There is no doubt that the process of visualization has been going through radical changes in the last decasde. WHere once technologies such as photography and cinema determiend what it meant to “see” an image, no imagine technologies such as computer-generated and -enhanced animation, firtual reality (VR), infra-red sensing, satellige imagine, telepresence etc., are significantly altering the nature of imaging, of “seeing,” and of observing. These technologies are more than just chapters in the continuing development of high-tech research and production structures. They represent an important process of organizing knowledge across political and cultural sites in society, including the military, industry, the media apparatus, and consumer culture.

It we are to understand VR and other significant imaging technologies as involving lhe application and organization of new bodies of knowledge, it is necessary to examine historically relevant paradigms of vision and representation; that is, It is important to note the similarities and differences between nineteenth· and twentieth-century understandings ol physiological vision and emerging late twentieth-century forms of visual representation. My purpose in this paper is to develop a fuller sense of where VR finds ils cultural, aesthetic, and reptesentational antecedents.

In his study of lhe camera obscura in La dioptrique (1637). Rene Descartes makes a significant break with previous studies of this optical apparatus. While an analogy between the pr000$ses of the human eye and the camera ot,scura was often made by ear[‘er observers. Descartes demonstrates a more pragmatic connection by ”taking the dead eye of a newly dead person (or faifing 1hat, the eye of an ox or some other large animal)” and u:sing it as a lens for the camera obsrura.1 As Jooalhan Crary indicates, the significance of this hypolhetical experiment cannot bo underestimated: By thisr adk;;ad!i sjunctiono f ey&f romo b$e-r,ear nd its instat1a1iionn t11i$ lorrnala pparatuso f Obfeetlvree, :i,esontatiotnhe, dead. pemaps evenb Ovlnee ye undergoesa klnd or apo1he0Saisn d ftses to an inoorporeaSl1 a1us,2 Sy this ‘“radical” act, a distinctfy organic and mortal object-lhe human eye-is decisively abstracted trom lhe physical body and associated solely wllh vision and the prooess ot seeing,. This conceptual abstraction provides the foundation lor a set of assumptions and a body of knowledge that make possible an entirely new model or seeing, tepresen1atlon, and Illusion, whethe( mechanical, computer-gonorated. or neural•physiological. The experiments ol Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the physiological nalu(e of color and Jan Evangeli$ta PuOOnje’s experiments with afterimages a(e two examples of the paradigm shift from vision understood as an objective act to vision that is understood as a process relian1 on a physiological base of knowledge. The science of physiological vision resulted, among other things, in lhe identification of persistence of vision, an effect first identified in tho experiments of Purkinje and Goethe, among others, and suggesled directly by the English·Swiss physician Peter Mark Roget in 1824.3 The principle established by these experiments is that vision physiology is temporal. That is, the exposure of the retina to images results in certain after effects. which are more or less pronounced depending upon specific conditions. This principle allowed for the development of such entertainment devices as the phenakistiscope. zootrope. thaumatrope. and stereoscope. Considering the initial similarities between VR and the stereoscope-for ex.ample,t heir p,od1.1etioonf Illusory 3-0 effects, and their marketing as entertainment devices-1he stereoscope is a particularty useful technology to analyze and contrast with VR in O(der to develop a historically specific description of Jhe tatter. I do not wish to suggest that the stereoscope is the technical precursor of YR. On the contrary: I wish to present an alternative to a delermlnislic view of 1echno1ogy thal holds that one technology dlreclly leads to another without being influenoed by existing conditions of cultural production and polttloal requirements. The original development of the stereoscope was a resutt of scientific research. The phenomenon of binocular disparity-the problem that we see ono coherent visual field composed somehow by twO disparate points of view, one for each eye-was identified during the period of increasing scientific study of human physiology in general and vision physiology in particular around 1820-1840. The British scientist Charlos Wheatstone decided to explore the binocular phenomenon by devising an apparatus that could present two disparate images in a controlled manner. His apparatus allowed for lho presentation of sepatate images ro each eye and for the control of angles ot presentation and tocus distance. In this way the device rep(oduces the anatomical pcsitioning of the eyes and the way they reference an image in space. By mimicking the physiological effect or ocular convergence Wheatstone’s stereoscope was designed to facilitate further study of the nature of binocular disparity. However, the mechanical reproduction of the physiological account of binocular disparity also suggests a desire to control the phenomenon. The Wheatstone stereosoope thus raises the problem of the relationship between humans (the vision system) and machines (Ille stereoscope). In the late twentieth c,entury other technosc-ientific concerns have come to the fore. Unlike the stereoscope. VR technology only peripherally raises issues of t.he workings of vision physiology. Instead, it is caught up with questions of how info(mation is accessed, managed, and represented in the compuler age. VR is being developed as