Global Asia Speaker Series

A Different History of the Digital Image: Between the Frames of Photogrammetry in Japan

Dr. Paul Roquet, associate professor of media studies and Japanese studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Thursday, September 26  |  6-7:30 CT/7-8:30 ET

Virtual

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ABOUT THE TALK

Photogrammetry attempts to capture a site or subject in three dimensions by triangulating between a set of two-dimensional images. While recent machine learning-based approaches have advanced the field considerably, these techniques build on over a century of struggles to conjure up a hidden spatial dimension between photographic stills. Photogrammetry’s focus on surveying, measurement, and documentation tasks has meant this history has until recently been excluded from broader media and image histories, despite being intimately entwined with the development of camera technologies and image-processing techniques. Tracing the tumultuous trajectory of spatial photography in wartime and postwar Japan, I show how an integration of photogrammetry into media history better reveals how we arrived at our contemporary culture of computational imaging: one focused less on the images themselves and more on the spaces—and temporalities—that lie between them. I argue this kind of spatial photography discloses an alternate media trajectory set against the recent theoretical privileging of first-person perspectives, focusing instead on the value of the allocentric (or ‘other-centered’) image.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Paul Roquet is associate professor of media studies and Japan studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing section. He is the author of Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self (Minnesota, 2016) and The Immersive Enclosure: Virtual Reality in Japan (Columbia, 2022). His work focuses on the techno-perceptual history of environmental and immersive media, and the cultural politics of the mediated spaces they produce. See https://proquet.mit.edu for more.

SPONSORED BY the KU Center for East Asian Studies