Photgrammetry 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, meaurement, 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 temporarlities - that lie between them. I argue that this kind of spatial photography discloses an alternate media trajectory set against the recent theoretical priveleging of first-person perspectives, focusing instead on the value or the allocentric (or 'other-centered') image.
More on the Speaker: Paul Roquet studies the use of media as personal technologies of perceptual and emotional self-regulation as an associate professor of media studies and Japan studies at MIT.
Sponsored by: The Institute for the Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, College of Arts and Letters.