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.

Transcript

2. Vision and its historical construction
3. Relation between subject and object
4. Relation between subject and object i.e. politics
5. “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
6. Camera Obscura
7. Stereograph
8. Computer Graphics
12. 3 regimes
13. Renaissance 3 regimes
14. Renaissance 3 regimes Modern
15. Renaissance 3 regimes Modern Contemporary
16. Renaissance “geometrical optics”
17. “hidden chamber”
18. “objective ground of visual truth”
19. “universal rules of geometry”
21. Modern “physiological optics”
22. “eccentricities of the human sensorium”
23. “located within the body”
24. “mobility and exchangability”
26. panopticon
27. Contemporary “symbolic optics”
28. “a rule-based simulation of Renaissance geometry”
29. “a mathematical description of the 3D world”
30. “reconfigurable reality”
32. The Matrix!
33. Renaissance “geometrical optics”
34. simulated “geometrical optics”
35. programmable w/constraints
37. James George and Alexander Porter Sensor Vernacular
38. “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