Raster Nostalgia

When I came across the following description, I was reminded of the days when raster images took a while to appear on screen -- line by line.

I recall the afternoon in the archive when I first unfolded one of the large format plates interleaved perpendicularly into a copy of The Natural History of Jamaica (1725) by the British physician Hans Sloane and watched a palm tree grow sideways out of the book. This fantastic remnant of the dream enterprise of colonization takes the form of a condensed surprise. To swing open this relatively gigantic plate is to be confronted by the sensation of mixed emotion, the complicity of pleasure and disgust. To unfold the palm tree plate is to be confronted by the materializing aesthetic prospect of palms forcibly proliferated to signify boundary and property in their use as “natural fences” and its enfolding with conflicting dreams for the production of a paradise in the tropics, and countercolonial knowledges and practices not entirely contained by the textual and planting apparatus of imperial landscaping.

from Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization by Jill H. Casid

And so for day 1607
08.05.2011