Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design

AUTHORS: DANIEL CARDOSO LLACH AND THEODORA VARDOULI

Reveals the history of numerical control and computer-aided design technologies using rare images from institutional archives and personal collections, including photos, films, and interactive reconstructions.

Seventy years or so after their appearance on radar screens and oscilloscopes in the wake of World War II, computational images seem about ready to fade into the background of our collective consciousness. They have come to undergird not only vast swathes of the contemporary visual culture — for example through film, software interfaces, games, and mobile media — but also accompanied disciplinary transformations and realignments in fields as varied as art, design, engineering, and architecture, where they have become the sites of new forms of technical work, as well as the prompt for new theorizations of their practice. Glimmering on screens small and large, lurking in the background of algorithmic machineries, and shaping the intellectual life and embodied labors of practitioners across multiple domains, they appear as ubiquitous brokers of the present. And yet, while their allure has made them inescapable, their omnipresence has made them almost invisible.

Computational images are ambivalent, and resist essentialist definitions or reductive analog-digital divides. They are symbolic as well as physical; constituted both by numerical abstractions and the electro-mechanical contraptions required for their display. They are social as well as technical; their histories and politics closely intertwined with the militarism and economic anxieties that shaped the second half of the twentieth century — and with the more recent softwarization of everyday life. They are formal as well as informational; at times devices for creative expression, at times stalwarts for functional or financial rationality. They are conduits for a widespread aesthetics of personalized entertainment and consumption, but also the locus of critical redefinitions of human agency in artistic and humanistic registers.

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