Page 9 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 9/146
John Benjamin Dancer: Microphotographic Daguerreotypes 1839.
Although Dancer was inventing these daguerreotypes (micrographs - that could only be viewed prop-
erly with a microscope) as early as 1839, and although he developed his technique during the 1840s,
and adopted the Scott Archer Wet Collodion plate instead of the Daguerreotype after 1851, his dis-
covery of the 160:1 reduction ratios (that he achieved back then) was not applicably relevant in 1839.
Despite this, the real value of the microphotograph - or microfilm as it became known - was not real-
ised until the 20th century, and the massive increase in the importance of documentation and docu-
ment-processing as the mechanisation of industry progressed. (Although in 1859, Rene Dagron had
patented an application of microfilm that was used as a method of compressing military correspond-
ence during the Franco Prussian War 1870-1871). The next big breakthrough came in 1925 when the
banker George McCarthy patented the Checkograph - a microfilm-based technology that recorded
and archived bank records, cheques and receipts. After this Emmanuel Goldberg (then boss of the
lens company Zeiss Ikon) invents his Statistical Machine - a photo-electric sorter for microfilm/mi-
crofiche (sheets of related microfilms), and the gradual integration of image-based micro-storage and
information processing and retrieval technology began.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Benjamin_Dancer
So the ‘expansion’ of photography begins with an invention that eventually - in the form of microfilm -
would play an important role in the development of ‘hypermedia’ - the electronically linked, interactive
form of information compression and storage - that was seen from the 1920s to the 1960s as the solu-
tion to the ‘information explosion’ of printed documentation in the mid- 20th century. Microfilm is the
basic medium upon which the American computer scientist Vannevar Bush based his thought exper-
iment of Memex - a ‘memory-extension’ storage, retrieval and browsing technology that he developed
in the mid-1940s, and described in his 1945 article: As We May Think (Atlantic Monthly 1945). https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
This is the art-design-science-technology information-vector that most concerns me - in this and oth- er Expanded Arts books, and in websites apps like my mediainspiratorium (https://mediainspiratorium.com/), mediaartinnovation (https://mediartinnovation.com/), and julia margaret cameron secession (https://juliamargaret- cameronsecession.wordpress.com/tag/julia-margaret-cameron/), - through all these media, and in my film ZeitEYE (ht-
tps://vimeo.com/372445421), my books: Understanding Hypermedia (1993), The Cyberspace Lexicon (1994),
Futurecasting Digital Media (2001), I have tried to situate the emergence of the form and content of new media within the kind of 21st networked broadband media-ecosystem we now enjoy.