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  • The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels by Sean Cubitt
  • Rob Harle
The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies From Prints to Pixels
by Sean Cubitt. The MIT Press
, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A., 2014. 368pp. Illus. Trade. ISBN: 978-0-262-02765-6.

The Practice of Light is a tour de force. Exceptionally well-researched and brilliantly written, this book is the result of the dream of a very talented individual. Cubitt dreamed he held a book such as this in his hand and dearly wanted to read it. No such book existed in reality, so he set about the monumental task of writing it himself. I say monumental because, as you will appreciate as you read the book, the level of detailed research and scholarship is vast; from the genesis of “Let there be light” through to the images we see on giant LED screens in our contemporary cities.

I am not sure Cubitt realized what a can of worms he was opening when he first started on the task of fulfilling his dream. It appears there are almost no areas of human endeavor that are immune to the influence and analysis of light—politics, consumerism, dance, oil painting, contemporary 3D movies, physics and ecology are just a few examples. Cubitt explores all these topics and many more in detail. The book shifts easily from the pragmatic (the composition of oil painting media) to the philosophical (politics of power, à la Foucault), for example. My opening remarks are no exaggeration. [End Page 500] Cubitt introduces, explains and then explores highly complex theories in a way that is easy to understand and will not cause a stress headache. It is highly readable.

Trying to define the purpose of this book for the prospective reader in a few short sentences is no easy task. “Enquiring into the materiality of media, the minutiae of their operation, exposes the contingency of their existence and the role of probability in bringing this rather than that into dominant position” (p. 9). From this inquiry it follows that “The major task of The Practice of Light is to explain why we have the media we do” (p. 9). The book, a part of the MIT Press’s Leonardo Book Series, which comprises a numbers of scholarly works on art and science, is nicely produced. Unfortunately, the cover/jacket design is very ordinary and the colors are appalling. After the introduction there are six chapters, followed by extensive notes, references and an index. There is a smattering of black-and-white photos and illustrations, and a small center section of color plates. Chapter titles are:

  1. 1. Black

  2. 2. Line

  3. 3. Surface

  4. 4. Space

  5. 5. Time

  6. 6. Reflection.

The chapters in turn “address the key themes of the book: invisibility and the nonidentical, geometry and the vector, enumeration and averaging, apparent versus virtual, and the struggle to control light’s chaotic flow” (p. 16). The first chapter is black, in every way you can imagine and more. After reading this chapter, I realized I could never again use the phrase, “It’s as simple as black and white.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Rembrandt’s work and methods are the main focus of this chapter, which argues that the “pursuit of black as an effect as well as a material reveals a fundamental instability in the process of making visible” (p. 16). This instability is of considerable ontological and phenomenological importance.

Chapter 2 is slightly less revelatory but just as important as the first chapter. It discusses the “rise of geometry as a governing principle in visual technology.” Cubitt argues that there has been an “increasingly rationalist account of light as linear and instantaneous rather than pervasive and flowing.” Durer, Rembrandt, Descartes, Hogarth and Disney are discussed.

Chapter 3 explores the phenomenon of surface, from the preparation of plates for printmaking through to television screens including opto-electronic chips. “The flux of light does not immediately lend itself to this arithmetic handling. It requires an intermediate step, traced in the way optoelectronic chips average the light they receive” (p. 17). Walter Benjamin, van Eyck, John Gage...

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