Superimposed, Still

Abstract

Superimposed, Still Kris Cohen (bio) A man in a white shirt and dark tie, microphone pressed to his upper lip, addresses a viewer, us, with his voice. But his eyes are focused on another task (Figure 1). Superimposed on his face is the text that, somehow, we know to be the focus of his work: "statement one: word word word …," with "word" repeated another ten times followed by an ellipsis. The image I'm describing is a still, an extract. This particular still superimposes two video feeds that are themselves intricately mediated: the first image results from pointing a video camera, at very close range, at a small circular calligraphic monitor that hosts the text ("word word word …"); the second results from angling another camera, also at very close range, up at the face of the computer user as he himself stares into a terminal networked to a time-sharing computer. On that terminal, the user, the man in a tie, sees the same text that we see superimposed on his face. The effect is strange, estranging. It is also an invitation. Such a still doesn't freeze or extract; it agitates the proceedings. What it agitates in these two particular video feeds is their aspiration to establish a space for living, dwelling, working that was to be a training in a style of personhood. Computational personhood is one kind of shorthand for the style I want to describe. But whiteness is another, a racial whiteness constituted less as an identity and more as a possibility, an aptitude, an attitude made possible in and as the graphical screen that Douglas Engelbart here demonstrates. Superimposition names the video technique that made the demonstration both illustrative and a marvel. But it will also turn out to be a better name for the infrastructure provided to whiteness by the graphical screen being demonstrated, one that no longer relies on a politics of representation so much as a graphics of superimposition. [End Page 163] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Still image, from Douglas Engelbart's demonstration of the oN-Line System (NLS) at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference, San Francisco, CA, December 9–11, 1968. That some readers will already know too much about the event that I'm describing while some will have no idea what I'm referring to is itself telling of the particular kind of oblivion into which Engelbart's demonstration of an early graphic computer interface has fallen: both too historicized and not enough. The effect of the superimposition is therefore a strange amalgam. The temptation will be to see it as an allegory, the user superimposed into the new graphicalized field of a computer terminal—an allegory of capture, say, or conscription. But the effect is actually more literal than allegorical. The story I want to sketch briefly, with the still as historical agitator, has to do with how this graphical space generates the racial constitution of the personal computer user. The still is from the demonstration that Engelbart and his team performed for an audience in 1968.1 As described on the website of the [End Page 164] Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a funder of Engelbart's work, "Engelbart's terminal was linked to a large-format video projection system loaned by the NASA Ames Research Center and via telephone lines to a [Scientific Data Systems] 940 computer (designed specifically for time-sharing among multiple users) 30 miles away in Menlo Park, California, at the Augmentation Research Center, which Engelbart founded at SRI [the Stanford Research Institute]. On a 22-foot-high screen with video insets, the audience could see Engelbart manipulate the mouse and watch as members of his team in Menlo Park joined in the presentation."2 White button-up shirt, dark tie, the insinuation that a sports jacket has recently been removed—this human figure is superimposed on or into the field of the computer screen (whether on or into, it is in the nature of the graphical screen to render all prepositions inadequate). That field is in some ways most remarkable for its blankness, the fact that there is almost nothing in it, including...