Gaboury, Jacob (Author)
Image Objects: An Archaeology of 3D Computer Graphics, 1965-1979 explores the early history of 3D computer graphics and visualization with a focus on the pioneering research center at the University of Utah. The University of Utah is one of the most significant sites in the history of computing, but has been largely neglected by historians and digital media scholars alike. From 1965-1979 almost all fundamental principals of modern computer graphics were developed by Utah graduates and faculty, many of whom went on to found some of the most important research and technical organizations of the past fifty years, including Adobe, Pixar, Netscape, and Atari. The project begins with this history, but looks to pull apart familiar narratives of invention and innovation by engaging the challenges and failures of early research into computer visualization. As such the project is organized around a set of technical and cultural objects of particular significance to the early history of graphics. Chapter One introduces the project and its research site and the University of Utah, discussing methods, archives, and the history of the Utah program. Chapter Two offers a meditation on questions of vision and visibility, structured around the development of the "hidden surface algorithm" for graphical display from 1965-1969. Chapter Three offers an analysis of memory and materiality through the lens of early graphics hardware, with a focus on the development of the first commercial framebuffer in 1973. Chapter Four investigates objects and ontology through an analysis of the "Utah Teapot", a famous graphical object standard developed in 1974 and used widely in contemporary software, film, and research demonstrations. Finally, Chapter Five offers an analysis of language and text through an exploration of the object-oriented paradigm first conceived by Alan Kay at the University of Utah. By looking to the first moments in which visual computing is made possible this project critiques popular narratives that view the digital image as an extension of earlier visual forms, arguing instead that the development of 3D interactive graphics marks the moment at which computer science develops a concern for ontology and the simulation of objects in the world. Ultimately the project seeks to make the familiar strange, offering a theory of the digital image that refuses a genealogy of the visible.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 76/03(E), Sep 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1635305045.
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