Kaleidoscopic Historiography

A kaleidoscope looks externally like a telescope, an instrument for collapsing distances, but putting its lens up to the eye transports the viewer into another world entirely. Small internal mirrors reflect random bits of colored detritus into a beguiling image: a multi-colored snowflake subject to the laws of geometry but transforming into an incomprehensibly new configuration at the slightest twist.

I’m sure I’m not the first to find kaleidoscopes an apt model for certain modes of historiography. The historian gathers fragments in front of their lens, hoping they land rhetorically in place to create a structured image of the past in the mind of the reader. The effect is precarious; a slight digression could conjure a different vision entirely. What appears telescopic (a bridging of time and epistemic difference) is rather more like a hallucinogenic revery.

In the third and last session of Digital.Visual.Material, some themes that had been shifting into position for days clicked together in my mind. One point that stuck with me was mentioned by David Theodore, one of the three panelists. Microhistory, he noted, remains the preferred historical model for exploring the content of the conference (computation, images, design) and the historical period in question (the long Sixties). The other two panelists, Gabriela Aceves-Sepúlveda and Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, did not take up this methodological point directly, but they did offer evidence that microhistory is still valuable. Both presented accounts of rich historical moments that offer, above all, a lesson in the fecundity of subcultures. Watching the feminist video artist Elizabeth Vander Zaag play around in the sunshine on the floor of her Vancouver home and MIT programmers huddled around archaic screens creating and playing games together – these seem ultimately to be studies in productivity: how energy is converted into life and art. What approach other than microhistory could present these moments in their unique richness while simultaneously suggesting that it could not be otherwise – that this is simply how life operates when examined closely?

But did these presentations offer any lessons beyond the fact that images are situated and material? At one point Theodore noted that this should be “the starting point of analysis, not the end,” and I agree. Another observation is that the microhistorical mode almost automatically presents temporal moments as historical hinge-points. Theodore’s case study of a parametric hospital implied a history with two broad periods: architecture before parametricism and architecture after parametricism. Likewise, for Aceves-Sepúlveda (film before inexpensive computational video manipulation systems vs. after) and Singh Dhaliwal (computation before interactivity vs. after). But these vignettes offer no explanation on their own. In a single transition from before to after, the explanation itself is rendered beside the point.

So, I find myself wishing for longer and more involved accounts of chains of causes and effects in the history of computer-generated images. A map and a narrative instead of a collection of kaleidoscopic views. This would be made all the more difficult – but also intellectually productive – by the fascinatingly specific, situated, embodied, material nature of the subject in question. How do self-involved aesthetic / technical subcultures form into broader cultural constellations? How do these cultural structures and patterns evolve over time? What are the forces involved, and what observational viewpoint would allow us to survey the field?

I am not suggesting doing away with microhistory entirely, of course. Now is assuredly a time for thick description. Computational techniques and imagery are more pervasive than ever, and their history is evermore obscured by the fog of naturalization. (That is, we tend not to think critically about those practices that have become habitual.) As John May mentioned early in the conference, workers in the visual design disciplines are often shockingly illiterate about the genealogy of the techniques they use. I am simply arguing for critical explanation along with thick description. I understand that answering the question of why things happened the way they did would be no less illusory than a kaleidoscopic focus. And I understand that grand narratives and comprehensive maps are out of fashion – rightly so. Nonetheless, I think we should have more to offer in terms of big pictures and temporal change.

One idea: How about the relational database as a model for historiography? Perhaps the lattice.space platform will do some of the work of drawing things together that I am suggesting.