Fireside Chat- Depth Effects: Dimensionality from Camera to Computation

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Thursday May 15th, 2025 at 7 PM ET

Virtual Event | Free

Join us this evening to learn about Brooke Belisle’s recent book Depth Effects: Dimensionality from Camera to Computation (UC Press, 2024). During an era where emergent, AI-driven techniques of computational visual culture seem to unsettle or break from long standing frameworks of photographic representation, Belisle explores how an alternative history of photography can reframe current practices of computational imaging seen in object recognition, depth mapping, and photogrammetry. Her talk will show how early experiments in photographic aesthetics offer unexpected resources for navigating current transformations in visual culture, thinking about ways we use images to capture the three-dimensional shapes of things, that portray the contours of embodied identity, and map the terrain of geographical space. Moving between historical and contemporary case studies, she will touch on recent artworks that explore problems and potentials of dimensionality in visual mediation.

Brooke Belisle is Associate Professor of Art History and Criticism in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University, where she is also affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Computational Science and the Alda Center for Communicating Science. Her first book, Depth Effects: Dimensionality from Camera to Computation (UC Press, 2024), connects emerging forms of computational imaging to aesthetic experiments in very early photography. Her current book project, Seeing Stars: Astronomical Media, traces changing techniques of visual mediation in the history of astronomy and astrophysics. Belisle studied 19th century visual culture as a fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia, and has also held fellowships from ACLS and the Getty. Her work can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of Critical Inquiry, LA+, and Photography and Culture.

Hosted by the Visual Culture Program