In her essay Taking a line for a walk, from the Abbasid Caliphate to computer graphics, or, The Performativity of the Vector, Laura U. Marks uses examples from Islamic art to “show that an immanent Infinite is imaginable in contemporary society,” and suggests a number of ways in which “contemporary works of computer-based art may point toward this infinity.”
In the conclusion to her essay, Laura U. Marks wites:
If rhythm is connected to body and breath, then the temporality of computer media does not have a rhythm; or at best its rhythm is the perfectly regular beat of some internal timer. What comes along to shape and punctuate its tedious journey into the infinite? Only the materiality of software, hardware, programmers; only the imaginative effort of humans to compare numeric infinity with our own finiteness. The rhythm of computers seems to be measured by the giant On/Off of mortality. It is the human interventions that instill “breath” into software. While the latent rhythm of Islamic art, here in the privileged example of calligraphy, is doubly rhythmed by the body of the artist and the (divine) breath from beyond.
Yet some works of new media make manifest the latent movement of calligraphy, the breath that pulls the writing, vector-like, toward the goal of becoming. Animation, video, and new media, allow calligraphy to reveals its hidden inner life. For example, in Mounir Fatmi’s video Alphabet Rouge, in which calligraphy spins and transforms, unfolding new forms.
The inspiring example of Islamic art shows that an immanent Infinite is imaginable in contemporary society, and that contemporary works of computer-based art point toward this infinity.
Laura U. Marks / Taking a line for a walk, from the Abbasid Caliphate to computer graphics, or, The Performativity of the Vector
J. R. Carpenter’s note: Many of the early arcade games used vector graphics displays, as they were capable of displaying more detailed images than raster displays on the hardware available at that time. This means, instead of drawing the image by pixels, the image is projected by an electron beam, drawing lines like a laser show. Many vector-based arcade games used full-color overlays to complement the otherwise monochrome vector images. Other uses of these overlays were very detailed drawings of the static gaming environment, while the moving objects were drawn by the vector beam. Games of this type were produced mainly by Atari, Cinematronics, and Sega.
In the following video, the Jupiter 2 Arcade presents a tribute to classic (pre-1982) arcade vector graphics games:
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