Hidden Surface Problems: On the Digital Image as Material Object

This article offers a materialist critique of the digital image through a history of early computer graphics. Critiquing existing genealogies that understand computer generated images as the outgrowth of prior visual media forms, the author suggests that graphics offer us a uniquely computational image form, one concerned less with realism and mimesis than with delimiting the world through the black boxing of vision. Focusing on one of the most significant challenges to the field of computer graphics research from 1963–1979 – what is known as the ‘hidden-line’ or ‘hidden-surface’ problem – the article argues that the material logic of the digital image is not one of inscription but restriction, a making absent.