Witnesses

This project was motivated by a desire to explore the idea that the pixels and data that make up digital images could be conceived of as conceptually important in the same way that found objects have been understood as important in the world of conceptual art. I wanted to argue that they might even be considered to have a memory of sorts. This would begin with their original indexical relationship to the real thing they depict and following their distribution on the internet, remaining even after experiencing digital compression that affects their ability to convey and represent. For this piece I collected images of the towns that my Armenian ancestors, as the Indigenous people of Western Armenia lived in, all dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. I selected minute areas of pixels from the images, featuring no obvious figuration, and reproduced them manually in graphite. 

I have no photographs of my family in these places, nor of their homes, and no remaining family in the area, due to their forced, violent displacement that took place around the time these images were taken. These images are the only visual way I have of conceiving of their lives pre-Armenian Genocide. The project became a journey of translation, from the real, to analog photographs which became digital images uploaded on the internet. They degrade as they travel between devices and databases to become an image I print and lightly graphite transfer onto paper, and then recreate by hand. 

This journey mimics my diasporic experience and the contradictory distance and closeness I feel in regards to my identity. The steps of the process allowed me to explore the complexities of my relationship to these found images and how it has been affected by both history and by the digital landscape I have encountered them in. The drawings are presented alongside descriptions of the original images I produced using generative AI, as another warped translation, using a tool that is supposedly objective, but riddled with biases, alienating, and affected by the propaganda it most certainly has been trained on.