An Engineer / Not a Camera

forthcoming

The production of a computer chip is arguably the most complex technical process in human history. But at the heart of this cutting-edge technology shaping the future, is the older science of photography and optical principles that go back centuries. In 1827, the inventor and engineer Nicéphore Niépce developed what is widely considered the first photoresist, which he used to successfully capture a lasting image from a camera obscura. He called this image a heliograph, or "sun drawing." Half a century later, Leland Stanford employed the English photographer and engineer Eadweard Muybridge, who advanced these methods in the field of cinematography by capturing the motion of Stanford’s galloping racehorses. Today, photolithography, a manufacturing process derived from these sciences of photography, is central to making advanced semiconductor chips. But this technology has increasingly led to the disavow of the material world that makes it possible. Once a method for capturing an image of the world, the principles of optics are now being used to fabricate devices capable of rendering the world without needing to look at it. And where some digitally created images appear indistinguishable from those captured by traditional optics, others present an alternative “virtual” world that lies seemingly elsewhere. Yet there is no elsewhere. Every image that beckons from an uncanny world somewhere else fundamentally alters our world right before our eyes.

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