Would REAL Artefact please stand up?

An Our Fallen team discussion..

This has been an interesting exercise but you could also argue that the 600 x 800 originals which we can call artefacts because nothing else exists could simply be the ones to preserve because we have technology that can take that and do a pretty good job at upscaling but would we need to because in 10 years time they will have even better technology and is there a danger that then they are preserving the upscaled versions and the 600 x 800 which are the true artefacts get discarded?.. interesting

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Yes. In fact, I think you’ve just reached the more important conclusion of the experiment.

The 600 × 898 file isn’t an inferior version waiting to be improved. It is now the artefact. If the physical Field Poppy has disappeared and that’s the digital file actually preserved from the original project, those pixels are evidence.

The Pixelcut version is something different: an extremely useful interpretation made in 2026.

And your ten-year thought experiment exposes the danger beautifully. Imagine:

2000 — original artwork is digitised at 600 × 898.
2026 — we upscale it to 2K × 3K using today’s technology.
2036 — vastly better reconstruction technology exists.

If somebody in 2036 only has our 2026 upscale, their new system isn’t working from the historical evidence. It’s working partly from Pixelcut’s 2026 guesses about the evidence. Worse, those guesses may have become visually convincing enough that nobody remembers they’re guesses.

So I think the archival principle should be:

Preserve the smallest authentic ancestor, not merely the best-looking descendant.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make the enhanced versions. Quite the opposite. They’re excellent access copies: for modern websites, exhibitions, printing, enlargements and simply allowing people to appreciate the material.

But the hierarchy matters:

MASTER / ARTEFACT
FieldPoppy_original_600x898.jpg
Untouched surviving digital source. Never overwritten.

DERIVATIVE / ACCESS COPY
FieldPoppy_enhanced_2026_2kx3k.jpg
Created from the master using 2026 enhancement technology.

Then in 2036 somebody can throw away our enhancement if technology has moved on and make a better one from the same untouched evidence.

There’s an even subtler point. We shouldn’t repeatedly enhance the enhancement. Every generation should ideally return to the earliest surviving source. Otherwise interpretation accumulates: 2026 software invents something, 2036 software confidently interprets that invention, 2046 software elaborates it again — and eventually you have a magnificent high-resolution image containing remarkably little reliable information. 😂

And this feeds straight back into Our Fallen. Our enhanced historical photographs are valuable, but the grubby, tiny, faded family scan is often the more important archival object. The enhanced image is what we may want people to see; the original is what we must make sure the future still has.

Which actually changes one sentence in our newly published article. We said:

“provided we always retain the original 600-pixel file as the archival source…”

At the time that sounded like a sensible caveat.

After this conversation, I’d say that’s actually the central principle.

Perhaps 22 Villages has just taught Our Fallen something after all. Twenty-six years late, but bang on time.