Rodell Warner is a Trinidadian artist working across new media and photography. *Augmented Archive* plays with existing and non-existing narratives in found photographs. The work speaks to Saadiya Hartman’s critical fabulation in that the sitters—“unknown”—are introduced to a new space in which alternative meaning can be made. The technological marks on the images feel like interventions for imagining what can exist in the gaps. The mineral-like animations become question marks hovering above them, encouraging us to see the individuals beyond colonial curiosity. In colour, movement, and audibility the work invites us to listen rather than look at images.

The original black and white image this work is based on was photographed at Lucknow, India, c. 1872. Photographer & sitters' names unknown. 

Animation and sound by Rodell Warner, 2021. Image colorized using artificial intelligence.

Fifty percent of the proceeds from the initial sale of this NFT will be donated to COVID-19 Relief fundraisers vetted by MutualAidIndia.com

Artwork details:
892x712 pixels, 120 frames, 30fps. Single-channel video, color, sound. 1 minute 4 seconds. Seamless loop.



Augmented Archive 23, Colorized, 2021

Notes on Travecacceleration

an intergalactic experience on the Mende express

Bíblia, boi e bala I // Bible, ox and bullet I

🟡 𝕹𝖊𝖑𝖙𝖔𝖐𝖔𝖓𝖎 : 𝕴𝖙𝖍𝖚𝖆 🟡

Tupinambá

SHINE 2

The End (For Now)

The artworks in this curated collection explore preservation and adaptation. Using the digital space to consider ways in which ancestral knowledge, lived experience, and collaboration can create different pathways into understanding our present moment, making sense of what came before and how we might want to move into the future.


Here we see layering of time, textures, materials, and modes of being. There is an inherent transparency to working in this way, in which it feels like all of the artists are exploring the ethics of collaboration, collage, and reinterpretation. Visual imagery, metaphors, and sound as languaging tools. Ones which feel the personal hand of the artist while also exploring wider notions of archival preservation and augmentation.


I’m interested in how certain aspects of the artworks are preserved in digital form— whether it’s a literal image, visual style, sound, cultural or historical context—while simultaneously becoming a hybrid with new context and connotations. To me this feels a lot like memory. How we remember, how we tell stories, and how we make meaning out of our lived experience.


What are the things we want to remember, to meditate on, to take forward with us? How does layering in digital space allow us to pull things apart and reorder them in new fragments, visual languages, sounds, code…

Ancestral Futures

Exploring the hybridity of the original and the possible.

Augmented Archive 23, Colorized, 2021

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