Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies (review)

This is a densely written work which uses "historical" examples as jumping-off places for exploring the concepts of selfhood, representation, perception, and imagination. "Historical" is here put in quotes for two reasons. First, David Tomas does not give the "history" of any of his case-study subjects: the book is history only in that the artifacts and ideas are situated in the past; none is shown in development, only as a snapshot. Tomas does, however, explore the relationship of technology to culture—exquisitely sensitive and sensual culture.

Second, Tomas includes the history of fictitious or imaginary artifacts, a history he calls "uchronic" (p. 86: "a philosophical term that refers to the historical reconstruction of fictive events on the basis of given historical referents"). He also uses a rather extended definition of "image technologies," which includes verbal descriptions (Henry Adams's "The Dynamo and the Virgin") and scientific data in various formats.

Tomas writes that earlier versions of several chapters were originally published elsewhere, and there is a substantial amount of repetition which assists the reader in comprehending the unfamiliar material. This is especially useful given the often opaque language used: for example, "[this book] argues that we should actually be thinking of, and working toward, a highly modulated world where the cultures of science and technology that articulate our existence and bodily transformations will be conceived as a dimensionally complex ideational matrix stretching from past to future" (p. 9); or "The mirage of the new, with its ability to promote, in the name of progress, a unique category of perception—the one associated with novel technological forms—tends to vanish when one treats machine systems or their various representations as agents in one's cybernetic dissolution, as a matrix of different spaces, times, and possible mental systems, or as immanent, hyperphysical traces of previous tactilo-ecolographic activity" (p. 186).

Tomas employs Gregory Bateson's image of a blind man's stick used as a probe as an analogy for the various image technologies he discusses, and each of his chapters might well be considered to have that same function as probe, to explore the boundaries of conceptual and perceptual "objects." The first chapter examines "pictures of the new" executed with "new" techniques, to examine efforts of artists to represent emerging societal realities. Chapter 2 is titled "The Materialization of Sentience" and presents Adams's essay as an attempt to bring the numinous and "supersensual" (p. 43) under his pen, using words rather than lines to draw a "picture" of the invisible. In the third chapter, Tomas attempts to bring the sensations evoked by viewing the original print of Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's heliographic image "View from the Window at Gras" similarly under his own pen.

Chapter 4 brings "engineering drawing" and the imagination together. "Reimagining the Computer's Origins" is uchronic history, since no working model of Charles Babbage's difference engine was ever constructed. Just as Adams's essay pictured the supersensual with words, Babbage's drawings pictured the nonexistent with lines. "Here the principle of the copy is tenuously articulated into existence as an image or trace that is measured against the imagination, the impossible, and perhaps even the infinite" (p. 98). The drawing is Bateson's blind man's stick, probing the shape of the potential.

Chapter 5 is perhaps the most difficult, both with respect to the technical instruments described and the nuances of the concepts presented. The camera lucida, the camera obscura, and modern virtual-reality imaging are linked as a continuum, but the precise differentials in type of image (projected on the drawing surface, or "in the air," or as a virtual image in the eye) depend on technical details which are mostly depicted in words. Only the camera obscura, the most easily visualized, is illustrated clearly. Much is made of the variety of ways in which "a pencil's or pen's point [is brought] into contact with the image" (p. 108, emphasis...