“Light, when analysed by the prism, is seen to be made up of many colours, but there are three particular kinds of rays, red, green, and blue, which equally combine to produce white, and these correspond to the three fundamental colour sensations of Young’s theory.
“All the varied hues in Nature can therefore be obtained from mixtures in various proportions of the three simple colours, red, green, and blue; and if more or less of one or other of these colours be admitted, it is possible to produce every shade and every delicate graduation of colour.
“How, then, is the Ives colour photograph made? “By the aid of a special camera, fitted with an arrangement of mirrors, prisms, and light filters, three pairs of images of the object are thrown on the sensitised plate at the same time. One pair is made by the red and such other rays as excite the red sensation on the eye, all other rays being excluded from this pair of images from the filtration of the light through specially tinted glass and other transparent substances; another pair is made in the same way by the rays which excite the green sensation, and the third by the rays which excite the blue sensation.
“A pair of images of each colour, it may be explained in passing, is taken, so that in the viewing instrument-the Kromskop-the colour photographs may be observed with both eyes, and the picture consequently seen with the relief and perspective familiar to ordinary vision.
“The sextuple negative having been made and developed in the ordinary way, a photographic dry plate is put in contact with it, exposed to gas light for a few seconds, and developed in the usual manner. The positive when dry is cut into three parts, and mounted in a folding cardboard frame, thus forming the Kromogram.
“The three images of the Kromogram, which are similar in appearance to ordinary lantern slides, represent, by differences in their light and shade, the distribution and proportions of the three simple colours in the object photographed. These three transparencies, therefore, though themselves of no colour, form a true colour record, just as the wax cylinder of the phonograph, although emitting no sound itself, preserves the record of sound, and the Kinetoscope or Kinematograph ribbon contains the record of motion.
“The cylinder must be placed in the phonograph before the sound recorded can be reproduced, the ribbon with its myriad images must pass through the Kinetoscope in order to visually reproduce the moving scene, and in like manner the Kromogram must be seen in the Kromskop in order to reproduce in colour the object photographed, which it does so perfectly that all suggestion of photography vanishes, and the object itself, be it flowers, fruit, portrait, landscape, or a work of art, seems to be actually before the eyes.
“This wonderful effect, which must be seen to be fully appreciated, is obtained by an ingenious arrangement of mirrors and coloured glass screens in the Kromskop, so fitted that the three images, illuminated respectively by red, green, and blue light, are blended in such a way that the observer at the viewing lenses of the instrument sees the object in all its perfect reality of colour.
“Our illustrations show the form and general appearance of the Kromskop and of a Kromogram. In the larger representation of the Kromogram images, the upper pair shows the amount of red, the middle the amount of blue, and the lower Pair the Proportion of green, which combine to produce one of those brilliant iridescent blue Brazilian butterflies.
“There is no kind of colour which is not reproduced. in the Kromskop; the bloom of grapes, the velvet of the peach, the shiny red cheek of the apple are all faithfully rendered; while the iridescence of glass, the delicate shades of the opal or mother of pearl, the dull gleam of gold or silver, all of them tints most difficult to reproduce, are displayed with perfect naturalness. Nor will any colour recorded by the Kromskop ever fade. For time has no effect on the images of the Kromogram and light is always the same.
“No special scientific skill or tedious training is required in taking the colour photographs. The operation is as simple as ordinary photography, and the development is just the same. Some practice will, of course, be necessary, but any amateur who understands the art of photography will quickly acquire the skill to successfully carry through the new colour process.
“Before long there is every probability that the invention will be extended to life portraiture. The only obstacle at present to this development is the length of exposure required for port- raits-about a minute in a good light. Unfortunately but few mortals can keep perfectly still for so long a period as sixty seconds, but Mr. Ives is quite confident that sufficiently rapid plates can be prepared, and it will then be’ possible to have photographs of one’s family and friends in the true colours of Nature and in all the reality of life.
“The Kromskop and Kromograms can be obtained from the manufacturers, 121, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, but the camera is complicated, and will not be obtainable just yet. When certain difficulties in its construction have been overcome, simplifying its operation, and making it possible to produce the camera at a popular price, careful amateurs will be able to make their own colour photographs, and a new pleasure will at once be attainable by all who are familiar with ordinary photographic manipulation.”
Source: Pearson’s Magazine, December 1897
The Birth and Death of Memory
From Bruce Sterling
“The Birth and Death of Memory” from “The Future of Memory” Conference International Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies Republic of San Marino May 21-23, 1999
Hello, my name is Bruce Sterling, I am a writer and journalist from distant Texas. My speech today concerns “The Birth and Death of Memory.”
This part is the birth of my speech. Very soon, I promise you, we will have the death of my speech. In between, I hope to say something memorable.
So, let us begin with the birth of memory. When was memory born? I am a writer, I am not a neurologist.
My interest lies in forms of memory that can survive the death of the individual brain. Not memory within consciousness, but memory’s lasting traces in the physical world. In other words, symbols: Records. Archives. Language. Media.
Therefore, I re-phrase our question. When was media born?
The earliest physical evidence of symbolic records are found in bones. These prehistoric artifacts are prepared sections of animal bone, about the length of one’s hand. These bones have grooves cut into them.
These are deliberate, intentional, symbolic marks: long, careful rows of parallel cuts. Microscopic analysis of these cuts shows that they were not made all at once. They were not decorations. They were accounts.
These grooved bones are records. We do not know what they were recording. There have been many speculations, of course. They might be phases of the moon, astronomical records. They might be calendars, records of days passing. Perhaps they are economics: days spent in some kind of labor, or accounts of gifts, or accounts of services.
This is all theory.
All we know is that these notched bones are, by far, the longest-lived system of records that the human race ever created.
These bones were born about 100,000 years ago, and they died about ten thousand years ago. This bone technology was very widespread and successful.
Notched bones of this type have been found in prehistoric excavations all over the planet. The technology never advanced, and the technology never decayed. The notched bones always looked very similar, no matter where they were found.
This practice lasted ninety thousand years. This much is well-attested.
But were these bones were the true birth of media? I fear we underestimate our ancestors.
The bones are fossil media, but the fossil record is untrue to the past. Time does not preserve reality: time preserves only what time fails to destroy. The Stone Age left us a lot of evidence in stones, but this does not mean that stones were the core technology of the Stone Age. If you study the lives of contemporary Stone Age people, you soon come to realize that their world is not made out of stones.
T
heir world is made out of wood, bark, fiber, bone, shell, juices, poisons, toxins, drugs, thorns, hide, leather, string, skin, hair, fruit, seeds, roots, meat, and feathers. These are all organic materials. They rot easily, they decompose, they are very temporary. Time does not preserve them.
The very first records created by human beings probably did not survive. And what were these original physical records? Perhaps we can look to the apes.
An American scholar named Susan Savage-Rumbaugh studies the bonobo apes in the African Congo. These chimpanzees live in tribes of about a hundred apes. Every morning, the large tribe breaks up into small family groups, and they go out in the jungle to forage for food. They sometimes use primitive tools, such as the famous chimpanzee termite-stick.
Chimpanzees have also been known to use stones as tools. The small groups of apes separate all day, and they wander over many miles. At night, however, without fail, the small groups always gather together again, into the large tribe. But they do not gather where they started. No, they gather in a different place. The question then arises: how do the apes know where to go at night?
Susan Savage-Rumbaugh says that the answer is simple: the apes mark the trail. Certain trails, you see, are already written into the landscape through the passage of animal bodies. Animal trails are a proto-medium, a physical record of intents, and needs, and resources.
Even an ant knows that following a trail will lead you to something good and useful. Some animals can track each other through scent, but chimpanzees have a bad sense of smell.
So they mark the trail, they tear up the landscape. They bend and break branches, they tear off big leaves and place them carefully on the ground, to point the way they have gone.
The apes that follow read these symbols, and they follow them. So, these apes leave symbolic messages by deliberately changing the vegetation. Unfortunately for them, they’re not very good at it.
Bonobo chimpanzees have never gotten beyond the left bank of the Congo River. The other side of the Congo River is a lovely place, but they have never gone there.
The same might be said for a proto-human stock, the extinct species we call Homo habilis. The Homo habilis species never left the nurturing landscape of Africa. But another extinct species, Homo erectus, exploded out of Africa, and travelled all over the world. Homo erectus crossed rivers, explored over mountain ranges, crossed great plains and deserts.
You might ask how this pre-literate, pre-human group of animals managed this great feat of travel, which no previous ape could perform. Perhaps they were just hardier than other apes. Or perhaps, they knew where they were going. In Australia, pre-literate humans knew where they were going, because they had a system of marking trails.
These were the legendary “song-lines” of Australia, and they were set up in a very deliberate, very poetic fashion. Great chunks of bark would be ripped from trees, leaving huge scars on the tree. Or branches would be stripped of bark and tied together with strips of hide. After a few months, the branches would grow together permanently, creating an artificial, human-made sign in the natural landscape. With this system of signs came a system of poetry.
Children were taught to sing the landscape. When they understood the songlines, they could sing their way from landmark to landmark, over thousands of kilometers.
The passage of time would erase this medium. But it was still a communication system of great power, because it might allow small groups to migrate with purpose and intelligence, to a known destination.
Imagine that starvation is on the land, and that you, Homo erectus, know the songlines, but that Homo habilis, your older brother, does not know. Your advantage over him is spectacular; you will survive, he is doomed. Media becomes a matter of evolutionary life and death.
My suspicion, therefore, is that media was born about two and half million years ago. Media is much, much older than the human race. The thing I like about this media origin theory is its missing link. A marked trail is a missing link between unintentional marks, the tracks and trails that an animal body leaves naturally, as it moves through the landscape, and intentional symbols, a sign hacked into a tree, a human sign that is given a mythic, religious, poetic meaning.
We have no record of this theoretical prehuman medium. A marked trail is temporary by its nature, it could not survive the passing of its landscape. But prehistory has many such concepts, mostly unsupported by evidence. We have no record of the entity we call “protolanguage,” which is the theoretical state of language between the grunting and gestures of apes, and the human world of syntax and grammar.
But we believe in the concept of protolanguage anyway, because it’s very hard to believe that human grammar sprang up suddenly out of nothing at all. In today’s world, there is no such thing as a “primitive language.” Primitive people have extremely complex languages.
The only primitive languages we have belong to brain-damaged people. Or, to the spaces between established languages, the broken world of pidgins and creoles. Even a new-born pidgin, the halting two- word communications of refugees, conquered peoples and prisoners, cannot stay primitive.
In a generation at most, it becomes a creole, and in a few generations, it becomes a thriving mongrel vernacular, like English. The deep past is full of theoretical phantoms. Let us consider the imaginary language “Nostratic,” which is said to be the ancestral language stock of the Indo- European family of languages.
“Nostratic” is at least ten thousand years old, possibly much older. Interestingly, the marks of landscape seem to be preserved in Nostratic. Some of its root words seem to be involved with mountains, rivers and rushing streams, the paleolithic world of the south Caucasus and eastern Anatolia.
If media arose from attempts to mark the landscape, perhaps the Nostratic language, too, arose from attempts to name the things in one’s own immediate surroundings. To name the plants and animals is to know them. To know them, gives you the ability to use them, to survive. So perhaps we can say that languages of the Stone Age rose up from their region, that they grew there, like fine vintage wines.
A human language is a giant memory system, an intricate creation of millions of people, over thousands of years. Every human language has a regional version of reality. Each language cuts reality at some different angle. Even a humble dialect takes a chip from the broken stone of reality.
This brings us to the melancholy topic of the death of memory. Because across the world today, small, local languages are dying.
Along with the mass extinctions in the natural world, the postindustrial epoch is bringing us mass extinctions of languages. It is difficult to quantify what we are losing by this, but we are definitely losing something of importance.
People cheerfully die for the sake of their native language.
When a language has died, what have we lost? Some vital aspect of the memory of a people. My own native language is English, which is the great, globalized language primarily responsible for crushing all the other languages.
English crushes those languages under its feet, like grapes in a global tub. I know this is true. I admit it to you. I feel all the pain one feels at a sad event which causes one to benefit very much.
I am an author of English-language books, so every death of a small language suggests more readers for me. I would point put, however, that the noble Italian language is also far from guiltless in this regard.
Let me refer you to the very interesting and extremely morbid “UNESCO Red Book of Endangered Languages.” There are hundreds of dying languages around the world, so we will concentrate on Europe. UNESCO’s Red Book numbers 94 languages on the European continent.
Europe has forty-three Indo-European languages, twenty- five Finno-Ugrian languages, six Turkic languages, plus Kalmyk, Cypriot Arabic, Basque, Romani, seven Jewish creoles, and nine diaspora dialects. Fifty of these 94 European languages, more than half of them, are considered endangered languages by UNESCO.
Since I spe
ak in the ancient and honored Republic of San Marino, I must point out that the local language, “Emiliano Romagnolo,” is one of those endangered languages. Italy is crammed with endangered languages.
They are all being crushed like grapes by the televised Italian broadcasts of great media businessmen, like your former Prime Minister. It presents a great moral difficulty for an English speaker like myself to even publicly recite the names of these victim languages.
My Italian accent is so horrible that it will probably make this list of victim languages sound unintentionally comic.
But despite all this, as a gesture of respect, just to show that I am paying attention, let me publicly recite the names of: Cimbrian, Algherese Catalan, Provencal, Ladin, Friulian, Molise Croatian, Gallerese Sardinian, and the native tongue of San Marino, “Emiliano Romagnolo.”
English is not killing these languages. Italian is killing them. The mighty Italian language, the unifying force of a Group of Seven advanced industrial nation. I am not a linguist. I prefer engineering to syntax. If you looked at the paper I distributed to accompany this lecture, you will see that I am an amateur historian of media technology.
My interest in the subject of the death of memory came about through studying new media. Many of us here at this “Future of Memory” conference are deeply involved with new media, with historical databases, the social impact of television, digital libraries, information agents, and so forth.
The reason I myself am among you is that I discovered that no one was keeping track of the new media that did not work.
Everyone in the industry of creating new media wants to promote and sell new media, but most new media do not work. They fail and they die. They do not become the next dominant medium.
The Dead Media Notebook Page 64
