Stefan Gant's practice and research explores the discourse of contemporary drawing. Through peer selection, Gant was selected as a finalist and exhibitor in 2007, 2010 and 2012 for the Jerwood Drawing Prize, London and UK tour. He was also 'Highly Commended' at the National Eisteddfod of Wales Visual Arts Exhibition in 2007. Through his art practice, Gant challenges the notions of what drawing can be through the temporality of filmic medium and digital technologies. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and has been the recipient of Arts Council of Wales and Wales Arts International funding. Paul Reilly is a both a practicing field archaeologist and a pioneer of virtual and creative digital archaeologies. His current research explores ontological transformations that occur when (im)material archaeology enters the digital. He has published widely (see orcid.org/0000-0002-8067-8991). Reilly is honorary life member and former chairman of the Computer Applications and Archaeology organisation (CAA), and also chairs the CAA International Scientific Committee.

In this art/archaeological study, we question the utility of the interrelated concepts of provenance, provenience, and paradata as applied to assemblages in art, archaeology, and cultural heritage contexts. We discuss how these overlapping concepts are used to establish values of authenticity and authoritative attributions. However, as cultural assemblages are increasingly being extended through virtualisation, they may exist digitally as well as physically, or as combinations of both, that is phygitally. We show how provenances and paradata can now become unstable and even detached from the assemblage. Through a sequence of collaborative projects, we expose two provenance illusions at the centre of archaeological recording and presentation practices. In these illusions, the archaeologists and much of the archaeology they record actually disappear from the authoritative reports that are published. Using a transdisciplinary, diffractive art/archaeology approach, these illusions are unpacked to reveal how superficially slight changes to traditional archaeological “drawings” and “photographs” have wrought fundamental ontological shifts in their modern phygital incarnations which undermines their provenances and associated paradata. We conclude that archaeology like fine art does not require conscious paradata in order to support statements of authority and interpretation. Instead, we argue that archaeologists should adopt an art/archaeology approach and subvert and dismantle established practices, methods, tools, techniques, and outputs. By highlighting and challenging inconsistencies in what we say we do with what we actually do, we expose gaps in our knowledge and data and shortcomings in our practices. These deficiencies can then be tackled by developing more robust (trans)disciplinary approaches.

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