Esper Syndrome: Archaeotopologies of the Image

As emergent forms of machine vision and computational photography are increasingly seen to reconstruct lost artefacts and architectures, this research challenges the positivist extractivism and operational transparency assumed of such 'image mining' by addressing the anachronistic surplus of traces it produces in the visual document.

Through a number of interrelated case studies, ranging from early photography to visual datasets used by self-driving cars, the project redeploys Gilbert Simondon's notion of 'transduction' to propose optical reverse engineering as an inherently generative procedure that intervenes in the material and discursive strata of visual archives of the built environment to articulate and materialise new spatial ontologies of the image.