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 go back centuries. In 1827, the inventor and engineer Nicéphore Niépce developed what is widely considered the first photoresist, which he used to successfully 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 in the field of cinematography to capture and observe the motion of Stanford's galloping racehorses. Then, in the 1950s at Bell Labs, the technique for transferring light onto a pattern was adapted into the photolithographic process that is now used to make semiconductor microchips. But the immersive digital world that has risen out of this technology invites the disavowal of the material world that makes it possible. Once a method for capturing an image of the world, the principles of optics are now being used to make machines capable of rendering images of the world without needing to see it. Computer generated imagery is increasingly indistinguishable from those captured by traditional optics. And as these other “virtual” worlds grow richer and expand, so too does the allure to escape and lose oneself elsewhere. 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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