Jacob Gaboury - An Archaeology of Computer Graphics

This book is the product of many years, and the work and collaboration of countless people, communities, and institutions. It has benefited, first and foremost, from the patience and enthusiasm of mentors who saw this project through its earliest iterations nearly a decade ago. I would like to thank Alexander Galloway for pushing me to make big claims, Lisa Gitelman for ensuring those claims had substance, Mara Mills for her guidance and foresight, and the support and investment of Jussi Parikka and Timothy Lenoir. I am truly lucky to have had the opportunity to work with and learn from the incredible intellectual community that is the NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, whose faculty and students remain my advisers, colleagues, and friends.

That this project was allowed the time and resources to mature is thanks largely to the support of key research fellowships and archives, which provided critical funding and through which I presented early chapter drafts that challenged my own disciplinary preoccupations. My first trip to the University of Utah was made possible through the ACM History Fellowship, and subsequent trips were supported by the IEEE Life Members Fellowship in Electrical History. At Utah, I benefited from the guidance of an incredible group of archivists in the J. Willard Marriott Library Special Collections, including Elizabeth Rogers, Lorraine Crouse, Krissy Giacoletto, Sara Davis, and Molly Rose Steed. Work in the Carl Machover Papers at the Charles Babbage Institute was supported by the Adelle and Erwin Tomash Fellowship in the History of Information Technology, where Jeffrey Yost and Thomas Misa helped guide me through the collections and pushed the project in new directions. Access to the National Museum of American History and the Air and Space Museum were made possible through a Lemelson Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution, where Eric Hintz and Paul Ceruzzi offered invaluable guidance. I would also like to thank David Brock at the Computer History Museum and Henry Lowood at Stanford University for their invaluable assistance in navigating their institutional archives and collections.

The first draft of this project was completed in Lneburg, Germany, during a transformative fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation with Martin Warnke and Claus Pias. A final chapter was added during a research fellowship at the Internationales Kolleg fr Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie in Weimar, Germany, alongside an incredible group of fellows, and with the expert guidance of Bernhard Siegert and Lorenz Engell. The proposal for this book was completed during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where Lorraine Daston, David Sepkoski, and an amazing community of historians pushed me to consider a much broader view of the history of science and the place of computer graphics within it. That proposal is likewise indebted to the care and attention of Raiford Guins and Henry Lowood, whose feedback and advice transformed what was a vague plan into a complete and legible project. An early draft of the final manuscript benefited greatly from a University of California Humanities Research Institutes manuscript workshop fellowship, and the patience and sage advice of Patrick LeMieux, Patrick McCray, Colin Milburn, Rita Raley, and Fred Turner in tweaking, nudging, and totally reworking key elements of what would become this book. Finally, I would like to thank Doug Sery, Noah Springer, my three anonymous reviewers, and the editorial team at the MIT Press for carrying this project through its final stages. Their patience and support made this work possible, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to work with them.

I often tell graduate students that much of their professional career will be learning to confidently perform a series of tasks for which they have not been trained and might never be asked to perform againa near impossible task without the guidance of horizontal communities of practice and care, without which none of this would have been possible. To the media slackers: Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux, Laine Nooney, David Parisi, and Carlin Wing, your friendship means the world to me. To the Critical Media Forms Working Group, whose annual media aesthetics workshops refined nearly all of what follows: Brooke Belisle, Stephanie Boluk, Kris Cohen, James Hodge, Patrick Jagoda, Patrick Keilty, Patrick LeMieux, and Scott Richmond, thank you. I would also like to thank my students and colleagues at Stony Brook University and the University of California at Berkeley for the train rides, writing groups, happy hours, and phone calls that supported me and my work as I navigated the challenges and complexities of academe.

Finally: to my familyBeth, David, Bryse, Hannah, and Keith. And for Keehnan, who makes everything possible.