Digital Light

Light symbolises the highest good, it enables all visual art, and today it lies at the heart of billion-dollar industries. The control of light forms the foundation of contemporary vision. Digital Light brings together artists, curators, technologists and media archaeologists to study the historical...

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Hoofdauteurs: Cubitt, Sean, Palmer, Daniel, Tkacz, Nathaniel
Formaat: Online
Taal:Engels
Gepubliceerd in: Open Humanities Press 2021
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Online toegang:548050
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author Cubitt, Sean
Palmer, Daniel
Tkacz, Nathaniel
author_browse Cubitt, Sean
Palmer, Daniel
Tkacz, Nathaniel
author_facet Cubitt, Sean
Palmer, Daniel
Tkacz, Nathaniel
author_sort Cubitt, Sean
collection Directory of Open Access Books
description Light symbolises the highest good, it enables all visual art, and today it lies at the heart of billion-dollar industries. The control of light forms the foundation of contemporary vision. Digital Light brings together artists, curators, technologists and media archaeologists to study the historical evolution of digital light-based technologies. Digital Light provides a critical account of the capacities and limitations of contemporary digital light-based technologies and techniques by tracing their genealogies and comparing them with their predecessor media. As digital light remediates multiple historical forms (photography, print, film, video, projection, paint), the collection draws from all of these histories, connecting them to the digital present and placing them in dialogue with one another. Light is at once universal and deeply historical. The invention of mechanical media (including photography and cinematography) allied with changing print technologies (half-tone, lithography) helped structure the emerging electronic media of television and video, which in turn shaped the bitmap processing and raster display of digital visual media. 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 transforms to chip design, colour management to the translation of vector graphics into arithmetic displays, light is constantly disciplined to human purposes. In the form of fibre optics, light is now the infrastructure of all our media; in urban plazas and handheld devices, screens have become ubiquitous, and also standardised. This collection addresses how this occurred, what it means, and how artists, curators and engineers confront and challenge the constraints of increasingly normalised digital visual media. While various art pieces and other content are considered throughout the collection, the focus is specifically on what such pieces suggest about the intersection of technique and technology. Including accounts by prominent artists and professionals, the collection emphasises the centrality of use and experimentation in the shaping of technological platforms. Indeed, a recurring theme is how techniques of previous media become technologies, inscribed in both digital software and hardware. Contributions include considerations of image-oriented software and file formats; screen technologies; projection and urban screen surfaces; histories of computer graphics, 2D and 3D image editing software, photography and cinematic art; and transformations of light-based art resulting from the distributed architectures of the internet and the logic of the database. Digital Light brings together high profile figures in diverse but increasingly convergent fields, from academy award-winner and co-founder of Pixar, Alvy Ray Smith to feminist philosopher Cathryn Vasseleu.
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spelling doab-20.500.12854ir-264302025-07-30T08:59:09Z Digital Light Cubitt, Sean Palmer, Daniel Tkacz, Nathaniel photography digital visual media print digital light-based technologies mechanical media projection video light paint electronic media technology technique film Transparency and translucency thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies Light symbolises the highest good, it enables all visual art, and today it lies at the heart of billion-dollar industries. The control of light forms the foundation of contemporary vision. Digital Light brings together artists, curators, technologists and media archaeologists to study the historical evolution of digital light-based technologies. Digital Light provides a critical account of the capacities and limitations of contemporary digital light-based technologies and techniques by tracing their genealogies and comparing them with their predecessor media. As digital light remediates multiple historical forms (photography, print, film, video, projection, paint), the collection draws from all of these histories, connecting them to the digital present and placing them in dialogue with one another. Light is at once universal and deeply historical. The invention of mechanical media (including photography and cinematography) allied with changing print technologies (half-tone, lithography) helped structure the emerging electronic media of television and video, which in turn shaped the bitmap processing and raster display of digital visual media. 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 transforms to chip design, colour management to the translation of vector graphics into arithmetic displays, light is constantly disciplined to human purposes. In the form of fibre optics, light is now the infrastructure of all our media; in urban plazas and handheld devices, screens have become ubiquitous, and also standardised. This collection addresses how this occurred, what it means, and how artists, curators and engineers confront and challenge the constraints of increasingly normalised digital visual media. While various art pieces and other content are considered throughout the collection, the focus is specifically on what such pieces suggest about the intersection of technique and technology. Including accounts by prominent artists and professionals, the collection emphasises the centrality of use and experimentation in the shaping of technological platforms. Indeed, a recurring theme is how techniques of previous media become technologies, inscribed in both digital software and hardware. Contributions include considerations of image-oriented software and file formats; screen technologies; projection and urban screen surfaces; histories of computer graphics, 2D and 3D image editing software, photography and cinematic art; and transformations of light-based art resulting from the distributed architectures of the internet and the logic of the database. Digital Light brings together high profile figures in diverse but increasingly convergent fields, from academy award-winner and co-founder of Pixar, Alvy Ray Smith to feminist philosopher Cathryn Vasseleu. 2021-02-10T12:58:18Z 2015-06-03 00:00:00 2020-04-01T14:36:21Z 2015 book 548050 OCN: 918559714 http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/33200 9781785420085 https://directory.doabooks.org/handle/20.500.12854/26430 eng Fibreculture Books open access image/jpeg image/jpeg image/jpeg image/jpeg image/jpeg Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/33200/1/548050.pdf https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/33200/1/548050.pdf https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/33200/1/548050.pdf https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/33200/1/548050.pdf https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/20.500.12657/33200/1/548050.pdf Open Humanities Press 10.26530/OAPEN_548050 10.26530/OAPEN_548050 d3c5bd18-f778-4237-a73b-dd99e8cf7c24 9781785420085 224 open access
spellingShingle photography
digital visual media
print
digital light-based technologies
mechanical media
projection
video
light
paint
electronic media
technology
technique
film
Transparency and translucency
thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies
thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies
Cubitt, Sean
Palmer, Daniel
Tkacz, Nathaniel
Digital Light
title Digital Light
title_full Digital Light
title_fullStr Digital Light
title_full_unstemmed Digital Light
title_short Digital Light
title_sort digital light
topic photography
digital visual media
print
digital light-based technologies
mechanical media
projection
video
light
paint
electronic media
technology
technique
film
Transparency and translucency
thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies
thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies
topic_facet photography
digital visual media
print
digital light-based technologies
mechanical media
projection
video
light
paint
electronic media
technology
technique
film
Transparency and translucency
thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies
thema EDItEUR::J Society and Social Sciences::JB Society and culture: general::JBC Cultural and media studies::JBCT Media studies
url 548050
work_keys_str_mv AT cubittsean digitallight
AT palmerdaniel digitallight
AT tkacznathaniel digitallight