Depth Effects - by Brooke Belisle

About the Book

"In this bold rewriting of visual culture, Brooke Belisle uses dimensionality to rethink the history and theory of media aesthetics. With Depth Effects, she traces A.I.-enabled techniques of computational imaging back to spatial strategies of early photography, analyzing everyday smartphone apps by way of almost-forgotten media forms. Drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Belisle explores depth both as a problem of visual representation (how can flat images depict a voluminous world?) and as a philosophical paradox (how do things cohere beyond the limits of our view?). She explains how today's depth effects continue colonialist ambitions toward totalizing ways of seeing. But she also shows how artists deploy dimensionality to articulate what remains invisible and irreducible"--

Book Synopsis

In this bold rewriting of visual culture, Brooke Belisle uses dimensionality to rethink the history and theory of media aesthetics. With Depth Effects, she traces A.I.-enabled techniques of computational imaging back to spatial strategies of early photography, analyzing everyday smartphone apps by way of almost-forgotten media forms. Drawing on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Belisle explores depth both as a problem of visual representation (how can flat images depict a voluminous world?) and as a philosophical paradox (how do things cohere beyond the limits of our view?). She explains how today's depth effects continue colonialist ambitions toward totalizing ways of seeing. But she also shows how artists stage dimensionality to articulate what remains invisible and irreducible.

From the Back Cover

"Brooke Belisle has written an intellectually ambitious, theoretically expansive, and methodologically persuasive book that not only reframes but also models the micro and macro aspects of the technologies, aesthetics, and practices of computational visual culture."--Vivian Sobchack, author of The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience

"In one brilliant analysis after another, Belisle details how the computationally produced grids, portraits, and maps of contemporary technical visual culture have interposed vast new layers of racialized abstraction between embodied viewers and the world; and she reintroduces all the 'other landscapes that remain to be seen.' Required reading."--Laura Wexler, Charles H. Farnam Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University

"Depth Effects offers a shimmeringly prismatic look at how imaging technologies past and present--from the photographic portrait to augmented reality--render the dimensional world and reveal our vantage point within it. Belisle trains our attention on the sutured and superimposed lenses and screens through which we behold ourselves and one another."--Shannon Mattern, Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies and History of Art, University of Pennsylvania

"Depth Effects is an important book. Belisle's scholarship is superb, her prose stylish and accessible, and her arguments offer critical resources for not only rethinking the 'photographic basis' of cinema and digital media, but also elaborating the computational."--Scott Richmond, Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology, University of Toronto

"Lucid and convincing, Depth Effects crafts a counter-history of photography that centers multi-perspectival capture rather than the singular, monocular still. This reframing offers a new perspective on computational aesthetics and identifies critical potentials of contemporary art."--Kris Paulsen, author of Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface

"Full of marvels! Inventively constructed and rigorously argued, Depth Effects offers an invaluable history of our photographically saturated present. Belisle articulates the computational ground of contemporary photography as routed through nineteenth-century technologies and aesthetics."--James J. Hodge, author of Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art

"Depth Effects is a critical and necessary corrective to how we think about contemporary visual culture--computer vision algorithms shaping the future of AI and smartphone modes that both evoke and shatter photographic aesthetics. Essential reading for anyone interested in the long history of digital images."--Jacob Gaboury, author of Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics

"Elegantly conceived and beautifully written, Depth Effects combines the technical precision of the best media studies with the formal precision of the best art history. Moving past discourses of index and ideology, it considers distinctively twenty-first-century logics of display, value, and racial subjectivity."--Kris Cohen, author of Never Alone, Except for Now: Art, Networks, Populations

Review Quotes

"Depth Effects presents a solid addition to the current literature on visual media studies, offering extensive theoretical depth, historical breath, and heightened awareness of aesthetic potential. Especially noteworthy is its comprehensiveness, which implies neither closure nor a definite conclusion; instead, the book extends an invitation to explore the many sides of other in/visible landscapes that Belisle has disclosed."-- "Film Quarterly"

"This scholarship illuminates a deeper understanding of dimensional aesthetics, computational imaging, and how we see and experience the world through photographic representation. It is, in my opinion, a triumph in the field of visual culture studies."
-- "Visual Materials Section of the Society of American Archivists"

About the Author

Brooke Belisle is Associate Professor of Art at Stony Brook University.