Literature Review from ChatGPT

What follows is a prompt given to ChatGPT version GPT-6 Intelligent UI on October 11, 2026, and its response

I have a research question about composite objects. Specifically, I am making composites of thousands of WWI memorials and I want to understand what scholars have written about the meaning of this type of object. I want to become familiar with the scholarship that can provide context for my project. Please provide me an annotated bibliography on hyperobjects and the hyper-real. Please also include any other studies that you find to be closely relevant. For every entry, include a DOI or ISBN. At minimum there should be at least 20 scholarly works and no more than 60 total.

Annotated Bibliography: Hyperobjects, Hyperreality, Composite Images, and the Memory of the First World War

Introduction: How to Conceptualize Your Composite Memorials

Your project raises an important question in visual culture and historical theory: What happens to the meaning of historical objects when thousands of individually meaningful objects are combined into a single image?

A First World War memorial is already a composite object in one sense. It unites individual deaths, communal grief, political aspirations, artistic conventions, and collective memory in a single material artifact. By combining thousands of these memorials, you are producing another level of representation: an image that may reveal historical patterns no individual monument can express.

Several theoretical traditions are particularly useful for interpreting this process.

Hyperobjects: Timothy Morton’s concept describes phenomena so extensively distributed across space and time that they cannot be comprehended from any single location. The totality of First World War commemoration might productively be investigated through this framework, although an individual composite image is not automatically a hyperobject.
Hyperreality: Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco provide ways of understanding representations that generate their own sense of reality. A composite might produce an apparently definitive image of remembrance that never existed as a physical object.
Photographic composites and visual atlases: Scholars of photography, archives, and art history examine how combining images can reveal shared forms, impose categories, and create meanings absent from individual images.
Collective and cultural memory: Historians distinguish individual acts of remembrance from the social systems that produce collective interpretations of the past.
Digital visualization and aggregation: Recent scholarship examines how large collections of visual evidence become intelligible through computational and artistic transformation, and what these transformations conceal.

I would emphasize a distinction throughout your research: a composite is not simply a representation of many things; it is a new object whose meaning emerges from the process of combination.

The bibliography below brings these traditions together, with annotations emphasizing their relevance to First World War memorials. It includes foundational theoretical texts, methodological studies, and specialized historical scholarship. Each entry identifies a DOI or ISBN.

I. Hyperobjects, Hyperreality, and the Ontology of Composite Objects

This section provides the philosophical foundation. The first three works are especially useful for defining hyperobject precisely; the later works explore how objects, representations, and simulations acquire their meanings.

Hyperobjects and Distributed Materiality

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

ISBN: 9780816689231.

Morton’s foundational text develops the hyperobject as an entity distributed so extensively across space and time that no individual can perceive it in its entirety. His characteristics include viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity. For your project, the distributed phenomenon of WWI commemoration is a promising candidate for analysis: individual memorials provide localized encounters with a much larger historical phenomenon. However, the composite image should not be confused with the entirety of that phenomenon.
Morton, Timothy. “Everything We Need: Scarcity, Scale, Hyperobjects.” Architectural Design 82, no. 4 (2012): 78–81.

DOI: 10.1002/ad.1433.

This shorter essay connects hyperobjects to architecture, scale, and our tendency to establish artificial boundaries around complex phenomena. It is useful for a project concerned with physical monuments because it helps frame the relationship between built objects and conditions that exceed their boundaries. It also offers a more accessible introduction to Morton’s ideas than his full-length monograph.
Boulton, Elizabeth. “Climate Change as a ‘Hyperobject’: A Critical Review of Timothy Morton’s Reframing Narrative.” WIREs Climate Change 7, no. 5 (2016): 772–785.

DOI: 10.1002/wcc.410.

Boulton evaluates Morton’s concept as a strategy for conveying phenomena that exceed ordinary perception. She recognizes the value of aesthetic and philosophical approaches but questions whether Morton’s unsettling language can make such phenomena harder to understand. This is particularly relevant to the communicative aims of your composites: does the visualization render the scale of remembrance comprehensible, or does it overwhelm the viewer?
Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

ISBN: 9780674049208.

This earlier work develops Morton’s understanding of interconnectedness, which informs his later account of hyperobjects. Its concept of a vast network of relationships can be extended, cautiously, beyond ecology. It may help you consider individual memorials not as independent artifacts but as participants in larger networks of grief, nationalism, manufacturing, religious imagery, and commemorative practice.
Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. London: Pelican Books, 2018.

ISBN: 9780241269152.

Harman argues that objects possess realities that cannot be exhausted by their relationships, descriptions, or human uses. This offers a productive counterpoint to interpretations that treat memorials merely as manifestations of collective memory. Your composites may establish relationships among objects while leaving much of the reality of each individual monument irreducible to the resulting image.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

DOI: 10.1215/9780822391623.

Bennett develops a theory of material agency, emphasizing the capacities of things and the assemblages they form. Although her concerns differ from memorial studies, her concept of assemblage is especially useful for composite objects. A large collection of memorials might be understood as an assemblage whose historical and aesthetic significance emerges through relations among material forms, makers, locations, and viewers.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

DOI: 10.1215/9780822388128.

Barad’s theory of agential realism challenges the assumption that observation merely records an independently existing object. Her discussion of apparatuses and the production of knowledge is valuable for examining how the methods used to construct your composites—photographic selection, alignment, cropping, weighting, and combination—shape what becomes visible. The composite is an interpretive production, not simply a transparent aggregation of evidence.

Hyperreality and Representation

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Originally published in French in 1981.

DOI: 10.3998/mpub.9904.

This is the foundational statement of Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and hyperreality. He examines situations in which representations cease merely to reflect reality and instead produce a reality of their own. Your composite memorials invite such an interpretation because they create apparently unified objects that never existed in historical space. A question inspired by Baudrillard is whether a visually convincing composite might come to function as a more authoritative representation of WWI remembrance than its thousands of constituent monuments.
Baudrillard, Jean. The Perfect Crime. Translated by Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1996.

ISBN: 9781859840443.

Baudrillard further explores the apparent displacement of reality by increasingly comprehensive systems of representation. His work offers a deliberately provocative way to investigate the danger that visualization might replace historical complexity with an illusion of completeness. For your project, this is useful as a cautionary rather than descriptive framework: a composite can be visually persuasive without constituting an exhaustive or unmediated historical account.
Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays. Translated by William Weaver. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Also published as Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality.

ISBN: 9780151910793.

Eco examines reproductions, simulations, museums, and cultural environments in which representations seem more complete or compelling than their originals. He is particularly helpful for understanding the aesthetic experience of hyperreality, rather than only its philosophical implications. The text provides a way to consider the paradox that a fabricated composite of thousands of real memorials could appear to communicate the experience of mass commemoration more powerfully than any actual memorial.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.

DOI: 10.1215/9780822378419.

Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism emphasizes the historical significance of surface, reproduction, pastiche, and the difficulty of representing complex totalities. His discussion of cognitive mapping is especially relevant to visualizing collections that exceed individual perception. Your memorial composites might operate as attempts to make a dispersed historical totality intellectually graspable through a new visual form.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

ISBN: 9780262024525 (hardcover); 9780262522793 (2000 paperback).

Bolter and Grusin argue that new media transform existing representational practices rather than simply replacing them. Their distinction between immediacy and hypermediacy is particularly useful for your project. A seamless composite may conceal its photographic construction, whereas a tiled montage makes the plurality of contributing images visible. These formal choices can lead viewers toward quite different interpretations of authenticity and historical knowledge.

II. Composite Photography, Visual Atlases, and the Creation of New Images

This is arguably the most directly relevant theoretical literature for the actual making of composite memorials.

The works below examine photographic averages, visual typologies, image archives, montage, and the meanings produced through juxtaposition and combination.

Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64.

DOI: 10.2307/778312.

One of the most important works for your project. Sekula analyzes the nineteenth-century development of photographic archives, classification systems, and composite portraiture, particularly Francis Galton’s efforts to produce statistically representative faces. He demonstrates how photographic aggregation participates in projects of knowledge and social power. The historical association between composite photography, statistical norms, and eugenics makes this article especially important when considering the political implications of creating an apparently representative or idealized memorial from thousands of individual examples.
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

ISBN: 9780870236266.

Tagg challenges the assumption that photographs function as self-evident historical documents. He emphasizes the institutional conditions through which photographs acquire evidentiary authority. This work will help you describe the transformation from individual photographs documenting specific monuments into composite images claiming to reveal broader historical patterns. It also provides a framework for discussing how your own decisions about inclusion and presentation shape the archive.
Warburg, Aby. Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne—The Original. Edited by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2020.

ISBN: 9783775746939.

Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, constructed during the 1920s, is one of the foundational projects in visual research through the juxtaposition of images. He organized reproductions into panels that revealed continuities, transformations, and recurring motifs across different historical periods. For your project, Warburg offers a particularly compelling precedent for treating the assembled visual field as an argument rather than an illustration. His approach suggests that relationships among memorials may become legible through their arrangement.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art. Translated by Harvey Mendelsohn. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016.

ISBN: 9780271072098.

Didi-Huberman develops Warburg’s understanding of images as sites where different historical temporalities coexist. He is particularly interested in the persistence of older visual conventions within later cultural forms. This is valuable for WWI memorials because monuments produced after 1918 frequently adapted much older iconographic traditions. A composite might reveal the persistence of religious, classical, medieval, or nationalist imagery within a commemorative landscape associated with modern industrial warfare.
Becher, Bernd, and Hilla Becher. Typologies of Industrial Buildings. Edited by Armin Zweite. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

ISBN: 9780262025652.

The Bechers photographed industrial architecture systematically and arranged images into typological groups, making similarities and differences visible through repetition. Their work is among the strongest artistic precedents for combining large numbers of photographs of broadly similar structures. For your project, the key insight is that standardization of viewpoint and presentation transforms individual monuments into a comparative visual system. Unlike photographic averaging, their grids preserve the integrity of individual examples while generating new knowledge through juxtaposition.
Edwards, Elizabeth. Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums. Oxford: Berg, 2001.

ISBN: 9781859734971.

Edwards treats photographs not only as representations but as historical objects embedded within social relations, institutions, and practices. Her attention to archival and museum contexts helps illuminate what happens when images are extracted from their original environments and reorganized. For your memorial composites, Edwards offers a way to examine how removing monuments from their locations and placing them within a new visual system transforms their historical significance.
Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. Translated by Rela Mazali and Ruvik Danieli. New York: Zone Books, 2008.

ISBN: 9781890951894.

Azoulay understands photography as a relationship involving the photographer, the photographed subject, and the spectator, with significant ethical and political consequences. Her arguments are especially important when photographs concern catastrophe, violence, and people whose histories have been marginalized. For your project, this raises ethical questions about who is represented in memorials, who remains absent, and how a composite reshapes the relationship between historical suffering and the contemporary viewer.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Later edition, 2010.

ISBN: 9780374532338 (2010 edition).

Barthes distinguishes the culturally intelligible features of photographs from details that affect individual viewers with particular emotional force. His theory offers an important counterpoint to the abstraction of mass visual composites. When thousands of memorials become a single image, does their aggregation strengthen the emotional encounter with loss, or remove precisely those distinctive details that made individual images affecting?
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

ISBN: 9780312422196 (Picador edition).

Sontag examines the representation of war, death, and suffering in photography, questioning what images can communicate and how repeated exposure affects viewers. This is crucial for your project because the memorials themselves represent historical loss, while your composites introduce another level of visual mediation. Sontag helps frame the ethical and aesthetic tension between making the magnitude of suffering perceptible and reducing that suffering to a visually compelling spectacle.
Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

ISBN: 9780226532325.

Mitchell explores the relationships among images, language, representation, and interpretation, including the concept of the metapicture: an image that reflects upon the nature of images themselves. Your memorial composites might be understood as metapictures because they simultaneously depict monuments and encourage viewers to reconsider how monumentality, remembrance, and visual repetition operate. This work would help you develop an art-historical interpretation of the composite as a self-reflexive visual form.

III. Digital Humanities, Visualization, and the Interpretation of Large Visual Collections

These works are particularly important if your composites are being produced through digital image processing, computational techniques, or systematic combinations of thousands of photographs.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

ISBN: 9780262133746.

Manovich investigates the structural and conceptual characteristics of digital media, including databases, compositing, modularity, and the relationship between digital and earlier visual forms. His discussion of compositing is particularly relevant to your project. He offers a vocabulary for understanding how digital images can construct new visual realities from independent elements, while his discussion of databases helps distinguish an underlying collection from its visual representation.
Manovich, Lev. Cultural Analytics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.

DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/11214.001.0001.

Especially relevant to your project. Manovich develops methods for analyzing cultural phenomena through large collections of images and other digital materials. He explores the possibilities of observing patterns that would be difficult or impossible to perceive through conventional examination of individual works. Your memorial composites fit closely with this general approach. The book provides a methodological framework for moving between individual historical artifacts, large-scale visual patterns, and the interpretation of cultural variation.
Drucker, Johanna. Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.

DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/12523.001.0001.

Drucker argues that visualizations in the humanities should express interpretive complexity rather than borrow uncritically from methods that presume data to be objective and self-evident. This has direct implications for your work. The choice to normalize memorial photographs, average their features, or arrange them according to particular categories is not a neutral technical operation. Drucker helps explain how those choices constitute historical arguments.
Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005.

ISBN: 9781844670260.

Moretti develops approaches to literary history that move away from the close reading of individual texts toward patterns observable across large collections. Although his primary subject is literature, his argument is applicable to your memorial project. The composite may reveal structures of repetition, variation, and historical change that are difficult to identify through individual case studies. Moretti also provides a useful starting point for discussing what is lost when historical interpretation shifts from singular objects to aggregate forms.
D’Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.

DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/11805.001.0001.

D’Ignazio and Klein use feminist theory to examine power, classification, absence, and representation in data collection and visualization. Their approach is important for understanding how large datasets can reproduce existing inequalities while appearing objective. For a collection of WWI memorials, it encourages questions about whose deaths were commemorated, which social groups controlled memorial design, and how gender, class, race, empire, and nationality shaped the surviving monuments. A composite may render certain historical patterns visible while unintentionally reproducing their exclusions.
Kurgan, Laura. Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics. New York: Zone Books, 2013.

ISBN: 9781935408284.

Kurgan explores the political and cultural implications of creating images from large quantities of spatial and technological data. Her work operates at the intersection of art, architecture, documentary practice, and information visualization. The book is especially useful for thinking about how the change of scale transforms an object’s meaning. Your memorials may be encountered either as geographically specific historical sites or as constituents of a much larger visual landscape; Kurgan provides a vocabulary for examining that transformation.

IV. Collective Memory, Monumentality, and the First World War

The final section grounds the broader theoretical literature in historical scholarship on commemoration.

These studies are essential for avoiding an interpretation in which the visual similarities among monuments obscure their distinctive historical contexts.

Theories of Collective and Cultural Memory

Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Edited and translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226774497.001.0001.

Halbwachs provides a foundational account of collective memory, arguing that remembrance operates within social frameworks rather than existing entirely within isolated individuals. His work is central to understanding why communities erect memorials and how monuments acquire their meanings. For your project, Halbwachs helps explain how distinct local acts of commemoration might collectively participate in much larger systems of remembering.
Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–24.

DOI: 10.2307/2928520.

Nora develops the influential concept of lieux de mémoire, sites where memory becomes concentrated and invested with symbolic significance. WWI memorials are obvious candidates for this kind of analysis. Your project raises a second-order question inspired by Nora: can a composite of thousands of historical memory sites itself become a new site of memory, despite having no singular physical location or original commemorative community?
Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Functions, Media, Archives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

ISBN: 9780521165877.

Assmann examines the relationship between cultural memory, symbolic forms, archival practices, and the transmission of the past. Her work is particularly useful for distinguishing the continued existence of historical materials from their active use in cultural remembrance. The transformation of your memorial photographs into a composite can be understood as another stage in the mediation and reinterpretation of cultural memory.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

ISBN: 9780231156530.

Hirsch develops the concept of postmemory to examine how later generations inherit memories of traumatic events they did not experience. Her work is valuable for investigating the changing relationship between WWI memorials and contemporary audiences, especially as firsthand personal connections have disappeared. Your composites may create a new form of engagement with a historically distant catastrophe, raising questions about the mediation, transmission, and appropriation of inherited memories.

First World War Memorials and Historical Commemoration

Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

ISBN: 9780521496822.

Winter’s influential study examines the cultural practices through which Europeans commemorated the First World War. He emphasizes the persistence of traditional languages of mourning, religion, and ritual, challenging interpretations that describe the war as producing a complete rupture with the past. For your composites, this is particularly important because recurring monument forms may represent continuity with earlier cultural traditions rather than the invention of an entirely new commemorative vocabulary.
Winter, Jay. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

ISBN: 9780300110685.

Winter examines the development of modern war remembrance through public rituals, historical narratives, visual images, and commemorative institutions. His work helps distinguish between historical knowledge about the war and the practices through which societies remember it. The book is useful for placing your digital composites within a longer history of transforming the First World War into collective cultural representations.
King, Alex. Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance. Oxford: Berg, 1998.

ISBN: 9781859739884.

One of the most important historical studies for your project. King examines the production of British WWI memorials, paying particular attention to local political processes, conflicting interpretations, symbolism, and commemorative practices. His study demonstrates that monuments that appear formally similar may have emerged from very different social circumstances. The book is especially useful for interpreting the tension between the formal uniformity that your composites might reveal and the diverse local negotiations that produced the original memorials.
Goebel, Stefan. The Great War and Medieval Memory: War, Remembrance and Medievalism in Britain and Germany, 1914–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

ISBN: 9780521854153.

Goebel examines how British and German commemorative cultures used representations of the medieval past to interpret the First World War. His comparative approach demonstrates how similar historical and artistic traditions could be adapted to different national circumstances. The work is particularly relevant if your composites reveal repeated medievalizing motifs, such as knights, crosses, or architectural forms, across geographically dispersed memorials.
Mosse, George L. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

ISBN: 9780195071399 (later paperback edition).

Mosse analyzes the creation of a modern commemorative culture in which military death became associated with sacrifice, national regeneration, and collective identity. He demonstrates how representations of war could transform mass death into culturally meaningful narratives. Your composites could provide a visual means of investigating the standardization of these narratives across thousands of memorial objects.
Sherman, Daniel J. The Construction of Memory in Interwar France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

ISBN: 9780226752860 (2000 paperback edition).

Sherman examines the relationship between the remembrance of WWI, visual culture, public commemoration, and the political reconstruction of France. The study is especially valuable because French war memorials were produced in enormous numbers but nevertheless reflected diverse social and political circumstances. It offers an important historical framework for investigating the balance between shared visual conventions and local variation in a large composite collection.
Gregory, Adrian. The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day, 1919–1946. Oxford: Berg, 1994.

ISBN: 9781859730010.

Gregory explores British Armistice Day rituals and their contribution to public memory, demonstrating that collective remembrance was continually negotiated and contested. Although this study focuses primarily on commemorative practices rather than monument design, it helps establish the historical relationship between material memorials and the rituals that gave them meaning. It offers a reminder that monuments should not be interpreted entirely apart from the social performances surrounding them.
Inglis, K. S. Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998. Revised edition, 2008.

ISBN: 9780522854794 (2008 edition).

Inglis provides a comprehensive historical examination of Australian war memorials, interpreting their imagery, placement, and associated rituals in relation to national identity and civic religion. The book is particularly valuable because it approaches commemorative monuments as a large-scale historical and geographical phenomenon. Its discussion of memorials ranging from major national monuments to small-town structures would provide a strong comparative model for your project.
Vance, Jonathan F. Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997.

ISBN: 9780774806008 (1999 paperback edition).

Vance studies the construction of Canadian memory of the First World War through literature, art, ritual, and commemorative culture. He emphasizes the ways historical experiences were transformed into idealized accounts of military sacrifice and national development. His analysis provides a useful comparative framework for considering how your composites might reveal common international motifs while also exposing distinctive national narratives.
Wittman, Laura. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning, and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011.

DOI: 10.3138/9781442696006.

Wittman examines the symbolic representation of collective loss through the figure of the Unknown Soldier. Her work is especially relevant to the conceptual problem of using one object to stand for many individuals. The Unknown Soldier embodies a form of symbolic aggregation: an anonymous individual becomes a representation of a vast population of dead. Your composite memorials perform a different but related operation by producing one visual form from many commemorative objects.

Monumentality, Affect, and the Politics of Memorial Objects

Doss, Erika. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

ISBN: 9780226159386.

Doss examines the proliferation of memorials and the emotional and political investments they embody. She treats commemorative monuments as sites through which public feelings are expressed, organized, and contested. Although her examples are predominantly American and often more recent than WWI, her conceptual approach is useful for investigating whether your composites communicate an accumulation of emotion as well as an accumulation of physical objects.
Young, James E. The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

ISBN: 9780300053838.

Young’s study examines how memorial forms and their meanings differ across historical and national contexts. He challenges the idea that monuments possess fixed meanings independent of their audiences, locations, or commemorative traditions. While his primary subject is Holocaust remembrance, the book is valuable for considering what happens when monuments are detached from their environments and reorganized into a single composite. His work cautions against the assumption that a common visual form necessarily signifies a common historical meaning.
Beckstead, Zachary, Gabriel Twose, Emily Levesque-Gottlieb, and Julia Rizzo. “Collective Remembering through the Materiality and Organization of War Memorials.” Journal of Material Culture 16, no. 2 (2011): 193–213.

DOI: 10.1177/1359183511401494.

A particularly useful article linking the theoretical and historical dimensions of your project. The authors examine how the material form and spatial organization of war memorials contribute to collective remembrance. Their analysis of the Massachusetts Vietnam Veterans Memorial demonstrates that a memorial’s effects cannot be reduced to its textual or symbolic content. This offers a framework for examining what happens when memorial objects are digitally recomposed and their original material and spatial relationships are transformed.

V. Synthesis: What This Scholarship Suggests About Your Composites

The bibliography contains 45 scholarly works, spanning philosophy, art history, photography, digital humanities, cultural memory, and the history of war commemoration.

Taken together, they suggest at least four interpretations of your composite images.

Interpretive model	Central question	Most useful scholarship
Hyperobject	Does the composite provide a partial encounter with a distributed historical phenomenon too extensive to perceive directly?	Morton, Boulton
Hyperreal object	Does the composite produce a persuasive new visual reality that never existed as a physical monument?	Baudrillard, Eco, Bolter and Grusin
Visual atlas or typology	Does placing thousands of images into a shared visual framework reveal relationships invisible in their individual presentation?	Warburg, Didi-Huberman, Bechers, Sekula
Collective memory object	Can the composite represent large-scale systems of remembrance while preserving the historical specificity of individual commemorative acts?	Halbwachs, Winter, King, Assmann, Beckstead et al.

The Distinction I Would Prioritize

I would be cautious about describing the composite itself as a hyperobject without qualification.

Morton’s hyperobjects are not simply very large collections of objects, nor are they images assembled from numerous smaller images. His concept concerns entities with forms of temporal and spatial distribution that exceed localized perception. The entire historical phenomenon of First World War remembrance might plausibly be examined through this theory. Your composite could then be described as an attempt to make aspects of that distributed phenomenon perceptible.

By contrast, Baudrillard’s hyperreality addresses a different question: how representations can produce a new reality that seems autonomous from, or more compelling than, the objects they represent. This may be especially relevant if your composites produce a coherent, recognizable memorial that never actually existed.

A third framework, the visual atlas, may provide the closest art-historical precedent. Warburg and the Bechers demonstrate that the aggregation of images can become an independent intellectual and artistic operation, producing meanings through combination, juxtaposition, and repetition.

There is also a significant difference between two possible methods of compositing:

Overlaid or averaged images can suppress differences to produce a representative or generalized form. Sekula’s discussion of Galton, along with Drucker’s work on visualization, is especially important here.
Tiled, juxtaposed, or mosaic images can preserve individual examples while making relationships visible across a collection. Warburg, the Bechers, and Manovich provide especially relevant precedents.

If your composites involve one of these techniques rather than the other, the theoretical emphasis should change accordingly.

VI. Recommended Starting Points

Of the 45 works, I would begin with these six, in approximately this order:

Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive” (1986). Begin here for the history and politics of composite photography, particularly the relationship between photographic aggregation, classification, and claims to represent typical forms. Article information.
Aby Warburg, Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (2020 reconstruction). Study the arrangement of images into interpretive constellations, particularly how recurring historical symbols become meaningful through their visual relationships. Publisher’s description.
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (2013). Read this to determine whether the larger phenomenon represented by your composite satisfies Morton’s criteria for a hyperobject. Publisher’s description.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1994). Use this to explore whether the composite acquires a visual and conceptual reality distinct from that of the memorials used to construct it. Book information.
Lev Manovich, Cultural Analytics (2020). Use this for the methodology of analyzing large collections of cultural images and translating visual aggregation into historical interpretation. Book information.
Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain (1998). Ground your theoretical claims in the actual historical circumstances of memorial construction and the diverse meanings attached to apparently conventional forms. Publisher’s description.

VII. A Possible Central Argument for Your Research

One argument worth developing from this literature is that your composites operate simultaneously at three levels.

First, they are historical archives transformed into visual objects. Their constituent images refer to specific monuments, each situated within particular communities and commemorative traditions.

Second, they are instruments of historical analysis. Through aggregation, they reveal recurring structures, aesthetic conventions, and visual relationships that may not be readily apparent when monuments are studied individually.

Third, they are new cultural objects with their own meanings. They are not merely summaries of the photographs from which they were constructed. They can elicit interpretations and emotional responses that differ fundamentally from the experiences of encountering the original monuments.

The most intellectually productive tension may be that your images make the collective visible by transforming, and potentially diminishing, the individuality of their constituents.

That tension connects the early history of composite photography, the methodological debates surrounding digital humanities, contemporary theories of representation, and the historiography of First World War remembrance. It also creates a strong basis for explaining why the composites should be considered historical interpretations—and potentially works of art—in their own right, rather than simply digital illustrations of an existing historical collection.

Theorizing Composites