The Black Tower is an experimental film using crowd-sourced, aftermath photography of Grenfell Tower, in the wake of the catastrophe that befell Londoners in 2017. As a homage to John Smith’s 1987 masterpiece of the same name, we enter the world of a notional character who is preoccupied with a black tower that seems to follow them around eventually driving them to oblivion. Crucial that all aftermath images for the film were crowdsourced from the general public who had documented the aftermath, here we consider how a networked connectivity can link individual consciousness to cultural memory. This re-enactment creates an aesthetic space to join the conversation between event & representation, myth & reality and the role of viewer-witness in our digital culture. Given how voyeurism underlies an engagement with spectacles of violence, the film explores how “Art After Grenfell” is even possible by putting the traumatic image under scrutiny to perform a critique of seeing. We watched the Tower transform overnight from presence to absence - and then again ad nauseam through the prism of mainstream media. On that day, event and representation experienced a temporal collapse. An architectural and visual anomaly, the ‘monument’ became a politically and historically resonant site of trauma. As the real appears and disappears through the power of images, its monumentality hides in plain sight. The project explores (counter) memory and attempts to inspire an ethical presence with the wider complexities of this unconscionable trauma.