Representation and structure conflict in the digital age: Reassessing archaeological illustration and the use of cubist techniques in depicting images of the past
- Title
- Representation and structure conflict in the digital age: Reassessing archaeological illustration and the use of cubist techniques in depicting images of the past
- Creator(s)
- Carlson, Eric S.
- Date
- 2014
- Is Part Of
- Advances in Archaeological Practice
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 269-284
- Language
- eng
- Abstract
- Digital imaging technologies have enhanced archaeological research and profoundly expanded the scale of the discipline’s potentialities. As illustrators and archaeologists move away from using hand-drawn images (of hand-held, real-life objects) to depict artifacts and other archaeological information, certain capabilities of the traditional illustrative process are lost. One such loss is the ability to present a complete and informed representation of an artifact free of the distortions and visual limitations that single-perspective (i.e., digital or photographic) imagery produces. This is accomplished by the illustrator through the unification of multiple views of the artifact from various perspectives into a single two-dimensional image that communicates to the viewer important attributes of the artifact, free of distortion and remaining true to the measured, analytical conventions of the illustrative process. Liberation from the single-viewpoint perspective was one of the fundamental elements of the Cubist movement. Traditional archaeological illustrators utilize Cubist principles to communicate visually to the viewer a complete, accurate, and undistorted package of information about an artifact. The supplanting of hand-drawn illustrations by digital images in today’s archaeological publications threatens to revert the visual representation of data back to uninformed, surficial “snapshots” of incomplete objects.
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