Visual Thinking Laboratory
Texas Center for Digital Knowledge
College of Information
University of North Texas
The Visual Thinking Laboratory weaves together ideas, talents, and abilities of
researches from a variety of backgrounds. Computational analysis of video structure
and the relationship of billboards to people and places; engagement with very large
images and modeling the photograph in terms of entropy; proof-of-concept new
combinations of photo-technologies and philosophical considerations of the nature
of visual signs; linkages between cellphone snapshots and ultra-high resolution
images and codes of style – all these and others constitute expressions of research
into visual thinking.
Our tag line from physician, essayist, and photographer Oliver Wendell Holmes
reflects the novelty and excitement of photography in 21st century culture and in
our laboratory. Holmes wrote: “Form is henceforth divorced from matter.” By this
he was attempting to convey the significant rupture with the past brought about by
photography. Until the early 19th century. One had to be in the presence of an object
to have direct knowledge of its form. If one wanted to see the precise shape of a
cathedral in France, a windmill in Holland, a maple leaf in New Hampshire, a king, a
peasant, then one had to be looking at that thing or that person. A painting or an
etching or even a detailed written description might give a useful description; yet
one could not count on seeing the exact shape or every wrinkle, crease, vein, brick
or other details whose entirety make up the precise look. One could see one’s own
children, then 20 years later not remember precisely how they had looked 20 years
before. One could see oneself in a mirror, then see something rather different in the
mirror a year later. Holmes speaks of photography as a mirror with memory. We
need no longer be in the presence of something in order to see its form.
For much of its existence photography involved processes that required time,
equipment, and training beyond what most people were willing to devote to the
making of photographs. Until fairly recently photography required chemical
processes that meant setting up a darkroom or bringing film to a processing station.
In the digital era most of the boundaries surrounding production and publication
have crumbled. The monetary and temporal costs of making images have become so
trivial that the mere act of photography is no longer reserved for special events and
publication may be limited to showing one or two friends an image on a cell phone.
At the same time, imaging extraordinary levels of detail and in the most varied of
places have become possible. In all of this we have yet to construct robust models of
uses, the nature of photographic information, fruitful ways to integrate photography
into academia and cultural heritage institutions, even what it might mean for
humans to have such augmented and easily shared memory of forms.
Members of the Visual Thinking Laboratory construct and examine images, push the
limits of existing technologies, contemplate how images function in our daily lives
and academic pursuits. We examine uses of images and uses of photographic
technology at all levels. Our theory base privileges both the snapshot and very large
view camera image. We link problems of seeing, production processes, contexts and
conditions, technical construction, social construction, history, and authoring and
authority of images
Hominids existed for millions of years without any cameras, computers, or any of
the myriad devices that are making their way into our lives these days. Yet, tool use
can be traced back two million years and the use of realistic imaging in paintings to
at least 40, 000 years. We can say that Holmes’s use of the term “unfading artificial
retina” to describe photography is, then, a continuation of human propensities and
an extension of the eye’s mind.
Photographs are fundamentally records of photons emitted from surfaces. How
much detail about how many photons varies; one may have just luminance data for
a small portion of the photon stream in the form of a black and white snapshot or
hundreds of megabytes of data on luminance and color in the form of museum
images of precious holdings. Photography is a matter of photons in, photons out.
Which photons one decides to record, how one records them, how one manipulates
them, how one presents them, and how one might consider new means of recording
photon data are all aspects of the work of the Visual Thinking Laboratory.
Holmes, speaking of the example of parents forgetting just how their children once
looked commented:
But the unfading artificial retina retains their impress, and a fresh sunbeam lays this
impress on the living nerve as if it were radiated from the breathing shape. How these
shadows last, and how their originals fade away!