A hundred and fifty years ago, two inventions revolutionised the image: lithography and photog-raphy. Combined in contemporary photolitho presses , large-scale printing of photographs lead us into a new set of mathematised techniques. Refined through fax, TV and digital transmission, our imaging technologies are dominated by grids. This talk traces that history, and asks whether the unacknowledged presence of tiny squares is just a random blip in a chaotic cosmos, or per-haps a structural characteristic of the society we now inhabit: the database economy.

>>> Genealogy of the raster display

Sean CubittPratt Institute, Brooklyn, 11 November 2009

Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828) Tour du gros horloge, Évreux Lithograph, 331mm x 245mm(detail of clockface above)

William Henry Fox Talbot, Latticed Window at Lacock Abbey, 1835

Stephen H. Horgan, Steinway Hall, New York Daily Graphic, December 2, 1873: first mass-printed halftone photograph.

Bell Labs Wirephoto, first commercial transmission, New York 1935

The Quatermass Experiment, BBC TV, 1953, dir Rudolph Cartier, scr Nigel Kneale

Cathode Ray Tube

Trinitron Mask

LCD sub-pixel

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ISSUES

1. UNIT ENUMERATION = commodity equivalence, exchangability2 AVERAGING = biopolitical management of probabilty3. PREDICTIVE SCANNING = protocological zone => DATABASE ECONOMY

Ivan Sutherland demonstrating Sketchpad, 1963

Methodological PrinciplesConsideration - of the actually existing situation in its unique complexity

Wonder - at the specific unexpected details, readiness to question previous habits and assumptions

Hope - for a ‘difference that makes a difference at some later time’ (Bateson);