The Data Image Lab is pleased to host a talk by Jacob Gaboury (University of California, Berkeley) on May 2, 1.30 – 3.00 pm. The talk will be in person at WSA, 63 South/3003 (Seminar Room 7) and on Teams.

Jacob Gaboury is Associate Professor of Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in the seventy-year history of digital image technologies and their impact on our contemporary visual culture. His first book was published in 2021 with MIT Press, and is titled Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics.

Screens Shot: Mediating the Interactive Interface
The screenshot is arguably one of the most pervasive digital image forms today, a digital snapshot that documents the visual output of a computer and its operations both extraordinary and mundane. Screenshots are an important tool for the archiving of digital environments, and remain central to the visual methods of both film studies and art history. That said, the nature of the screenshot as a method for capture has transformed radically over the past fifty years. What began as an analog process of photographing a screen or display has become an entirely digital operation, produced by software and stored as files to be transferred, uploaded, shared, and archived. Yet across the many disciplines for which it is an essential tool, the screenshot as photo-object has gone largely unremarked, its complex genealogy collapsed into a single button: PrtScn. This talk will examine the history of the digital screenshot from its origins in computer graphics labs in the 1960s to contemporary methods for digital archiving and preservation, asking what this history tells us about the materiality of the digital and the ways in which visual artifacts efface the complexity of digital systems.

Please register your interest via the Registration link