An Engineer / Not a Camera

2025 12 min

The production of a computer chip is perhaps the most complex technical process in human history. But a critical step to produce this cutting-edge technology shaping the future relies on the older science of photography and optical principles dating back centuries. In 1827, the French inventor and engineer Joseph Nicéphore Niépce developed the first photoresist to successfully capture a fixed image of the world using sunlight and the principles of a camera obscura. He named this process heliography, or "sun drawing." Half a century later, the English photographer and engineer Eadweard Muybridge advanced these methods to capture and study motion. By the mid-twentieth century, the U.S. industrial laboratory Bell Labs patented a version of this process called photolithography, not for the production of images but rather for the fabrication of microchips. In this timeline, Niépce’s nineteenth-century heliography (sun drawing) is the antecedent to Donna Haraway’s microchip made of sunshine at the end of the twentieth century. “The new machines are so clean and light,” she wrote in 1985, “their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society.” Decades into the reality of this dream, generative AI and computer-generated imagery are nearly indistinguishable from those made with a camera. Once a method for capturing an image of the world, the principles of optics are now being used to build machines that can make images of the world without needing to see it. Muybridge’s galloping horse turns from motion to be captured, to data to be rendered. As this new virtual world grows richer, the allure of escaping into this elsewhere grows with it. Yet there is no elsewhere. Every image that beckons from an uncanny world somewhere else fundamentally alters our world right before our eyes.