An Engineer / Not a Camera

forthcoming

The production of a computer chip is arguably the most complex technical process in human history. But at the heart of this cutting-edge technology shaping the future is the older science of photography and optical principles that date back centuries. In 1827, the inventor and engineer Nicéphore Niépce developed what is widely considered the first photoresist, which he successfully used to capture a lasting image from a camera obscura. He called this image a heliograph, or "sun drawing." Half a century later, Leland Stanford employed the English photographer and engineer Eadweard Muybridge to advance these methods further in the field of cinematography to capture and observe the motion of Stanford's racehorses. At Bell Labs in the 1950s, the technique for transferring light onto a pattern was adapted into the photolithographic process to make semiconductor microchips. Once a method for capturing an image of the world, the principles of optics are now being used to make machines capable of producing images of the world without needing to see it. Muybridge’s galloping horse turns from motion to be captured, to data to be rendered. AI and computer-generated imagery are now virtually indistinguishable from those made by traditional optics. And the immersive digital world that has risen out of these technologies invites the disavowal of the material world that makes them possible. As the virtual world grows richer and expands, the allure to escape 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.

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