Abstract

This essay examines Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), an open source computational photographic process that is transforming methodologies in archaeology and heritage conservation for its ability to interactively re-light artefacts within a virtual hemisphere of illumination and extrude a digital topography that is hyper-legible in space-time, from its contemporary application in facial recognition via Bertrand Tavernier's 1980 science fiction film La Mort en Direct and a return of the death mask through digital extrusion, ultimately locating a progenitor of the heightened objectivity promised by RTI paradoxically in Surrealist photography and the fugitive facialities of Salvador Dali's Paranoiac-Critical Method. As emerging imaging technologies such as RTI are seen to open novel ways of extracting latent data from historical artefacts, reassembling objects of study in a new (virtual) light, collateral opportunities provided by these technologies to re-enter archival still and moving image recordings inadvertently recalibrate their spatio-temporal ground and destabilise their indexical reading through an excessive production of new traces and signs. If methodologies can be seen to play a significant role in constructing their objects of study, then emerging computational imaging operations such as RTI have their own subjectivities to disclose: In performing a media archaeology of this digital process, the essay proposes that we not only narrate the subjects of our study but the very tools of investigation themselves.