Kyle Stine
Faculty in Film and Media Studies
Johns Hopkins University
A Critical Hardware Approach to Digital Media
My research takes a critical hardware perspective on the material flows, labor processes, and environmental impacts of new media, while engaging with the complex material histories of cinema, sound media, and computers. In a somewhat counterintuitive move, I argue that any understanding of materiality today must be supplemented by an equally rich and nuanced understanding of the image, that imaging and computing are two aspects of a single system, and that cinema studies still has much to offer new media and software studies.
My current book project argues that the register of the image is crucial to understanding the dynamic unfolding of media today, the material processes of which increasingly take place beyond human sense. Taking a media archaeological approach, it focuses on the role of imaging technologies in the history of computing and industrial manufacture, where visual techniques and machine vision systems have become indispensible in producing components for computers and digital cameras. Following a history from nineteenth-century practices of scientific imaging to the automated production of integrated circuits today, it traces the integral history of photography and cinema in the development of computers and robotics, where images are not merely sensory entertainments meant for human users but also the sensors of machine perception. Throughout their history, popular media have continually fed back into the development of high-tech, with consumer-grade photography, film, video, and digital cameras all being used at different points to supplement processes of automation and machine perception. Integrated circuits, the foundation of modern computing, are nothing less than images etched three-dimensionally into silicon, and their history draws directly from cinema, as their inventors used film and 16mm camera lenses to create the first step-and-repeat cameras to print transistors photographically. Picturing and calculation compose a feedback loop that curves throughout the history of modern media: better images to produce better computers to produce better images. Cinematic media are thus not only the beneficiaries of digital technologies but also, along certain paths of application, their source.
My current book project argues that the register of the image is crucial to understanding the dynamic unfolding of media today, the material processes of which increasingly take place beyond human sense. Taking a media archaeological approach, it focuses on the role of imaging technologies in the history of computing and industrial manufacture, where visual techniques and machine vision systems have become indispensible in producing components for computers and digital cameras. Following a history from nineteenth-century practices of scientific imaging to the automated production of integrated circuits today, it traces the integral history of photography and cinema in the development of computers and robotics, where images are not merely sensory entertainments meant for human users but also the sensors of machine perception. Throughout their history, popular media have continually fed back into the development of high-tech, with consumer-grade photography, film, video, and digital cameras all being used at different points to supplement processes of automation and machine perception. Integrated circuits, the foundation of modern computing, are nothing less than images etched three-dimensionally into silicon, and their history draws directly from cinema, as their inventors used film and 16mm camera lenses to create the first step-and-repeat cameras to print transistors photographically. Picturing and calculation compose a feedback loop that curves throughout the history of modern media: better images to produce better computers to produce better images. Cinematic media are thus not only the beneficiaries of digital technologies but also, along certain paths of application, their source.
Archival Research
My projects develop theoretical insights about the history of media technologies through archival materials, the sifting and sorting through which is also one of my greatest pleasures as a scholar. Beyond several university and city libraries, I have conducted research at the Smithsonian Archive Center, MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections, the MIT Museum, the Kodak Historical Collection, and the Library of Congress. The Computer History Museum and Charles Babbage Institute are next up on the list, and I look forward to reporting back soon!
Interviews
Interviews with software engineers, filmmakers, and other practitioners make up another significant aspect of my research. I recently interviewed San Francisco software engineer Greg James about his work on the Visual 6502 project, and quotations from that interview will appear in my article "Critical Hardware." I will also be visiting Stockholm this June to interview Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson, creators of the 37-day-long art project Logistics, the longest film ever made.
