yasminer jon ippolito send be a back email suggesting we bring attention
to the book by sean cubitt Digital Light in which Ippolito has an essay in it
http://openhumanitiespress.org/digital-light.html
Sean, Jon- hope you will jump in to the yasmin discussion on light !
here is the table of contents:
Introduction: Materiality and Invisibility 7 Sean Cubitt, Daniel
Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz 1. A Taxonomy and Genealogy of Digital
Light-Based Technologies 21 Alvy Ray Smith 2. Coherent Light from
Projectors to Fibre Optics 43 Sean Cubitt 3. HD Aesthetics and Digital
Cinematography 61 Terry Flaxton 4. What is Digital Light? 83 Stephen
Jones 5. Lillian Schwartz and Digital Art at Bell Laboratories,
1965–1984 102 Carolyn L. Kane 6. Digital Photography and the
Operational Archive 122 Scott McQuire 7. Lights, Camera, Algorithm:
Digital Photography's Algorithmic Conditions 144 Daniel Palmer 8.
Simulated Translucency 163 Cathryn Vasseleu 9. Mediations of Light:
Screens as Information Surfaces 179 Christiane Paul 10. View in Half
or Varying Light: Joel Zika's Neo-Baroque Aesthetics 193 Darren Tofts
11. The Panopticon is Leaking 204
meanwhile sean has a second book just out
The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies From Prints to Pixels.
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/practice-light
--
From the introduction to the book The Practice of Light
the intro is on Sean's academia page
The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies From Prints
to Pixels. Cambridge MA: MITPressSean Cubitt
This work is licensed under aCreative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia License.
Preface (pre-press draft)
The rewriting of the past is dynamic, oriented towards the future. Its
role is to endow the present with meaning byoffering a focus of desire
to a community with reason todoubt its future' (Debray 2004: 29)
How do visual media work? How did they get to work the way they do?
Does how they work matter?
The Practice of Light
ponders these questions by concentrating on the inferences of the
word 'work'. The titlerefers to the practice of light. Working with
light, the work
of
light, making things with and about light, is practice. When we speak
of someone as 'practical', we think of a one-to-one relationship with
materials andtools. That privileged close relation is still widespread
in media, but the tools have become increasinglycomplex, and the forms
of practice increasingly involve complex interactions not only of
human beings buttechnologies doing things, working, making. All
practice involves us in the laws of nature and, as we shallsee, in
learning from natural processes, and intervening in them. The book
unpacks a story of natural, humanand technical practices involved in
both craft and industrial methods of accounting for or mobilising
light invisual media.Light is the condition of all vision. The visual
media are our most important explorations of this condition.They
reveal the long history of humanity's struggle to control light.
The Practice of Light
presents agenealogy of the commanding visual media of the 21st
century, digital video, film and photography, tracingthe evolution of
their forms through a history of materials and practices. Because of
this focus, it omits thenon-Western history of visual technologies,
the dyes, inks, printing and paper technologies that preceded
theEuropean trajectory of printmaking, and the
swadeshi
and other indigenous forms of mechanical and digitalmedia developed
in the modern period. Instead it traces the roots of those
technologies that have becomeglobal in the 21st century. Addressing
the colonialist implications of these technologies, as well as the
otherface of globalisation, the ecological implications of dominant
media forms, will have to wait for acompanion volume to this book. It
seemed important first to establish the aesthetic of dominance in
thedominant aesthetic. In the imperial era that parallels the period
tracked here since the 15th century,techniques and technologies stolen
from colonised cultures have been assimilated into that
dominantaesthetic. It will take another book, or more than one, to
trace the braided environmental and decolonialhistories of visual
technologies. That work will look at the extent of dominance: this
investigates itsintensity.
The Practice of Light
begins in the invisibility of black, then builds from line to surface
to volume and space.It traces increasing degrees of complexity,
passing from the simplest of marks, the line, to two qualities
ofsurfaces, their texture or grain and their colour. The construction
of space in visual media is addressed in thefollowing chapter under
the rubrics of shadows, layers and projection, with perspective
considered a specialcase of a more generalised practice of projecting
that includes, among other things, cartographicorganisations of space
as well as cinematic projection. The last chapter deals with time, the
most recentaddition to visual culture, although in many respects the
media we can presume to be the oldest – poetry,song and dance – were
always intrinsically temporal. Time, as the movement of becoming,
completes atrajectory from nothing, the invisible dark, via something,
surfaces and spaces that are clearly seen, to end inwhat cannot be
seen as and in itself, but yet is everywhere apparent: the time of
decay and of emergence.By media I understand the physical processes –
matter, energy dimension and form – in which all humancommunication
takes place, including money, sex, transport, weapons and the panoply
of communication
The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 1
roger malina
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