Fibreculture Books Art/Digital digital light contributors digital light sean cubitt edited by terry flaxton sean cubitt jon ippolito daniel palmer stephen jones nathaniel tkacz carolyn l. kane scott mcquire daniel palmer christiane paul alvy ray smith darren tofts cathryn vasseleu Digital Light Fibreculture Books Series Editor: Andrew Murphie Digital and networked media are now very much the established media. They still hold the promise of a new world, but sometimes this new world looks as much like a complex form of neofeudalism as a celebration of a new communality. In such a situation the question of what ‘media’ or ‘communications’ are has become strange to us. It demands new ways of thinking about fundamental conceptions and ecologies of practice. This calls for something that traditional media disciplines, even ‘new media’ disciplines, cannot always provide. The Fibreculture book series explores this contemporary state of things and asks what comes next. Digital Light Edited by Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS London 2015 First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2015 Copyright © the authors 2015 This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Read more about the license at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 Figures, and other media included with this book may have different copyright restrictions. The cover is a visualization of the book’s text. Each column represents a chapter and each paragraph is modeled as a spotlight. The colour reflects an algorithmic assessment of the paragraph’s likely textual authorship while the rotation and intensity of the spotlights are based on a paragraph’s topic ranking for “digital light”. It was made with Python and Blender. © David Ottina 2015 cc-by-sa Typeset in Deja Vu, an open font. More at http://dejavu-fonts.org ISBN 978-1-78542-000-9 OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide. More at http://openhumanitiespress.org 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 Jon Ippolito Notes on Contributors 220 IntRODUctiON Materiality and Invisibility Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz There is a story that the very first filter invented for Photoshop was the lens-flare. Usually regarded as a defect by photographers, lens flare is caused by internal reflection or scattering in the complex construction of compound lenses. It has the unfortunate effect of adding a displaced image of the sun or other light source, one that in cinematography especially can travel across the frame, and mask the ‘real’ subject. It also draws attention to the apparatus of picture-taking, and when used for effect transforms it into picture-making. The lens flare filter is said to have been added by Thomas Knoll, who had begun working on his image manipulation program as a PhD candidate at Stanford University in 1987, at the request of his brother John, a technician (and later senior visual effects supervisor) at Industrial Light and Magic, the George Lucas owned specialist effects house. Its first use would be precisely to emulate the photographic apparatus in shots that had been generated entirely in CGI (computer-generated imaging), where it was intended to give the illu- sion that a camera had been present, so increasing the apparent realism of the shot. The defect became simulated evidence of a fictional camera: a positive value. But soon enough designers recognised a second quality of the lens flare filter. By creat- ing artificial highlights on isolated elements in an image, lens flare gave the illusion of volume to 2D objects, a trick so widely disseminated in the 1990s that it became almost a hallmark of digital images. In this second use, the once temporal character 8 Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz of flares—as evidence that a camera had ‘really’ been present—became instead a tool for producing spatial effects. That is, they are used not for veracity but for fan- tasy, evidence not of a past presence of cameras, but of a futurity toward which they can propel their audiences.1 The history of lens flares gives us a clue about the transitions between analogue and digital in visual media that lie at the heart of this collection. The movement is by no means one-way. For some years, cinematographic use of flare in films like Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962) had evoked extreme states of consciousness, even of divine light, and with it the long history of light in human affairs. We can only speculate about the meanings of light during the millennia preceding the scriptures of Babylon and Judaea. Somewhere around a half a million years ago human ances- tors tamed fire (Diamond 1997: 38). Separating light from dark instigates creation in Genesis. Before the fiat lux, the Earth was ‘without form and void’. Formlessness, Augustine’s imaginary interlocutor suggests (Confessions XII: 21–2; 1961: 297–300), already existed, and it was from this formlessness that God created the world, as later he would create Adam out of a handful of dust. For Erigena in the eighth cen- tur y, omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt: all things that are, are lights. In the De luce of the twelfth century divine Robert Grosseteste: …light, which is the first form in first created matter, extended itself at the beginning of time, multiplying itself an infinity of times through itself on every side and stretching out equally in every direc- tion, dispersing with itself matter, which it was not able to desert, to such a great mass as the fabric of the cosmos. (Grosseteste, quoted in MacKenzie 1996: 26) As the analogue to Divine Light (which, Anselm had lamented, was by definition invisible), light pours form from God into creation. While mystics sought to plunge into the darkness of unknowing in order to find their way back to the creator, Grosseteste attributed to light the making of form (space) as well as the governance of the heavens (time) to provide a model scientific and theological understanding of light’s role in the moment of creation. The word ‘light’ can scarcely be uttered without mystical connotations. Understanding light’s connotations of yearning for something more, something beyond is important because these ancient and theologi- cal traditions persist; and because they also provide a persistent counterpoint to the rationalist and instrumental modernisation of light, at once universal and deeply historical, whose transitions from one technical form to another are our subject. Introduction 9 Digital light is, as Stephen Jones points out in his contribution, an oxymoron: light is photons, particulate and discrete, and therefore always digital. But photons are also waveforms, subject to manipulation in myriad ways. From Fourier trans- forms to chip design, colour management to the translation of vector graphics into arithmetic displays, light is constantly disciplined to human purposes. The inven- tion of mechanical media is a critical conjuncture in that history. Photography, chronophotography and cinematography form only one part of this disciplining. Photography began life as a print medium, though today it is probably viewed at least as much on screens. In common with the lithographic printing technique that preceded it by a scant few decades, photography was based on a random scatter of molecules, a scatter which would continue into the sprayed phosphors lining the interior of the first television cathode ray tubes. Mass circulation of photographs required a stronger discipline: the half-tone system, which imposed for the first time a grid structuring the grain of the image. Rapid transmission of images, required by a burgeoning press industry, spurred the development of the drum scanner that in turn supplied the cathode ray tube with its operating principle. But this was not enough to control light. From the Trinitron mask to the sub-pixel construction of LCD and plasma screens, the grid became the essential attribute of a standardised system of imaging that constrains the design and fabrication of chips, the software of image-manipulation software, and the fundamental systems for image transmis- sion. This is the genealogy of the raster screen that dominates visual culture from handheld devices to stadium and city plaza screens. As Sean Cubitt, Carolyn L Kane and Cathryn Vasseleu investigate in their chapters, the control of light forms the foundation of contemporary vision. In this collection, we bring together high profile figures in diverse but increas- ingly convergent fields, from academy award-winner and co-founder of Pixar, Alvy Ray Smith to feminist philosopher Cathryn Vasseleu.