# The Practice of Light [[Sean Cubitt]] [Citation Link](https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9138.001.0001) *Cubitt, Sean. The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels. MIT Press, 2014.* ## Description Traces a genealogy of dominant twenty-first-century visual media — digital video, film, photography — back through a history of materials and practices beginning with intaglio printing and oil painting. Attending to the specificities of inks and pigments, cathode ray tubes, colour film, lenses, screens, and chips, Cubitt argues that visual technologies form a centuries-long project aimed at controlling light, tracking a shift from a hierarchical visual culture organized around semantic value toward a more democratic but value-free numerical commodity. Structurally, the book builds from the invisibility of black through line, surface, volume, and space. ## Key Tags #media-archaeology #film-theory #vision #optics ## Key Passages %% none yet %% ## Notes by Chapter %% Reading notes pending a full pass against the text; chapter structure follows the book's progression from black/line to surface, volume, and space. %% ## Details %% none yet %% ### Concepts and Theories - [[Media Archaeology]] - traces optical/visual technologies across a long historical genealogy in a comparable media-archaeological mode - [[Vision]] - central concern with how technologies of light construct and condition seeing ### Creative and Technical Practices %% none yet %% ### Related Individuals - [[Sean Cubitt]] - author ## References ### Cited In - [[Sean Cubitt]]