🪴 Jachére

Thinking about Images and Software

May 21, 20244 min read

Thinking about Images and Software

I’ve been left with quite some material to think through after the Leisure Electronics conference (see When did tinkering become programming?). My current reading, The Philosophy of Software [@berryPhilosophySoftwareCode2015], is expanding on that. Which leads me to an attempt of capturing the current state of that reflection.

Thoughts on the Video Game Image

Video game images are always already an assemblage between player interfaces[[see below). When outlined like this, the [FAVR](notes/Favr.md|^1]] concentrates on the aspect of player interfaces and the visual materiality of the image (texture, perspective, etc.), but not on the structural materiality of the image (interaction, computing, etc.).

I also figured, that formalizing image data is ridden with problems. For example, are colors and style mediated by emulators and needs to be reflected and considered. An emulator can change the produced image massively, for example by simulating old screens. Instead of exact color values, maybe color spaces would be preferable to analyze, i.e. the relation between the colors on screen.

Thoughts on The Philosophy of Software

Berry, David M. The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

The book went into many of the more profound questions that I had on the nature of computing. It did so through material that I was partially not familiar with, a lot of it being Heidegger’s phenomenology. Looking at my highlights, I have to say that I got a lot out of this reading, although it is way too much to write a coherent summary about. I will need to sift through the highlights and my notes, and at one point in my dissertation, read some of the more complex parts again. I have a hunch, that the book might hold important cues for my synopse.

What Sellars is trying to draw our attention towards is the contradiction within the two images, whereby the manifest image presents a world of flow, continuous and entangled experiences, and the scientific image postulates a world of discrete elements, particles and objects. [@berryPhilosophySoftwareCode2015]

A thought that I want to hold on for now is how code or computing retreats phenomenologically, while at the same time becoming a mediator between the scientific and the manifest image (Sears) through the computational image. Through its vicariousness, the computational can still have agency and to force us into its way of worlding. This highlights an interesting position for the video game developers that need to create software that mediates between the means of production (Vorhandenheit) and the player’s experience (Zuhandenheit, Dasein)1

This ongoing reflexion is helping me to become more specific on my intended Agenda. Recalling my current reasoning:

  1. Hunch: There isn’t enough fundamental thought and inquiry on the video game image in relation to its computational nature.2
  2. One possible answer for the lack of boundary-crossing inquiries could be the need of domain-specific knowledge. Here, I’d strive for a balance between the two domains, as found in Making the Water Move [@hutchisonMakingWaterMove2008].
  3. To get a better idea of this relation I look at early homebrew video game programming practices. I’m focusing on this specificity because the dominant discourse/conceptualization was still in flux3 and development is closer to the machine, meaning untainted by humanized video game development approaches.

Which results in the following four papers:

  1. Metadata, Imagedata and Videogame Graphics; The technical in the visual and vice versa, which tries to establish a distant viewing of the image corpus and the images’ relation to their means of production.
  2. Media theory/archaeology; Video game images in between player interfaces and narration, inquires how the visual image relates to Berry’s computational image through the application of FAVR on ported games.
  3. Conceptualizing graphics programming in the early 80ies; Analyzing means of production (hardware and programming languages) and distant reading source code through computational methods and visualizations.
  4. Case studies; Early homebrew video game development and the production of graphics, where I take a close look at a handful of early video games, bringing design research and critical code studies together.

Footnotes

  1. Translations of Heidegger’s Jargon ↩

  2. Needs proof; why would Birken and Bogost not be sufficient? ↩

  3. Also needs proof; how was programming actually conceptualized? ↩

Graph View

Backlinks