Abstract
For those of us who have only used computers after the development of Microsoft Windows and Mac OS, to say nothing of the growing number of young people with no memory of a time before the smartphone, graphics have always been an essential and often unremarked element of using a computer. We might have understood the quality of graphical rendering to have improved in our lifetime or compared the graphics of our machines versus those of another model, but the association of computing with a graphical interface has become ubiquitous outside certain time capsules: perhaps 1980s movies or the recollections of someone who learned to code using punch cards. In Image Objects, though, the development of computer graphics is shown to have occurred through a specific, material process of research and development that informed a conceptual shift in the role of computers in society. Through detail-oriented historical storytelling and incisive analysis, author Jacob Gaboury draws critical attention to the complexity of even the simplest computer graphics and establishes the importance of graphics for everyday computation.
The historical story of Image Objects begins at the University of Utah, a central location for early research into computer graphics. Where many histories of computation focus on Silicon Valley, California, and/or researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gaboury’s emphasis on the contributions of professors and especially graduate students at Utah brings forth an alternative, understudied narrative. Many of the most important problems for creating and making widespread computer graphics were solved at Utah across several decades, beginning in 1965 with the founding of a computer science program by David C. Evans. Receiving significant funding from both his university and the United States Department of Defense, Evans and his colleagues tackled the hidden surface problem—how to compute an entire object while only visualizing what can be “seen” from the vantage of the screen—and developed the first commercially available frame buffer, a piece of computer memory facilitating the successive display of different digital images, to give just two of the most important examples of their work. Image Objects also recounts the development and impact of the Utah teapot, an object of coincidental origin (the original pot belonged to Sandra Newell, the wife of a PhD student at Utah working on the simulation of curved objects) that became “the single most rendered object in the history of computer graphics” (p. 89) by serving as a test object for computer simulations through the present day. The full stories behind these technological achievements are rendered in sharp detail by Gaboury, who takes great care to attribute discoveries not just to the heads of research institutes but also the many graduate students whose dissertation projects substantially advanced the entire field of computation. This approach is quite refreshing in an era where the work of graduate students is frequently denigrated and many public universities struggle to achieve the scholarly reputation of their private counterparts.
It is when addressing the influence of graphics on computation as a technical process and phenomenological experience that Image Objects is the most exciting. Before graphics, we are told, computers were tools similar to desktop calculators, only capable of processing numbers in rote functions. After graphics, computers were (and are) “a medium structured by a distinct ontological claim” (p. 7, italics in original), a simulated space that is dynamically experienced and manipulated by the user. The significance of this shift cannot be overstated; without computer graphics, countless activities we now execute without a second thought would be impossible. The relation between ontology and visuality, computer graphics as objects existing in virtual space and images displayed on a screen or perhaps captured in a still image, is a tantalizing theoretical tangle grounded in the book’s case studies. Image Objects effectively manages the balance between recounting historical or technical specifics and abstract theorizing by emphasizing the former, allowing narrative details to do much of the work of explicating the theory. The book does not engage in intense theoretical wrangling, affording a stylistic clarity but therefore not developing the theoretical contentions to their ultimate potential. What are the social consequences of computer graphics’ ontology and visuality, for example? Image Objects stays focused on its story rather than chasing down such open-ended questions, a decision the reader will likely evaluate based upon their own interests. Those rigorously engaged in the topic of computer graphics, for example, might appreciate the controlled scope of the book’s claims, whereas a reader seeking a comprehensive theory of digital ontology might be left wanting.
Image Objects is an impressive book showcasing considerable skill in historical research, theoretical grasp, and scholarly prose. The book is extremely readable despite the technical nature of its material, with 133 black and white figures and 20 color plates also handsomely illustrating the technologies under discussion. As computer graphics continue to proliferate in contemporary culture, a book grappling with the origins of the medium marks an important and necessary contribution to the literature on new media of all sorts. We cannot predict how computer graphics will change in the coming years, but a look back at the preceding decades offers some helpful clues.
