Technologies of Vision: The War Between Data and Images

by Steve F Anderson

Overview

An investigation of the computational turn in visual culture, centered on the entangled politics and pleasures of data and images.

If the twentieth century was tyrannized by images, then the twenty-first is ruled by data. In Technologies of Vision, Steve Anderson argues that visual culture and the methods developed to study it have much to teach us about today's digital culture; but first we must examine the historically entangled relationship between data and images. Anderson starts from the supposition that there is no great divide separating pre- and post-digital culture. Rather than creating an insular field of new and inaccessible discourse, he argues, it is more productive to imagine that studying “the digital” is coextensive with critical models—especially the politics of seeing and knowing—developed for understanding “the visual.”

Anderson's investigation takes on an eclectic array of examples ranging from virtual reality, culture analytics, and software art to technologies for computer vision, face recognition, and photogrammetry. Mixing media archaeology with software studies, Anderson mines the history of technology for insight into both the politics of data and the pleasures of algorithms. He proposes a taxonomy of modes that describe the functional relationship between data and images in the domains of space, surveillance and data visualization. At stake in all three are tensions between the totalizing logic of data and the unruly chaos of images.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262343343
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	10/20/2017
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	6 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Steve Anderson is Associate Professor of Digital Media at the University of California Los Angeles.

What People are Saying About This

Endorsement

In an era flooded by images and data surveillance systems of massive breadth and complexity, the aim of this book is to interrogate through historical comparison the relation between data and images. In Anderson's view, data and images are not an oppositional binary but rather complementary—at times even congruent—existing in a dynamic interplay that drives technological development and media making both in and outside of the entertainment industries. The premise of the book is that understanding the evolving relationship between data and images offers a key to thinking critically about media and technology in the politics of everyday life.

—Timothy Lenoir, Distinguished Professor of Cinema and Digital Media, Distinguished Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Department of Cinema and Digital Media, University of California, Davis

From the Publisher

In an era flooded by images and data surveillance systems of massive breadth and complexity, the aim of this book is to interrogate through historical comparison the relation between data and images. In Anderson's view, data and images are not an oppositional binary but rather complementary—at times even congruent—existing in a dynamic interplay that drives technological development and media making both in and outside of the entertainment industries. The premise of the book is that understanding the evolving relationship between data and images offers a key to thinking critically about media and technology in the politics of everyday life.

—Timothy Lenoir, Distinguished Professor of Cinema and Digital Media, Distinguished Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Department of Cinema and Digital Media, University of California, Davis