Source: Gaboury, Image Objects ch3
only that which is knowable as present may become an object of study for simulation
→ this is the kind of world-building that computational simulation enacts
Our proximity to particular objects in the world both limits and defines that which is made knowable and therefore available for simulation.
This is true not only for the category of objects themselves—be they teapots or airplanes—but for how we understand and in turn describe them.
- As with early research by Coons and Bézier into modeling irregular curves and surfaces → ships, planes & vehicles
- → use in flight in vehicle simulation for military & commercial training
- As with the history of computing broadly, it is the potential for future military application that drives research into early computer graphics, such that it is no surprise that these are some of the first objects made legible to computation
- Then: We find a proliferation of everyday objects that speak to the culture of the individuals that reproduced them through simulation
- These were the objects that were ready to hand as researchers began their work, and in that moment of recognition became transformed into objects of study to be graphed and modeled mathematically.
which individuals’ culture does this draw on?
- What does it mean that what few women we find in this history are wives and partners offering teapots, and in more than one instance, their faces or bodies to be modeled and measured?
- Gouraud used to test his algorithm were spheres and airplanes, the most striking and widely remembered is the model of a face, which Gouraud digi- tized manually from a photograph of his wife, Sylvie.
- First drawing polyg- onal sections directly onto her skin, he then photographed the results to build a digital model in the Utah graphics laboratory
- The resulting life mask is among the earliest examples of a complete and shaded human face, though Parke would create a similar model soon after using his own wife’s face as the basis for his experiments in computer animation
→ back to materiality: the central contradiction of computer graphics as a technology shaped by a deeply material history that insists on its own virtuality
- Indeed, countless objects in use today hold a material connection to these generic object forms first shaped nearly half a century ago: the bow of a ship, the curve of a face, the handle of a teapot. Yet this connection is too often abstracted out and occluded by a culture of use that insists on its own immateriality as something that emerges without labor and without history.
- Women!
- If one inspects the photographic collection of E&S, it appears that the entire staff responsible for the assembly of computer hardware in the early 1970s were women (figure 3.20). Their presence here recalls the hidden labor of women at a time when women were computers, responsible for entering punched card data and running the machines that made computation work.67 Theirs was the labor of the material objects of computing, of the hardware itself. It is telling that the presupposed immateriality of computer graph- ics elides the same labor of circuits and soldering that these women made possible, that it is women who are traced but leave few traces of their own work and influence on the production of a new form of technical practice.