scale—and the empty space—excruciatingly real. How might we scan those three holes, created by the sharpened handle of a spoon, to tease out the force of the punched hole—as Barthes might say, as “punctum.” What formal or physical conditions might allow the belt to express both its immense weight, and, as inert object, the inability to ever convey the full weight of history. Or, in thinking about other states of the digital, how might the mesh, with its language of geometry, showing things in pieces, have the ability to speak to the gestalt of an object—finding movements through the whole or understanding how a thing might unwrap?

Thinking of these conditions, I was reminded of a diary in the USHMM’s archive that had been folded and hidden behind a radiator in the Warsaw ghetto. It was in such bad condition that it would fall to pieces if opened and the content read—the writing which, rightfully, we so covet. The physical object already contained another important part of its history, however, by being folded. How might the triangulation of a scan lead us to the physical folding, which became such a natural act, such a form of the act of concealing, of being forced to conceal. How, in the end, might we remove some of the information from things to reveal other qualities of the thing, hidden qualities, or qualities that we could not see because we were distracted by the camouflage, or in the newer terms of the gamer and the modeler, distracted by the “skin.”

In Conclusion

I want to conclude this chapter with two distinctly digital images. The first image shows the discovery of Mayan ruins found in the jungle of Guatemala. Here is a technology, LiDAR, that uses different wavelengths to make it possible to see through trees and other dense vegetation (another type of removal of information; something like the inability to see the forest for the trees? Or the forest floor for the trees) to allow a detailed 3D model of the ground. The second image is a scan of the death-camp Treblinka, created by forensic archeologist Caroline Sturdy Colls. Sturdy Colls has managed to use the cutting edge of technology to “see” the invisible and to reach back into a history that had been quite literally wiped away. The subtle movement of the ground, invisible, in this case, to the embodied eye, and not unlike the proteomic marvels mentioned earlier, has given deep insight into how this extermination camp may have functioned.

When studying LiDaR images through forest canopies, one most often notices the subtle suggestion of an angle, something near a rectangle, and that is the site of consciousness; the place, most often, of human intervention. In this image there are the slightest indentations, places where the earth has settled, in the shape of a rectangle, places where things have shifted under the ground. How might we create some form of recognition that allows for that angle to express the full weight of the painful history that it bears. Those are the questions that the archives of today must consider, and on which I have speculated here. Or else the archive is in danger of becoming a repository without meaning and without serving the incredibly important history that it conserves.

These very new LiDaR images bring to mind thoughts of very old things and of the first people that re-discovered the Mayan ruins.

I often imagine what it must have been like. You are walking through a dense, chaotic, organic jungle, and I imagine that jungle ever-so-slowly becoming more geometric. What is rock slowly giving way to block, overgrown, all that stone having turned back into the landscape from where it was taken, returning to the vegetation of the jungle. The sunlight filtering through the dense canopy, dappling the forest floor, climbing over vine-covered rocks, and suddenly one rock seems more geometric, and another even more so, until there seems to be a spacing, and these begin to act rhythmically, spatially, and then they feel staggered like steps, and then you arrive at the bottom of what you had thought was a hill only to find that you are at the base of a temple, jutting out of the roof of the forest. Maybe this is something like the jungle of the digital that we face now. We have all the data in the world, and we are tasked with making sense, or making it sensible, or, perhaps, more sensitive.