The Computer is not a Visual Medium: Visual Methods for Computational Materiality

• In Event: Computational Media Technologies: Computing and Critique Beyond Disciplinary Configurations - IV

Abstract

In his widely influential 2004 work “Continuous Paper,” Nick Montfort offers a critique of our tendency to privilege the visual experience of computational media in our analysis and understanding of the digital, naming this bias “screen essentialism.” In many ways this critique formed the foundation for a sea change in the field of media studies, a shift away from representational analysis and toward the materiality of computational technology in hardware, software, and code. Yet this wholesale refusal of the screen has produced its own restrictions, particularly as computational technologies come to re-engage visual experience in new ways, from the “discorrelated” images of post-cinema and computational photography to the adversarial networks that enable machine vision and artificial intelligence. How might we re-engage visual methods for the analysis of digital media without presuming the centrality of our phenomenal perception to the function of computational systems?

Taking up this task, this essay models visual methods for computational materiality through an analysis of the central role that computer graphics played in the development of the modern computer. Drawing on archival and materialist methods from my forthcoming book, I argue that while the computer is not a visual medium, computation itself has been shaped by a theory of relation that begins with the visual, and can be traced directly to contemporary applications in big data, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence. In pushing back against the critique of screen essentialism, my goal is to open up new avenues for visual methods in the study of computational media technologies.

Author

• Jacob Gaboury, UC Berkeley