The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies From Prints to Pixels.

Cambridge MA: MIT

Press
Sean Cubitt
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia License.

Preface (pre-press draft)

The rewriting of the past is dynamic, oriented towards the
future. Its role is to endow the present with meaning by
offering a focus of desire to a community with reason to
doubt its future' (Debray 2004: 29)
How do visual media work? How did they get to work the way they do? Does how they work matter? The
Practice of Light ponders these questions by concentrating on the inferences of the word 'work'. The title
refers to the practice of light. Working with light, the work of light, making things with and about light, is
practice. When we speak of someone as 'practical', we think of a one-to-one relationship with materials and
tools. That privileged close relation is still widespread in media, but the tools have become increasingly
complex, and the forms of practice increasingly involve complex interactions not only of human beings but
technologies doing things, working, making. All practice involves us in the laws of nature and, as we shall
see, in learning from natural processes, and intervening in them. The book unpacks a story of natural, human
and technical practices involved in both craft and industrial methods of accounting for or mobilising light in
visual media.
Light is the condition of all vision. The visual media are our most important explorations of this condition.
They reveal the long history of humanity's struggle to control light. The Practice of Light presents a
genealogy of the commanding visual media of the 21st century, digital video, film and photography, tracing
the evolution of their forms through a history of materials and practices. Because of this focus, it omits the
non-Western history of visual technologies, the dyes, inks, printing and paper technologies that preceded the
European trajectory of printmaking, and the swadeshi and other indigenous forms of mechanical and digital
media developed in the modern period. Instead it traces the roots of those technologies that have become
global in the 21st century. Addressing the colonialist implications of these technologies, as well as the other
face of globalisation, the ecological implications of dominant media forms, will have to wait for a
companion volume to this book. It seemed important first to establish the aesthetic of dominance in the
dominant aesthetic. In the imperial era that parallels the period tracked here since the 15th century,
techniques and technologies stolen from colonised cultures have been assimilated into that dominant
aesthetic. It will take another book, or more than one, to trace the braided environmental and decolonial
histories of visual technologies. That work will look at the extent of dominance: this investigates its
intensity.
The Practice of Light begins in the invisibility of black, then builds from line to surface to volume and space.
It traces increasing degrees of complexity, passing from the simplest of marks, the line, to two qualities of
surfaces, their texture or grain and their colour. The construction of space in visual media is addressed in the
following chapter under the rubrics of shadows, layers and projection, with perspective considered a special
case of a more generalised practice of projecting that includes, among other things, cartographic
organisations of space as well as cinematic projection. The last chapter deals with time, the most recent
addition to visual culture, although in many respects the media we can presume to be the oldest poetry,
song and dance were always intrinsically temporal. Time, as the movement of becoming, completes a
trajectory from nothing, the invisible dark, via something, surfaces and spaces that are clearly seen, to end in
what cannot be seen as and in itself, but yet is everywhere apparent: the time of decay and of emergence.
By media I understand the physical processes matter, energy dimension and form in which all human
communication takes place, including money, sex, transport, weapons and the panoply of communication
The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 1

channels through which we put into practice what social scientists abstract under the names 'politics' and
'economics'. Before we can communicate, we mediate. Merleau-Ponty (1968) insists that the condition that
he calls 'the visible' underpins seeing and being seen. Visibility is a special condition of mediation, a term
that describes the condition of everything that mediates and is mediated in turn. Mediation is the ground of
relationship, the relationship that precedes and constructs subjects and objects. Media matter, both in the
sense of giving material specificity to our descriptions of such abstract concepts as society and environment,
and in the sense of the active verb: mediation comes into being as matter, its mattering constitutes the
knowable, experienceable world, making possible all sensing and being sensed, knowing and being known.
Light is such a mediation, not only between people, but between human and non-human worlds. Light fills
and forms the world. For millennia light from the sun and the celestial bodies, and from burning organic
matter derived from sunlight, spilled with the seemingly boundless generosity of a god or gods into the
human universe. It bathed our skins and filled our eyes, nurtured our food and habitats, made it possible to
see and be bewitched by beauty. There would seem to be no need to hoard it. But everywhere is evidence
that mediation is parcelled out, amassed, ossified, delayed, hypostasised. If all human society is premised on
mediation, then it is the task of media theory to distinguish the philosophical concept of mediation as primal
flow connecting all things from the history of mediation as the engine of disconnection and delay, and thence
of exploitation and oppression. Like any other work of media history, this one must confront the dialectic of
actual and potential media: the physical media we have, and the potential that lies curled up in them.
A second principle guides this study: that among the human instincts of hunger, sex and self-preservation,
there exists an instinctual desire for order. We do not foul our own nests; we tidy our corner of the world for
habitation. This is not an entirely new thought. Sigmund Freud, in his late writings (1961a, 1961b), identified
the death drive in the repetition compulsion he observed among shell-shocked soldiers, describing it as a
biological urge towards dissolution and decay: as we would say, to entropy. At its opposite pole Freud placed
the instinct for life, attributing to civilisation a negentropic construction of order in increasing levels, from
the couple to the household, the community and the state. This negentropic instinct for order has at one pole
entropy, but at another the excess of order, as anorexia and compulsive eating hedge round the instinctual
pleasures of food.
This principle underlies the concept of practice as it is deployed in this book. Practice involves ordering
materials and techniques. The effervescent superfluity of light is one of the entropic instances to which we
seek to bring order: our infantile, oceanic immersion in the dazzling flash of moonbeams over rippled water,
the flicker of dappled sunlight under trees, the night speckled with stars, the fall of firelight over skin.
Control over light, and its mediations through visual technologies, matters because it alters the constitutive
grounds of sensing, knowing and relating to one another and to the world. The genealogy of visual
technologies traces a historical dialectic between the urge to control, even to fascistic excess, and the
constant re-emergence of entropy in the interstices of devices designed to curtail and command the excess of
light.
Mediation is not necessarily efficient, in the sense of translating data from A to B undamaged. Efficiency,
the mantra not only of engineering but of managerialism, can serve both the instinct to order and its
excessive and obsessive application, taking on forms of regimentation worthy the name of repetition
compulsion. At the mass scale of relations, connections and interactions where mediation operates, mutation
is the only constant, resulting in an evolution of which it remains to be seen whether it constitutes progress in
any definable sense. The rule of order tends towards equilibrium, but equilibrium, absolute symmetry in
every direction, is also the final state of entropy, the tendency of energy to dissipate evenly throughout space.
In that final state, energy and matter lose their shape, their clustering into higher organisations and more
complex relations. As Mary-Anne Doane (2002: 117) reports, 'the Second Law of Thermodynamics dictates
what is effectively an increase in an absence as entropy increases, there will be less and less difference . . .
in a thermodynamic logic what is increasing is lack, or loss'. Entropy is the opposite of information, of form.
So the attempt to control mediation to an extreme results in a decrease of form, and an increase of the very
entropy it emerged in order to conquer. The efficiency gains of standardisation addressed in the latter part of
The Practice of Light also risk increasing the level of noise in the system, while discouraging that radical
change which is the hallmark of emergence. The result is a culture that constrains us to innovation within
The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 2

parameters already historically established, and steers us away from inventing the disturbing and exciting
new (Stiegler 1998: 34-7). For much of the history traced here, political economy plays a relatively small
part in the genealogy of visual technologies, but as the 19th century's development of mass media
accelerated, there began a period, in which we are still living, of increasing political-economic interest in and
ultimately control over the development of new media forms and formations. This developing role of norm
and standard as instruments of control distinguishes the modern from the pre-modern history of visual media.
This is especially true of transmission media. In some respects, storage media had a far longer history of
separating especially prized moments of mediation artefacts, messages, tools and techniques through
priestly castes charged with secreting knowledge in the temple, through guild monopolies over the mysteries
of their trades, or through the amassing of beautiful things in the palaces of the rich and mighty. In the great
democratising of access to knowledge and art beginning in the 19th century's new transmission media
(chromolithography, photography and cinema among them), celebrated by Benjamin in the 1930s, and
reaching an apogee, even saturation, in 21st century network media, those old hierarchies flattened, and their
hidden treasures distributed to all and sundry. At the same time, however, there has been a transfer of the
function of control from storage media to transmission media. We are all aware of the increasing speed of
dissemination, now approaching the speed of light, or at least of light traveling through fibre-optics, a speed
which gives us the illusion of immediacy. That speed would seem to guarantee that, eventually, all
mediations circulate, all secrets are revealed: information, as we say, wants to be free. Yet information is
everywhere in chains. The purpose of control over distribution is to delay transmission. We think we pay
more for premium service delivery of news and entertainments: in fact the money pays for timely arrival, and
its absence assures a deliberately delayed and often downgraded delivery. The apparent ubiquity and velocity
of transmission media hides a new class system operating inside the new media democracy.
The crucial mechanised media of the 19th century telegraph, photograph, phonograph, cinematograph
share in their suffix the Greek word that stands for both writing and drawing. Since McLuhan, media history
has given the printed word pride of place, but the significance of drawing and its early modern
mechanisation in prints have attracted less attention. The history of printmaking techniques gets a privileged
place in the account that follows because it is critical to the story of the increasingly democratic distribution
of images, to the new cartographic culture of the European empires from the 17th to the 20th centuries, and
to scientific and technological visualisations. It is in printing too that we first see the division of images into
fields of dots, as well as the introduction of scanning at the beginning of the electronic era. The persistent
belief that Gutenberg apprenticed to the Master of the Playing Cards (see Chapter 1) points us towards the
coincidence of two great inventions of the early modern period, the printing press and intaglio printing.
Many of the Master's cards are composed from smaller engraved plates, which must have been held in a
frame to compose the 'pips' of the suits. The same kind of frame held the repeated letters of Gutenberg's
printing press. Alongside the printed word, we should understand the invention of etching as equally
formative of modernity, encouraging the move from Gothic linearity and reliance on types (the typical form
as opposed to the specific individual instance) in woodcut to the fluid, observational style of silverpoint
drawing and the engraver's burin. Woodblocks allowed longer print-runs than the shallow-cut metal plates of
early intaglio printing, but had nothing like etching's resources for fine, gestural lines and delicate shading.
Though more expensive than woodcuts, prints from metal were far cheaper and more reproducible than oil
paintings, and became the privileged medium of visual culture throughout Europe until the mass
reproduction of photographs became widespread in the later 19th century. Yet while their technological
advances assured wider transmission of images, the techniques of printmakers standardised increasingly
around schools and styles of drawing and incision even before the arrival of mass print technologies. The
demands of the new magazine and news industries of the 19th century required further efficiencies and
further standardisation in the transmission of images. One driver for this was the mass audience which,
having learned how to read the increasing numbers of images now circulating, was served by an increasingly
standardised lexicon of motifs, compositions and styles for communicating the visible, such as the black line
of ink denoting a ray of light addressed in Chapter 2.
Beyond such basic visual literacy, most of us have little interest in the technologies mediating our cultural
and working lives. A major reason for undertaking this research was the realisation that I knew next to
nothing about the workings of the analogue and electronic media I had been teaching and writing about for a
The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 3

decade or more. Discovering how they work is a fascinating study in its own right. Tracing their histories
gives us, in addition, ideas not only about how they work but why they work in the precise ways they do.
Observing the 'why' gives privileged access to the particular capabilities of specific technologies, what they
do best, what they do poorly, and what they cannot do at all. Not only does this promote a move from
connections to comparisons between media; it opens up understanding of how and why particular works
operate within the affordances of a specific medium, or push at their boundaries, provide practical criticisms
of their shortcomings, or turn them into unexpected vehicles for inventions and creations for which they were
never designed.
At the same time on the macro scale, as every scholar of globalisation knows, planetary commerce in every
sense of that word depends on media. With honourable exceptions (among them Curry 1998, Fuller 2001,
Tufte 2003), media scholars have been slow to address the aesthetics of the workplace media that underpin
globalisation. Picturing technologies are a relatively small part of these political-economic media. Far more
important are the databases, spreadsheets and geographical information systems required by every company
and government in the 21st century. In parallel with workplace media are scientific instruments, increasingly
tied into the networks of power and money through earth-observation satellites (Parks 2005), biometric
monitoring (Lyon 2009) and medical imaging (Cartwright 1995) among many others. These media share in
the history of visual technologies because they are themselves importantly visual, and because they share the
same architectures of storage and transmission. Workplace and scientific media are especially important
because they make apparent the increasing convergence of representational media with media of data
visualisation. Historically much of visual culture has concerned itself with making the invisible visible,
whether depicting celestial events, the lost past, the interiors of animals, cutaways of underground structures,
or infra-red and other wavelengths unavailable to unaided human vision. The universe of numbers generated
by an informational society draws on this history of visualising to make itself visible, and in turn the
particular organisational modes typical of informatics begin to impinge on modes of visualisation.
A near-universal characteristic of data visualisation is its bent towards generalisation. Graphs track both
individual occurrences and the trends they point towards, averaging the contingent results of a day's trading
or a lab experiment. As a practice of generalisation, graphs have roots in both the mathematics of abstraction
and the historical legacy of types in visual culture, though the latter is changed from the type as divine
substance or Platonic idea to the type as statistical norm. Data visualisation combines this statistical
normalisation with the process of counting individual, discrete occurrences. This textural quality, this grain
of the graph, has unexpected congruences with the chemistry of analogue photography and cinematography,
explored in Chapter 3.1, where molecules of photosensitive chemicals select photons from the flood of light
and generalise them as elements of an image. Similarly, the curve of a graph derives from plotted points
defined by their coordinates on the grid of the graph paper. To fit into the coordinate system, points must be
defined by finite numbers: units. Each pair of coordinates marks a unique spot on the graph, but every cell on
the grid is the same as every other.
This leads us to a second congruence, with film in particular but also with photography. Drawing on Marx's
contention that 'commodity is exchanged for commodity, except that this exchange is a mediated one' (Marx
1973: 132), Jonathan Beller argues that the circulation of cinematic images is a continuation of the same
process:
the mediation between objects by which a film constitutes itself is between
abstractions from objects . . . the mediation between the interval of imagecommodity and image-commodity is film. It is the film frame (screen) that allows
the images to circulate: film is the money of cinema (and the frame is the unit). The
affective dimensions of capital circulation are distilled and experienced in their
most purified form in the cinema and in the enchanted registration of everything
by money (Beller 2006: 58)
The twin processes operating here are common to cinema and to the graph as the basic form of data
visualisation. First, the object is abstracted, as image, commodity or numerical value; and second, it is placed
into relations of equivalence with all the other abstractions by dint of the formal equality of every cell, frame
or price with every other. In photography, every photograph is exchangeable for every other; in graphing,
every cell for any other; and in digital imaging, it is no longer images that are exchangeable but their
The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 4

component elements, the pixels. Important to our argument is that this abstraction and exchange belongs to
the same class as the abstraction and exchange enacted through money: both are mediations, and both arrive
at their hegemonic rles as a result of historical processes. Both promise to govern time, through the
measured frame-rate of projection and the preservation of debt as control over the future.
Enumeration is a pledge against disorder. The counting numbers give us the assurance (as they embody the
metaphor) of one-to-one correspondence, whether of images in circulation or of moneys to be repaid. But by
the end of the 19th century, that old assurance was no longer mathematically tenable, so that at the very
moment the engineers were hardwiring unit-counting into the technical media of the 20th century, theoretical
mathematics was beginning to unpick it. Kittler's precise date is disputable, but his sentiment is correct:
'innovations in the technology of information are what produced the specificity of the discourse network of
1900, separating it from transcendental knowledge'. As evidence Kittler offers the typewriter which 'provides
writing as a selection from the finite and arranged stock of its keyboard . . . In contrast to the flow of
handwriting, we now have discrete elements separated by spaces' (Kittler 1999: 16). Thus the principle of the
reproducible pips of playing cards passes from the printing press to the typewriter, and in Kittler's argument
becomes the basis of all subsequent discrete (as opposed to continuous) media. According to Kittler, discrete
media restructure knowledge, so that we no longer found knowledge on the permanence of transcendental
Kantian a priori categories like time and space. Here Kittler echoes Foucault's opening attack on historical
concepts of tradition, influence, development, evolution, and spirit (esprit) in The Archaeology of
Knowledge: 'instead of according them unqualified, spontaneous value, we must accept, in the name of
methodological rigour, that, in the first instance, they concern only a population of dispersed events'
(Foucault 1972: 22).
If, in Doane's version, entropy decreases difference, the negentropic order of discrete media involves the
proliferation of difference. But endlessly proliferating difference is as noisy as endless symmetry. Mediation
as the very fabric of change, of mutation, is a builder of differences, but as bearer of communication, it also
establishes organisational forms with varying degrees of longevity. The grid of data visualisation and its
forebears in the discrete mechanical media of the late 19th century form a bridgehead to a new moment of
modernity. Equally, the long migration of control from storage to transmission, from the political economy
of secrecy to the political economy of distribution, from secreting away to placing in circulation (and
charging rent on every transaction) does not occur as a smooth transition: 'Unlike the history to which it put
an end, the media age proceeds in jerks, just like Turing's paper strip' (Kittler 1999: 18). Historiography itself
falls under the sway of the media in which it is now composed.
Extending Kittler, Huhtamo and Parikka (2011) hypothesise an embattled relation between their project of
media archaeology and Geistesgeschichte, the tradition in historiography that sees a civilisational coherence
(Geist, spirit) shaping all the activities of an historical epoch. But the lure of creating order out of the archive
of events is too strong, even for heroic antecedents like Benjamin's Arcades Project (Benjamin 1999a) or
Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, whose attempt Agamben describes as 'an iconology of the interval, a
study of the Zwischenraum [space in between] in which the incessant symbolic work of social memory is
carried out' (Agamben 1999 100). Raiding Derrida's concept of the archi-trace in place of Foucault's
archaeology, Agamben draws out the implications of this formative difference, not only in the history of
symbols but as ontology. Citing the mediaeval divine Duns Scotus, he argues 'nothing keeps a thing from
being actual and, at the same time, maintaining its potential not to be, or to be otherwise (Agamben 1999:
262). For media archaeology, mere existence is no proof of necessity: because our media operate just so is no
reason why they have to do so, or why they may not operate otherwise. The jerky history of media that
Kittler observed is then not only a symptom of discrete media, but a description of a problem in the history
those media mediate: that in the steps between discrete moments, what Bellour (2002) calls the entre-images,
lies a formative differentiation, an ontological instability, the Zwischenrumen from which the architect
builds his house in Morgenstern's poem (cited in full, less than coincidentally, in Kittler 1990: 256-7).
At stake here is the primacy of Being, and of being-one, the root condition of discrete media. Countable
objects require two things: an object to be counted, and a subject to count. But if the object is to be one, it
must be whole. Ontologically, its existence as object requires a subject to recognise its objectivity, a
reciprocity that already undermines the unity of the object. But to be counted, the object has to be both itself
The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 5

and its representation as a number, which likewise divides it, even before the act of enumerating places it in
numerical relationship with other numbers and their objects (as a name not only adds itself to the thing it
represents but ropes the named thing into the chains of language). This primary instability of objects when
they are mediated reveals the mediation that generates them as objects in the first instance, and in the case of
discrete media posits their relationship with other objects as one of difference. In this contradictory structure
of existence lies the germ of the historiographic premise of the current volume. We cannot but write the
history of media as a history of discrete events, but in doing so we must insert gaps between those events,
gaps that, as differences, generate further instabilities. Thus history is not a plenum but a proliferation of
interruptions, each of which generates comparisons and continuities (of the kind investigated by Warburg) as
well as the unrepeatable isolation of events that might always have occurred otherwise, with other
consequences. As Parikka (2012: 2) writes, the spirit of media archaeology is 'thinking the new and the old in
parallel lines'. In this perspective, the continuum of history lies not in the chain of events, but in the spaces
between them, the grit and noise, the heat-generating friction of event grinding up against event.
The question of the continuum is both a historiographical and a technical one. As Michel Serres (2007)
argues, noise is intrinsic to any system. Not just the external interruptions but the interruptions intrinsic to
any signal, noise is the permanent condition of communication. Without the static of solar and cosmic
radiation, we would have no radio. The continuum is just this bubbling up into existence of potentialities,
realised or unrealised. At the same time, of all the mutations that occur randomly, we know that some have
the greater likelihood of establishing themselves, of gathering probability that they will recur. Media history
is not a matter of the ontological grounds of being or becoming, but of the actual events and situations that
emerge from it: objects are no less material for the fact that they have to be brought into existence, and are
perpetually interconnected with the past potentialities that generated them and the present universe of objects
with which they form their networks. Enquiring into the materiality of media, the minutiae of their operation,
exposes both the contingency of their existence, and the role of probability in bringing this rather than that
into dominant position. It is this question of dominance emerging from the static, of the congealed forms of
dominant media and their associated ways of perceiving and knowing, that differentiates the genealogical
project of The Practice of Light from those forms of media archaeology that emphasise the paths not taken.
Although The Practice of Light does speak to at least one lost opportunity, the vector screen, its major task is
to explain why we have the media we do. Having discounted the ideas of progress and efficiency, there
remains the thesis that our media are simply the most probable of all alternatives.
The second feature of data visualisation noted above was the process of averaging. The tendency towards
enumeration belongs to the world of the commodity; averaging however belongs with a relatively new form
of government, with power, and therefore with politics. There is an attempt here to re-introduce to one
another the two halves of an integral discipline, political economy, torn apart, as Vincent Mosco (2009: 4564) has it, in the attempt to make a science out of economics by ignoring the messy business of political life,
and further severed in the understandable but unfortunate anti-economistic stance of Foucault. For Foucault,
biopolitics concerns population,
a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while not infinite in number, they cannot be definitively
counted. Biopolitics deals with the population as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a
biological problem and as power's problem (Foucault 2003: 245) Unlike earlier formations of sovereign and
disciplinary power, biopower works on series of probable events, determining 'an average considered as
optimal on the one hand, and, on the other, a bandwidth of the acceptable that must not be exceeded'
(Foucault 2007: 6). Speaking of biopolitical town planning, Foucault emphasises key qualities of the new
form of rule:
It is simply a matter of maximizing the positive elements, for which one provides
the best possible circulation, and of minimizing what is risky and inconvenient, like
theft and disease, while knowing that they will never be completely suppressed.
One will therefore work not only on natural givens, but also on quantities that can
be relatively, but never wholly reduced, and, since they can never be nullified, one
works on probabilities (Foucault 2007: 19).
To achieve the enumeration required by both commodity exchange and digital media requires the reduction
of the messy, noisy world to units by a process of stabilisation through statistical sampling and probabilistic
analysis. Among the techniques analysed in The Practice of Light, the capture of light, transmission of
The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 6

signals, and the compression and decompression of video provide powerful examples of this process.
Foucault himself emphasises only the media of language and archives: Kittler expanded his terms to
technical media and their operation. Here I argue that these principles of statistical probability and unit
enumeration govern not only power and money but the minute and constant operation of visual media. It is at
this level, as much as through Foucault's argument about the mutual implication of power and economy in
liberalism and neoliberalism (Foucault 2008: 131, 202), that The Practice of Light propounds the
reconstitution of political economy at the foundations of visual aesthetics. Aesthetics, the sensations through
which we sense the world, are shaped by the technologies through which we do that sensing. True, we are
not dupes; and true, technologies do not spring fully formed from the mind of God. Quite the contrary: the
millennia of struggles over how to order mediation into communication shape and constrain those
communicative technologies which in turn shape and constrain our sense of the world. Aesthetics concerns
the struggle for control over the human sensorium, and thus over the ordering of communication which is the
order of our polities, societies, cultures and economies.
One important example is the resolution of the long-running dispute over physical and psychological
understanding of colour described in Chapter 3.2. The establishment of a normal observer has been critical to
the mass manufacture of visual technologies. In the early decades of broadcasting, radio and TV signals
competed for airspace with military, transport, government and emergency service users. The large tranches
of bandwidth required by early transmission technologies made bandwidth a scarce resource, and many
technologies developed techniques to make do with the restricted quality (and unreduced noise) of their
systems. To do this, they developed not only engineering solutions, of which the most significant is
enshrined in Shannon and Weaver's (1949) mathematical theory of communication, but psychological
models. Studies of hearing discovered that listeners could make out the words of a conversation even in a
noisy environment: therefore telephone suppliers could afford to produce only low-quality signals, on the
basis that a statistically normal user would be able to get enough information down a noisy line to understand
the message. Applied to visual technologies, this principle allows transmitters and networks to employ the
lowest level of clarity and fidelity needed for an end-user to make out the form and colours of an image. The
good-enough principle rests again on the foundations of statistical norms first formulated in Quetelet's 'social
physics' of l'homme moyen in the 19th century (Desrosires 1998; Hacking 1990). Far from leading towards
the best possible resolution, the evolutions of media technologies analysed in the following chapters
commonly standardise on the lowest acceptable solution, where 'acceptable' means conforming to a
normative psychology of perception, and a firm belief in the privilege of message not only over noise but
over the inessential qualities, contextual, poetic and emotive, that would otherwise colour and shape our
sense of communion. In the interests of efficient management, and employing the tools of probability and
norm, our media are also practices in the sense of Iago's practicing upon his peace and quiet (Othello II, i,
235), practicing on our perceptual gullibility, while shaping our expectations around the efficient-enough
delivery of data.
In the statistical management of sensory data and its unit enumeration there emerges a diagram of a state of
affairs which, while actual in its instrumental application in visual technologies, contains both disturbing and
liberating virtual potentials. Adorno points out,
Exchange is the rational form of mythical ever-sameness. In the like-for-like of
every act of exchange, the one act revokes the other; the balance of all accounts is
null. If the exchange was just, then nothing should really have happened, and
everything stays the same. At the same time . . . the societally more powerful
contracting party receives more than the other. By means of this injustice
something new occurs in the exchange: the process, which proclaims its own stasis,
becomes dynamic (Adorno 1998: 159)
going on to note 'the ever-sameness of the exchange principle intensifies by virtue of technology into the
domination by repetition in the sphere of production' (160), a process which in this work is traced further into
the reproductive mechanisms of visual culture, from print to frame to pixel. Yet Adorno is also keen to
demonstrate that this injustice that drives progress (which we might translate in the language of neoliberalism as 'growth') is also the grounds for its eventual disappearance: constantly completing mendacious
contracts based on broken promises of equal exchange is ultimately indistinguishable from the abolition of
exchange. In this sense, the reunification of politics and economics in the realm of aesthetics points towards
The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 7

more than a better, if bitterer, understanding of the nature of our oppression. Though not utopian, this book's
analysis drives towards a politics of hope.
The problem of exchange as model extends into the mutual mediation of subjects and objects, ossified in the
commodity form as a separation without mediation in which 'Once radically separated from the object,
subject reduces the object to itself'. We should not imagine a primal blissful unity before this separation,
however: 'Before the subject constituted itself, undifferentiatedness was the terror of the blind nexus of
nature' (Adorno 1998: 246). The constitution of the subject as individual is repeated in every individual, the
myth of individuality undercut by its compulsory severance from its objects and the resulting compulsory
engagement in economic life (Foucault 2004: 202) and in communication (Dean 2005), a tendency marked
lexically in the move from the older '-graph' suffix to now our common usage of 'audio' and 'video', literally
'I hear', 'I see'. Here we must part company with the philosophy of flux, the Bergsonian accusation that
cinema breaks up the continuity of duration, and accept the tragic rift between self and world, populations
and their environments, mediated through the necessary cut that redeems us from the formless terror of
absolute indifference. At the same time however, we have to understand that contemporary media replace the
chaos of indifferentiation with repetition, symmetry, and the homeostasis of endless exchanges summing at
equilibrium. The vast humming of the technological noosphere is the perverse utopia of a market that would
be both just and equal.
Ordering has become both separation and repetition, governed by probabilities that tend towards the
equilibrium of the least worst. If Adorno is correct, and the original sin that starts this process is the subjectobject relation, nonetheless the mediations of object and subject have a history, and we must start to look for
a third term, a project. A third quality of the graph is its temporality, at least in those common graphs with
time t as an axis. While the cells of graph-paper demarcate progression in the calculative units of clock and
calendar, they preserve at least a memory of another form of time, the gesture that marks a curve onto a
surface with charcoal, pencil or brush. This gestural continuum I refer to here as the vector, a privileged form
in computer graphics whose longer cinematic history I traced in The Cinema Effect (Cubitt 2004). The vector
is the dialectic of multiple and changing forces operating on a movement through time. As dialectic, the
vector also generates the forces operating on it: the swoop and swerve of a line is the joy of becoming that
generates the action of the hand, the tool it moves, the mark itself and, as Hogarth was so prompt to observe,
the motion of the eye that follows it. The term describes not just a type of line, but a principle observable in
camera movements, fly-throughs in digital animations, and in the continuities built through the succession of
images. In this it imitates Merleau-Ponty's (1968: 264) concept of the chiasm as an interleaving of world and
subject, 'the insertion of the world between the two leaves of my body / the insertion of my body between the
2 leaves . . . of the world' and at the same time the motion of suture, 'the general relation of lack to the
structure of which it is an element' (Miller 1977/8: 26; see also Butte 2008), the principle of difference, the
non-identical, the non-existent from which becoming springs. The vector is no escape from rule, but the
constant generation of new rules connecting subject and object in the creation of new forms of mediation. It
confronts the imposed order of symmetry and stasis with constantly mutating, improvisatory motion into an
unforeseeable future. In the nexus of all actually existing mediations, vectors emerge as their virtual
dimension, their capacity to change into something other than the already known, the already experienced,
the existing map of relations. Where the graph defines itself as the aggregate of points, vectors are
continuous, and continuously in metamorphosis, continuously negotiating the forces, situations and events
they encounter, and continuously redefining and changing those forces, situations and events and the
relations between them which it mediates.
Technically, a vector is a mathematical description of a movement through time. The description given here
is based on the principle that that movement, that gesture, is open-ended. In some contemporary media
practices, notably in codecs, the vector is bounded by start and end points. Even though the same maths
describes its motion, this instrumental vector is no longer open. As Bazin lamented, no technique is uniquely
destined to produce one effect and one effect only. Similar contradictions between utopian and dystopian
aspects afflict almost every technique investigated in this book. Even the unit, averaged grid which, posited
as hegemonic, plays the villain's part here, harbours internal contradictions which enable works of great
wisdom and beauty, a handful of them described in the following pages. Techniques and technologies are
neither stable nor immune to the principle of non-identity. When Beller argues that projecting film at 25
The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 8

frames per second orders perception in a particular way, he does not argue that all films are therefore the
same. The TCP/IP suite governing internet traffic does not make all websites identical. A technology is a
mode of mediation, a relation. In Scott McQuire's words (2006: 252), 'defining the technological activates
the border between nature and culture'. What we call power and economics can also be defined as mediations
between populations and environments, and this because, when we speak of relations of domination, 'We do
not try to trace their origins back to that which gives them their basic legitimacy. We have to try, on the
contrary, to identify the technical instruments that guarantee that they function' (Foucault 2005: 46). Those
instruments are media, taken, again, in the broadest definition: the media of mining for the materials that
build computers, as much as the media of police weapons trained on miners, and the financial flows from
mines to corporate offices and R&D labs; the media of farming pigments and glues, as well as those
regulating the clearing of rainforests and of transport and trade.
Practice is never individual; nor is a technology. According to Deleuze 'The machine is always social before
it is technical. There is always a social machine which selects or assigns the technical elements used'
(Deleuze and Parent 1997: 126-7). The social machine is not 'society' or some other imaginary force. It is an
assemblage of actors and mediators in Latour's sense, an interconnected web of mutually influencing and
translating activities, each open to contingency, but in the ensemble capable of acting as a single, ordered
machine. The 'traceable associations' that Latour (2005: 106) pursues form an ensemble of interactions, the
material forms of working together that makes any kind of social life possible. Thus the materiality of
mediations are technically and environmentally as well as humanly connected, in turn connecting, informing
and construing what we understand by human, technical and environmental.
Technologies are neither autonomous nor inhuman. Any technology assembles not just matter and energy but
information. It organises the skills and practical knowledge accumulated by our ancestors into physical form.
Marx's 'dead labour' is our common heritage (1973: 690 ff; Cubitt 2008a), the living presence of the
innumerable dead. When Stiegler (1998) speaks of the 'originary prostheticity' of human being, he posits that
to be human is definitionally to be a user of tools, thus to be born into an insufficient body that requires, for
its survival and for its relation with the world, the supplement of technology. This implies also that tools
mediate a relation with an environment which is inevitably altered in its meeting with the human population.
Their relation is always unstable, an instability out of which grows the history of that relation. Though the
epigenetic principle that characteristics acquired by one generation can be passed to the next may not apply
to all species, it does to humans. From earliest times our linguistic, musical and visual media have persisted
across generations, bearing their freight of acquired wisdom while also of necessity passing on the material
practices of those media technologies. Every technique and medium is the result of accumulated knowledges
and skills.
In writing genealogy, however, accounting for every mediation is impossible. Nor is a statistical sampling of
data compatible with the problem we have already encountered, when historiography is shaped by the
medium in which it is enacted. Two principles therefore guide the genealogical method undertaken here. The
first is to make the comparisons and connections made possible by the persistence and maintenance of skills
across generations: to relate the artefacts of one era to another, in this imitating the processes by which
technologies, as accumulations of ancestral skills and knowledge, perpetually compare, contrast and
reassemble elements derived from the great storehouse of the past. The genealogy of hegemonic forms of
mediation in the 21st century shares with media archaeology a concern for formations sidelined or
abandoned en route, such as the vector screens discussed in Chapter 4. The specific trajectory of evolution
that occurred is not presumed to have been necessary, but genealogy has to observe that the fact that it did
occur grants to hegemonic media formations the privilege that comes with having actually existed.
Nonetheless, the potentialities cast off along the way contribute to the definition of the actualities that
become dominant, as do specific ways of working within the dominant evolution of media forms.
This leads to a second methodological principle: to work at the level of the material specificity of individual
instances of mediation. The humanities are perhaps the last redoubt of this method, increasingly dismissed
elsewhere as 'anecdotal', that insists on the unique significance of the particular, especially when we aim to
discover the singular properties of a specific practice. The anecdotal method runs the risk of giving the false
impression that individual artists, artisans and engineers originated specific forms and techniques: this
The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 9

clearly is incompatible with the thesis that all technique is the fruit of ancestral knowledge. Nonetheless,
every act of making, including those in serial form and those using automated processes, is a new
concatenation of forces, and in potential always the birth of a new vector. That is why this book does not
offer a chronological survey in the manner of the excellent work of Briggs and Burke (2002), Debray (1991),
Mattelart (2000) and Winston (1998) among other media historians. Such histories must in some sense be
representative: to recount many instances, and to sum their common traits. The events inventions, artworks,
theories singled out in The Practice of Light are representative only in the sense that each stands at a
particular crossroads, drawing together the threads of the past in a unique pattern, and projecting forward
through time a specific trajectory.
The term 'mediation' then refers both to the principle and to specific acts of mediation, much as we speak of
'film' and 'films'. Glory presents a genealogy of mediation as the ground of human and non-human action, the
indefinite article suggesting that there are others. The term 'practice of light' evokes many mediations, many
orderings, many events that I have not been able to include: theological or quantum theories of light, the
neurophysiology of vision, pyrotechnics, stained glass, domestic and public illumination. Those I have
selected, as selection is inevitable even in broader surveys, I chose in order to emphasise the singularity of
each moment in the longer becoming of the architectures of visual communication in my own time, and their
mediation imitation, adaptation, critique, subversion, misunderstanding even of earlier forms. I have tried
to orchestrate these selections and arguments on the basis of three virtues to which I aspire, consideration,
wonder and hope: to consider in as much complexity as can be achieved the precise configuration of visual
culture in particular mediations; never to abandon to habit or cynicism the ability to wonder at the intricacies
of each mediation; and to embrace, even against all the odds, the hope that, if we have built ourselves a
demeaned perceptual repertoire, even within its structured regime there are inefficiencies, frictions, noise and
contradictions that can still generate the genuinely new, and that beyond its borders, other modes of seeing
and being seen promise to emerge.
*
In turn the chapters address the key themes of the book: invisibility and the non-identical, geometry and the
vector, enumeration and averaging, apparent versus virtual, and the struggle to control light's chaotic flow.
Chapter 1 argues that the difficult pursuit of black as an effect as well as a material reveals a fundamental
instability in the process of making visible. From his representation in cinema to his emulation in Picasso's
printmaking practice, Rembrandt van Rijn is the tutelary figure of the chapter, which is occupied with
attempts to achieve pure black, especially in printmaking, through techniques that involve not only the
production of complex materials and their handling, but also developing ways to trick the beholder into
seeing blacks that do not actually exist. If black is the marker of an absence of light then absence has also
been a marker of black. This ontological and phenomenological instability remains integral to the
visualisation of black from Gutenberg's inks to early greyscale television, and provides a first inkling of why
it is that visual technologies have to pursue forms of ordering that instability.
Chapter 2 traces the rise of geometry as a governing principle in visual technology by looking at five
instances where key transitions have been effected. Strongly represented in Rembrandt's famed collection of
prints, Drer's accommodation of observation to the grammar of proportion, especially in the observational
drawings and prints of animals and plants, opens drawing to a Euclidean geometry that would very soon
inform the proto-scientific investigation of optics undertaken by Descartes. In the plates to Descartes'
Dioptriques, as in those to Drer's Painters Manual, there is both an increasingly rationalist account of light
as linear and instantaneous rather than pervasive and flowing, and at the same time a growing irrationalism.
The terms of this contradiction come to a brief but influential resolution in Hogarth's roccoco line, and its
expression in his treatise on The Analysis of Beauty. This sinuous, sensuous line informs, only to be
disciplined in new ways by, the quasi-industrial line of Disney's animation studios in the 1930s, but reemerges in the form of vector graphics, represented here in the plotter-printer works of Roman Verostko.
The instability and fluidity of the line is both blessing and challenge, one taken up very differently in the
construction of space, time and, in Chapter 3, of surface.
Chapter 3 follows the emergence of two central features of digital imaging in the industrialisation of
The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 10

printmaking in the 19th century. Apparently innocuous techniques for preparing plates for printing by
stippling their surfaces gave way to other print technologies operating on the principle of a random scatter of
dots, including the most revolutionary of them all, photography. The dot for the first time begins to take on
the strategic dominance previously occupied by the line. Splitting images into spots enabled rapid printing,
but it took the invention of scanning to tame those dots into a new kind of line produced by scanning the
entire picture plane. The earliest electronic transmission of images by fax and wire introduced the principle
that governed the invention of modern television broadcasting. But like photography, early TV screens were
composed of random fields of spots and dots. Photography was tamed by the introduction of halftone
printing; television by a series of inventions culminating in linear scanning, an architecture traceable at the
molecular and even quantum level. From cameras and to data projectors, images are structured from the
moment of their capture in a grid of cells, identical save for their numerical designation. This structure takes
us to a point where the commodity form of the image is ingrained at the finest levels of their genesis,
transmission and consumption.
The flux of light does not immediately lend itself to this arithmetic handling. It requires an intermediate step,
traced in the way optoelectronic chips average the light they receive before converting it to whole numbers.
This process of averaging, which occupies Chapter 3.1 on colour, begins in the slow, and as yet still not quite
complete abstraction of colours from their material sources and the grammar of colour that structured early
modern works like van Eyck's Arnolfini. The process was dialectical: Newton's mathematisation of the
rainbow clashed with Goethe's phenomenology of perception, and the struggle between physics and
psychology would not be resolved until the application of statistical methods to perception in the 1930s.
Colour printing meanwhile would move from the floating colours of chromolithography, beloved of Walter
Benjamin, to increasingly controlled systems, culminating in the wholly abstract colour charts of industrial
suppliers in the late 20th century, and in electronic colour management in the 21st. The integration of
statistically managed perception with numerically coded grids produces the surfaces which now populate so
much of 21st century urban and intimate landscapes.
Traditional pictorial surfaces can only suggest the existence of volume through techniques like texture and
shading, the practice that opens Chapter 4. In digital imaging, volume and space can exist independently of
the surface depictions we recognise on screens. The chapter traces the construction of space first in shadows,
responsible for volume; then in layers, as a practice of creating the illusion of receding space; and thirdly
projection, the coordination of virtual and actual space. There has been an abiding lore of attached shadow,
the shadows an object casts on itself, of an eyebrow over an eye for example, or the shadow formed on the
sunless side of a tree trunk. Cast shadow however has a patchier history, tied into the tale of geometrical
organisation of space. Most of all, shadow colour, observed as far back as the Renaissance, which has to deal
with the multiple reactions of light and surfaces in continuous space, has proved elusive, a complexity too far
in many systems. As with colour, we discover again the readiness to apply 'solutions' that simplify
representation to the point of bowdlerising it. Something similar can be said of layers, the technique of
segmenting space into flat fields, stacked to give the appearance of distance. Deriving from theatre, the use
of flats in films, and of layers in digital imaging, organises space into discrete and discontinuous tranches.
Layers realise what is implicit in the gaps in shadow handling: that space becomes increasingly
discontinuous in contemporary practice. The same should not be true of projective space, and yet even here
the struggle goes on between modes of organisation. The geometric principle of perspective emerges from
the religious view of optics and the order of the world, but is rapidly subordinated to the disciplinary function
of the Mercator projection, and to the automation of Albertian perspective in the design of lenses. The purest
moment of this projective ordering of space is Speer's Zeppelin Field, but its most pervasive from is in fibre
optics where, at the heart of telecommunications, we find projected light rendered coherent, and binary. The
principle of segmenting space into discrete units is not the only route however. The chapter concludes with a
genealogy of vector space since the experiments of the Cubists, and with the artefacts produced by the
transformation of continuous and mutable space into raster displays.
Raster screens also organise their imaging in time. Chapter 5 traces the relations between
chronophotography, cinema, television and digital video as modes of temporal order. The continuity between
still photography and film has been overstated: film's unit is the succession of frames, not the individual
frame. Arguing that the photographic still is always already unstill, it suggests that film took as its task to
The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 11

overcome this peculiar property through its rapid substitution of one unstill still with another, until it could
emulate the instability of the world it observed. Broadcast television, especially live TV, increases the
incompleteness of each scanned image, sacrificing the structuring roles of beginnings and ends for the 24/7
cycle of endless image streams. This technique for settling the unstable, however, still generates its own
excess. New compression-decompression systems of transmission restructure the image, not only in the
raster grid and colour management, but in slicing the plane of the screen and carving the flow of time into
discrete segments. This segmentation structures time as a succession of whole moments, each discrete from
one another and from the continuum which cinematic vision had come to visualise. In the works of certain
artists operating close to the code level of technical imaging we can sense emerging an alternative aesthetic,
here named the vector, with a very different orientation to time, one that draws on discarded elements of the
tradition traced throughout this book. It is characterised in contrast to the assertive actuality of the informatic
mode of vision enshrined in contemporary digital video. Against units and averages, it poses multiplicities
and singularities; against the apotropaic solidity of segmented space and time, it embraces the non-identical,
source of the virtual capacity of world, media and viewers to become other than they are.
The unstable dependence linking seer and seen is one engine of the history of visual technologies. The
universe projects its ancient light onto and through our sensorium, while we project our order onto it. The
history of orderings traced in these pages suggests a deliberate forgetting of these foundations of perception.
Analysing the dimensionality, the space and time construed in the genealogy of visual technologies traces
that loss in order to understand how it has come about and how we might remediate our relationships with
the perceivable universe. At one time the conclusion to the book was to be titled 'White' but, on reflection,
white no longer appeared to be the only or the most telling contrast to the black with which it opens. Instead,
understanding light and its mediations as singularities and multiplicities gives us the grounds for an
understanding of the ethical and political dimensions of communication, not as means but as goal.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Australia License.

The Practice of Light 15.10.13 page 12