April 13, 2004
Samples
Geoff Rockwell links to this excellent history of “Lenna”, a Playboy bunny whose pixelated likeness became something of a global baseline for image compression. Call it algorithmic objectification.
This kind of documentary reconstruction of the history of a digital object is my bread and butter. Here’s something I wrote a little while back on another famous image:
This image, an artifact of our age, is named SAMPLE.JPG and comes loaded with all Windows-based operating systems. If you use a WinTel machine you already have your own copy.
Why this particular image? Clearly it has certain aesthetic qualities, for example the chalked lines of the starter’s box extending the strong limbs of the runner. The color palette is also conspicuous: red, white, and blue contrasted with the rich flesh-tones of human body. And the image is thematically appropriate to the Microsoft ethos—Start! Go! There are good technical reasons for this choice of composition too, for it serves to test a system’s capacity to simultaneously render both the subtle tonal gradations in the runner’s arms and the clean, crisp color separation demanded by the white grid on the blue background. But I want to introduce my topic today by proposing a broader significance for this, one of the most widely distributed digital objects in the world today. Although it is a photographic image, its photorealism is tempered by the way the runner’s body is cropped so as to be all but disembodied against the chalked asphalt. I am going to read this image as emblematic of two competing paradigms in digital imaging, both of which have been present since the origin of applied computer graphics in the 1960s, and both of which are now vying for authority on the Web.
The first of these two paradigms is photorealism, images typically delivered in raster or bitmap formats and represented here by the body of the athlete; the second and slightly older of the two paradigms are mathematically constructed images, delivered in vector formats and represented here by the same stark grid lines that have been the wire-frame support for some of our most influential imaginings of cyberspace.
The rest of the paper (which I gave at the 2002 MLA) goes on to detail the implications of the rise of vector image formats (notably Flash) for the current archival paradigm in digital humanities.
Posted by mgk at April 13, 2004 10:02 AMInteresting.
Not clear from Geoffrey Rockwell's blog entry and the story if ii is only part of the published image that has become accepted as the prefered image for testing compression. Geoffrey points to copyright considerations. I wonder if "quoting" part of a published images counts as fair use. The other point he raises about the initial purpose of the published image made me think of Benjamin's statements in his piece commonly translated at "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (not that it is applicable in the case at hand to subsitute ~titilation~ for ~barbarism~ but perhaps the opening image of the chess playing automaton as an analogy for the way history is constructed might be worth dewelling upon in this little bit of cultural history and border crossing (from the centre fold to the test bed)). Just wondering how Benjamin's phrases about the "anonymous toil of their contemporaries" and "the efforts of the great minds and talents" can connect with the case at hand.