The work can be understood as a harbinger of major shifts in image culture. Staehle’s interest in documenting scenes of everyday life aligned with the emergence of a “record everything” mentality that was fueled by newly available digital tools.

Untitled can now be read in relation to the kind of archival narratives that result from the increasingly exhaustive documentation of everyday life, in which human tragedies are often recorded by the detached gaze of automated systems.

Staehle made use of such a system, finding within it a possible strategy for facilitating artistic inquiry and aesthetic contemplation in a conditions of increasingly ubiquitous connectivity.