R. G. Collingwood, in his book The Archaeology of Roman Britain, emphasizes the historical value of epigraphic texts, calling them "contemporary and authoritative documents, whose text if legible cannot be corrupt…" Certainly I agree with him about their value. For me, however, there is also a perverse temptation to "corrupt" a text that has remained unchanged for 2000 years. On finding in the Rome Coliseum a large building stone bearing the textual fragment "LOSEC," I feel an irresistible urge to change the "C" to an "R." Traveling with a relatively cheap digital camera and laptop these past months, the method for effecting such a change was clear.

Call it digital sampling, only instead of borrowing from contemporary source material, the data sampled and remixed comes from cultures that no longer exist. The desire is not to merely appropriate this antiquated imagery and text, but to look for resonances – to create a kind of conceptual bridge between ancient and contemporary, upon which content might flow in both directions.