Seeing and Seafaring: Maritime Navigation and the Scopic Regime of Computation
A History & Theory of New Media lecture presented by the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society (CSTMS)
with Bernard Geoghegan
Reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media, King's College, London
Aesthetic artifacts display a reality on par with the assemblages involved in their genesis. This talk considers one such assemblage, maritime navigation, and its role in fostering a new graphical culture characterized by points, vectors, and ratios. Dr. Geoghegan argues that this new graphical culture constituted a scopic regime of computation that is still on display in the varieties of objecthood and worldliness prominent in digital visual culture today.
About Bernard Geoghegan
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a media theorist and historian of science researching how digital technologies shape science, culture, and the environment. He has also worked as a curator. Bernard earned a binational Ph.D. from Northwestern University and Bauhaus University Weimar. He has written on such topics as Orientalism in informatics, anxiety and vigilance shape networked communications, the political origins of interactive digital interfaces, how the rise cybernetics shaped fields such as French theory and family therapy, German media theory, and relations between new media and the occult. His essays appear in journals including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Representations, and Theory, Culture & Society. Bernard taught at Yale University, Coventry University, the Humboldt University of Berlin, and the American University of Paris.
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