This text explores vision, and how we see the world around us, very relevant to my studies, as my techniques disengage us with familiar ways of seeing for ones are “severed from a human observer.” (p1) These images do not refer to the way in which we, as humans see, what they refer to is “millions of bits of electronic mathematical data.” (p2)
Optical devices changed our perceptions of observation, even simple technologies have been used to modify and adapt our vision, as they have become more commonplace we have become accustomed to them. This can be seen through art history with the use of the camera lucida and the camera obscura in painting to obtain technically correct perspectives. After which “the camera obscura evolves into the photographic camera” (p26) capable of recording scenes more quickly and more accurately than an artist. This means of image generation was grounded in realism, only what was before the camera could be reproduced, leading to the rise of abstraction as a means of escape.
The use of the camera limits us to one viewpoint, somehow giving this authority, the possession of the technology allows us to think of it as truth. Our “sensory experience is supplanted by the relations between a mechanical apparatus and a pre-given world of objective truth.” (p39-40) Alluding the senses may allow us to see more objectively, but can our perception be recreated with machines, without human interaction? Is there any greater truth in the view of the machine, or just one which differs from our own vision?
Crary notes that vision is formed by several factors, which we can represent and describe. In particular he notes that cognition may be “measurable in terms of duration and intensity,” (p101) making it recordable and reproducible. In a way, this is more relevant today than it was to the camera obscura and the photograph. As digital technologies improve, so do the methods we have to record what we see, and beyond what we see, presenting the information back in a familiar, understandable medium.