Event overview
A critical history of CGI and computer simulation.
In her 2009 essay “In Defense of the Poor Image” the artist and scholar Hito Steyerl argues for the precarity of our contemporary visual culture through those images which have by necessity become small, lossy, transportable, and disposable. Far from the high definition dream of an ever-improving visual simulation, Steyerl suggests that the majority of our contemporary images are in fact poor in definition but rich in circulation. Following Steyerl this presentation dilates on the growing ubiquity of the rich image, not as the necessary successor to the poor but as its dialectical pair. If Steyerl’s image is enabled and shaped by the network as a highly distributed and seemingly immaterial system, the rich image is shaped by those sites at which the image labors and is labored upon, those sites at which its definition is most clearly felt. From the render farms of Pixar to DVD authoring facilities in Mumbai, I examine those images and sites that shatter our illusions of speed and immateriality. In situating display resolution as the material constraint for images both analog and digital this presentation offers up a theory of the rich image as precarious simulation.
Bio:
Jacob Gaboury is Assistant Professor of Digital Media and Visual Culture at Stony Brook University and Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His work engages the history and critical theory of digital media through visual culture, queer theory and media archaeology. His current book, titled Image Objects, offers an archaeology of early computer graphics in the 1960s and 1970s, and he is beginning a second project on the queer history of computation titled On Uncomputable Numbers.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 11 Feb 2016 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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