Hello all
my name is Sean Cubitt, I'm a media scholar based now in the UK but having lived in Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia.
Roger suggested I should chip into this discussion because I recently published a book about the history of visual technologies - there's a sample here
https://www.academia.edu/11196517/The_Practice_of_Light_A_Genealogy_of_Visual_Technologies_from_Prints_to_Pixels
(the book is still hardback only I;m afraid)
and also co-edited a book called DigitalLight - a rather contested title ;=) - with some great chapters, for example from Alvy Ray Smith, which you can download in pdf here
http://openhumanitiespress.org/digital-light.html
I come at this as someone whose written about media for years who came to the realisation that i didn't know how they worked. One night I dreamed I was reading a book that explained these things, but when I woke up, there was no book, so I decided to write it. It took several years. Technologies struck me as things that invite reading the same way a film or an interface do: they aren't inert, but invite interpretation.
I wanted to know how things came to be the way they are, so it became a history. A lot of it is about transitions from oils and printmaking techniques to electronics mainly in Europe. Some of it also deals with ways of picturing light itself. Trying to understand not only Descartes' and Newton's optics but the literature about them, while trying to keep an eye on contemporary physics and neuro-optics was tough for someone trained in humanities and social science. It may be more useful for people with that background (I'm constantly finding film scholars making elementary errors in describing things like how the negative-positive process works in cinema for example, or misunderstanding how CCD chips operate)
I was persuaded not to call the book "Glory". They thought it might give the wrong impression to theologically inclined Christians.My feeling is that light is too important to let it become a metaphor belonging to sects, and that although my history is in a certain sense political, the sense of wonder belongs to everyone, and that while some scientists have been great in communicating the wonder of the universe, oddly social and human sciences have simply ignored it for fifty years.
Guillermo's link to the amazing NASA solar observatory clip makes the pint better then I can
sean
Sean Cubitt
Professor of Film and Television; Co-Head, Department of Media and Communications
Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW
On 3 Apr 2015, at 04:13, Kerry Tunstall wrote:
Fireworks, Electricity and the business of light
Hi all in this discussion.
Here is a link to an exploding wire image from the electrical engineers
i collaborate with
created at the university of Canterbury
New Zealand
http://www.insidescience.org/content/exploding-wire-makes-pretty-plasma-arc/708
I was wondering if there is a scientist willing to discuss
the science of explosions and how the vacuum I have been thinking
about enters space.
I suspect this vacuum is shared in both the art of fireworks and exploding
wire electrical discharges.
In exploding wire the vacuum is used as a path of least resistance. Is that
the same when a firework
explodes
regards
Kerry
On Thu, Apr 2, 2015 at 7:07 PM, Avi Rosen <avi@ee.technion.ac.il> wrote:
On April 27, 1992, the sculptor Ezra Orion directed the performance Super
Cathedral I, aiming laser beams perpendicularly and simultaneously around
the world up to the sky and the infinity of the universe. This action is
the final detachment of sculpture from the physicality that had governed it
since prehistory, towards immense energy fields, at the speed of light. The
laser beams left the solar system in five hours; today they are 23 light
years from Earth. The laser beams join the cathedral of radio waves
broadcast from Earth, and their height is around 90 light years. Orion
proposed a continuation of this project, to be called Super Cathedral 4,
aiming for a unique interstellar cosmic arrangement. According to the laws
of Riemann's non-Euclidian geometry, eventually the laser beam will execute
a Moebius-strip-like loop in space, and return to its origin: the artist's
body and consciousness. The transmitted galactic laser beam loop creates
compression of space and time of Schwarzschild's cube model, while uniting
between space-time, subject, and object.
http://www.orbit.zkm.de/?q=node/108
AVI
-----Original Message-----
From: yasmin_discussions-bounces@estia.media.uoa.gr [mailto:
yasmin_discussions-bounces@estia.media.uoa.gr] On Behalf Of Liliane Lijn
Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2015 11:37 PM
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] Announcing YASMIN discussion on LIGHT
Hi Stephen
Your questions are fascinating. Have you had any answers to them?
David Bohm wrote that light contained all information. He also wrote that
matter was 'frozen light'. If he is right, then does matter also contain
all information? When 'frozen' will that information degrade?
I would be very interested to learn more about this.
Many thanks.
Liliane
Liliane Lijn
+39 075-782-4357
3381694382
www.lilianelijn.com
On 30 Mar 2015, at 17:10, Stephen Nowlin <stephen.nowlin@artcenter.edu>
wrote:
Hello, Guillermo and Roger -- this should be a fascinating topic.
I have a question about how much information is contained in light
traveling through space. From my house in Southern California I look
straight up to Mount Wilson, where Edwin Hubble confirmed an expanding
universe by measuring the redshift in light traveling from distant
galaxies. Early telescope optics had shown other galaxies as fuzzy clouds
of light, and thus by virtue of our inability to fully parse the
information contained therein, our perception of the universe was
incomplete and conclusions drawn were distorted. The difference between
those early fuzz clouds and current images of galaxies from powerful land
and space-based telescopes is stunning -- the light reaching us is the
same, but our technology for parsing the information contained within that
light advanced during the last century.
So, my question is: How much information travels in light? How much
potentially MORE information travels in light than can we can currently
decipher, should we be able to develop the technologies to see it?
It is clear, for example, that light bouncing off the Earth can yield
amazing detail as seen from close-by orbiting telescopes -- just look at
Google Map's satellite view. And from the Hubble Telescope we can see a lot
of information reflected off the surface of Mars, which is of course much
further away -- so could some astronomer on another planet at the other
side of the galaxy, using light-analyzing technologies we perhaps can't
even imagine, theoretically be able to see Mars at the same or even better
resolution? Given the physics of light, whether reflected or originated by
a body in space, will all the information contained therein travel intact
to very far away places? Could we someday observe stars in distant galaxies
at the same resolution we currently observe our Sun? My question is not
whether it is feasible to invent such sophisticated observation
technologies -- but rather would the physics of light traveling through
space allow close-up detail from very far aw!
ay -- would the information be preserved in the light and be awaiting
detection, should such technologies be invented?
/stephen
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--
Kerry Tunstall
hvkerry@gmail.com
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