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Techniques of the Observer: Vision and Technology from the Camera Obscura to OpenGL

gregab
September 29, 2011

Techniques of the Observer: Vision and Technology from the Camera Obscura to OpenGL

I use the work of historian Jonathan Crary to tell a story about how visual culture changed from the renaissance to the modern era. By examining the camera obscura, zoertropes, stereographs, and film Crary explains how modern optical techniques created a new subjective visual world in which illusions were created by playing on the eccentricities of the human perception system. I'll then attempt to extend Crary's ideas to understand how our new computer-generated graphical systems imagine human vision and what they might mean for the future of our visual culture.

gregab

September 29, 2011
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  1. “Whether perception or vision actually change is irrelevant, for they

    have no autonomous history. What changes are the plural forces and rules composing the field in which perception occurs. And what determines vision at any given historical moment is not some deep structure, economic base, or world view, but rather the functioning of a collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface.” – Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer
  2. “Itʼs an aesthetic born of the grain of seeing/ computation.

    Of computer-vision, of 3d-printing; of optimised, algorithmic sensor sweeps and compression artefacts. Of LIDAR and laser-speckle. Of the gaze of another nature on ours.” – Matt Jones, Berg London Sensor Vernacular