These are the positions GM Archive Studio works from. The title refers to the program built into every camera, the assumptions an apparatus makes about what is worth recording.

Gregor MacGregor is an artist based in Boorloo (Perth) who works with photography and the computational images built from it to examine how the camera has shaped our view of the natural world. The work starts from natural history collections and the systems built to catalogue them.

Temporal Undulations: Topography of a Meteorite sets photographic prints beside a 3D print made from the same photogrammetric scan of a meteorite. The work draws on Timothy Morton’s idea of the hyperobject, a thing too vast in time and space for us to hold in mind.

After-Nature is a photographic inventory of natural history specimens held in museum storage. It is modelled on William Henry Fox Talbot’s The Pencil of Nature (1844), the book that first set photography to work as a way of cataloguing the world.

Digital Uncanny: Texture Maps is a series of photographic prints made from the texture maps that photogrammetry software generates from natural history specimens. Its starting point is Jorge Luis Borges’s parable of a map drawn to the size of the empire it describes.

After the Object follows a group of objects through photogrammetry, as a photograph is taken apart into data and reassembled as a digital object. Each work holds one stage of that process.

Death Mask of a Chimpanzee presents the face of Jimmy, a chimpanzee who lived at Perth Zoo from 1962 to 1968, rebuilt from photographs of the death mask held by the Western Australian Museum. The mask is shown in more than one form, and each tests how far the viewer can trust what they see.

An Archive of Speculative Geologies photographs stone and industrial residue as if it had been recovered for the museum of a future time. Agate and jasper sit in the same register as slag glass, as evidence of an age that has not yet been named.

Strata / Fracture / Entanglement treats geological time as a material that folds back on itself and breaks. The work is in development.

Out of Time follows the Great Northern Highway through rural towns and the sites left behind them, photographed on Polaroid stock long past its expiry date. The film is chemically unstable, so the images keep changing after they are made.

Analogue Artefacts gathers work made in London on large format transparency film. Each image was built in the camera from multiple exposures on a single sheet. The finished transparency looked like one moment. It was a composite that no eye had ever seen at once.

Cumulus Conference. ISBN 978-952-64-90004-5 · ISSN 2490-046X