This document summarizes the history and techniques of different screen and printing technologies, including: - Woodcuts, mezzotints, aquatints, and etching which were early intaglio printmaking techniques. - Lithography which works by the repulsion of grease and water, originally using limestone plates. - Techniques like halftone printing which used screens to translate photographs into patterns of dots for print reproduction. - Early screen technologies like cathode ray tubes, LCD screens, and digital light projection used in modern displays. It provides details on the technical processes and histories of these various media to trace the "archaeology of screen technologies."

1. sean cubitt • donau-krems
Archaeology of screens

2. Attributed to Albrecht Dürer, 1488, woodcut, “The Pilgrim”3

3. Albrecht Dürer, intaglio print, The Kinight, Death and the
Devil, 1514

4. Young Woman Holding a Candle in a Bedchamber
Nicholaas Verkolje (Dutch, 1673–1746) after Godfried Schalcken (Dutch,
1643–1706)
Published by Gerard Valck (Dutch, 1651/2–1726)
Mezzotint; Image: 10 5/8 x 9 in. (29 x 23.4 cm)
Credited to the English Prince Rupert, ex-
iled as a result of the English Civil War, in
the late 1650s, mezzotint is a process for pre-
paring engravers' plates by use of a rocker
whose surface is spiked with emery or other
textures sharp enough to pierce the wax. By
rocking into the surface, the plate acquires a
mass of pittings sufficient to hold ink which,
when printed, produce surfaces of vary-
ing densities of dots and scars. Pressure,
duration and direction of rocking the tool
produce a variety of effects from a scarcely
visible tone to near-black areas.This ground
of tiny marks which hold the ink can then be
'scraped', burnished to stop the ink holding,
so reversing the familiar process by which
engravers and etchers moved from light to
dark.The plate can then be treated with en-
graving, etching or drypoint to add further
effects.While producing remarkable effects
of light and darkness, mezzotint is notorious-
ly difficult to ink, and the shallow markings
on the plates are soon worn
THE GRID

5. Goya - El sueño de la razón, (The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters), from
Los Caprichos 1799 (detail)
A very similar effect is secured by a
different method, introduced to Europe
around 1768 and often ascribed to Jean-
Baptiste Le Prince, aquatints, the me-
dium much favoured by Goya. Here the
ground is prepared by dusting it with
rosin which is heated to make it bond
to the plate.Then the plate is bathed in
acid, which etches tiny circles around the
grains of rosin, creating teeth which will
hold ink. Areas of the plate that are to
remain blank can be treated with tar or
varnish, which protects that area from the
rosin dust.The result is a fine textured
ground whose ink-holding capacity is a
function of the strength of the acid and
the duration of the bath.The acid may
be painted onto the plate in the process
known as spit-biting, to limit the textured
surface to restricted zones on the plate,
In a variation, the tinted areas can be
rubbed with soap, which is acid-resistant
but tends to bubble, so creating visibly
uneven textures.

6. Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-1828)
Tour du gros horloge, Évreux Lithograph, 331mm x 245mm
(detail of clockface on next page)
Lithography works on the principle of the mu-
tual repulsion of grease and water. Originally
working on stone (whence the etymology, from
the Greek lithos, stone), specifically a particu-
lar Bavarian limestone, the artist drew with a
greasy crayon, then wet the surface. A greasy
ink would then adhere to the marked areas but
be repelled by the water, and paper could then
be printed from the ink sticking to the drawn
parts. From the 1830s zinc plates substituted for
the stone, which became increasingly rare, and
from the 1890s aluminium sheets were used.
Modern lithography adds another process: af-
ter drawing, the plate is washed ('etched') with
an emulsion of gum arabic in dilute nitric acid
to fill the undrawn areas of the plate, the origi-
nal drawing is removed with lithographer's tur-
pentine, leaving a salt layer deposited by the
etching materials which attracts water, which
in turn repels the ink, which is trapped in the
unsalted, originally drawn areas.

8. I find that Seagull Grade 4 gives me a better print of my Frozen Lake and
Cliffs than I was ever able to get on Agfa Brevita Grade 6, and the tone is
magnificent.This is one of those significant early negatives (c. 1932) that
must be considered quite poor in quality and very difficult to print.The
negative contains enough information to yield an acceptable print with
great effort, and I continue to improve the 'salvage' printing as best I can
(Adams 1983: 50).

9. It was his practice,when conditions allowed or demanded,to use a spot meter,an exposure meter callibrated to sample light from a one de-
gree arc (as opposed to the 20 or 30 degrees of arc of a normal exposure meter).The spot meter could be placed much closer to objects than
the camera to get a specific sample of the light.The apparent value of light is as much a product of mental activity as of perception:the brain
compensates for light-levels,seeing a white sheet of paper as 'white' regardless of whether it is in shade or full sun.Cameras do not have such
equilibrating brains,and 'see' only what is there before them.The spot meter disregards the eye'-brain system,and instead emulates the reac-
tion of the correspondingly small area of the exposed film.rather like the way Impressionist painters ignored their learned habits of colour and
applied themselves to seeing and copying the colour in fragments of the scene in front of them,the spot meter ignores everything about the
scene to be imaged except the value of the light immediately in front of it,abstracting from it a measurement of brightness.

10. William Henry Fox Talbot, Latticed
Window at Lacock Abbey, photogra-
vure, 1835

11. William Henry Fox Talbot:
Samples of Lace, 1839

12. Stephen H. Horgan, Steinway Hall, NewYork Daily Graphic,
December 2, 1873: first prited halftone photograph.
when in 1855 Alphonse Louis Poitevin discovered that
bichromated yellow gelatine reacted to light by hard-
ening, the way was open for large-scale printing from
individual photographs and their truly mass circulation
embedded in print media like magazines. Relief print-
ing methods involved exposing the gelatine (and sub-
stitutes including treated albumen and fish glue) to the
negative, etching out the unexposed areas and inking
the raised surfaces.The halftone process interposes
a screen between the original and a new photograph
of it, giving the effect of a grid of dots of varying size,
depending on the depth of the tone.This process adds
more tonal variation, although to get good greys re-
quires such fine dots that they can only print to the best
chalk-faced art paper, whence the relative crudity of
newspaper reproductions compared to those in expen-
sive magazines and books. (Indeed visible grain re-
mains a major signifier of factual status, for example in
images drawn from CCTV or paparazzi telephoto snaps
of celebrities). Early screens were made of woven tex-
tiles, and had some of the roughness of mezzotint: rapid
industrialisation lead to the use of finely-lined glass
plates, which organised the dots into regular rectilin-
ear grids, in part to help them work with transmission
technologies.

13. Bell Labs Wirephoto, first commercial transmission, NewYork 1935

15. John Logie Baird,
experimental 23-line vertical
scan television transmission
1927, featuring Stooky Bill.
1993 reconstruction by David
Hall.

16. Baird Televisor, schematic and demonstration prototype,

17. The Quatermass Experiment, BBC TV, 1953, dir Rudolph Cartier, scr Nigel Kneale

18. Cathode Ray Tube
Trinitron Mask

19. LCD sub-pixel

21. Digital light projection

22. DMD Digital Micromirror device

23. uncompressed series of frames
same series showing selected chang-
ing areas to be transmitted between
keyframes
keyframe keyframeblocks / macroblocks/GoBs
How Codecs Work

24. The resolution of each chroma component in a macroblock
(Cr and Cb) is half that of the luminance (luma) compo-
nent. Each chroma block is partitioned in the same way as
the luma component, except that the partition sizes have
exactly half the horizontal and vertical resolution (an 8x16
partition in luma corresponds to a 4x8 partition in chroma;
an 8x4 partition in luma corresponds to 4x2 in chroma; and
so on).The horizontal and vertical components of each mo-
tion vector (one per partition) are halved when applied to
the chroma blocks.
Example: Figure 2-3 shows a residual frame (without mo-
tion compensation).The AVC reference encoder selects
the “best” partition size for each part of the frame, i.e. the
partition size that minimizes the coded residual and motion
vectors.The macroblock partitions chosen for each area
are shown superimposed on the residual frame. In areas
where there is little change between the frames (residual
appears grey), a 16x16 partition is chosen; in areas of de-
tailed motion (residual appears black or white), smaller
partitions are more efficient.
Iain E G Richardson, (2003), H.264 / MPEG-4 Part 10 White Paper :
Prediction of Inter Macroblocks in P-slices
Vector Prediction

26. genealogy of screen technologies
DLP
trinitron
mask
cathode
ray
tube
drum
scanner
wireleles
photo
half-tone
photo
printing
lithographyaquatintmezzotint
etching
(intaglio)
woodcut

27. archaeology of screen technologies
DLP
trinitron
mask
cathode
ray
tube
drum
scanner
wireless
photo
half-tone
photo
printing
lithographyaquatintmezzotint
etching
(intaglio)
woodcut
silk-screen
(serigraphy)
Linocut
jacquard
loom
difference
engine

28. Memento Mori, Guiseppe. Part of a bound collection of Italian (reverse image) copperplate engravings, Italy, c. 1700. © Collection Werner Nekes

29. typing pool

31. Ø
For Miller, the non-identical zero is not just an analogy:
it is the excluded figure that speaks and is spoken to in
logical discourse.The subject both exists and does not
exist, just as zero is represented by one (or indeed, as
he puns, by the symbol ø, the empty set). In Lacan, lan-
guage is representation.What is represented is not pre-
sent in language,but only re-presented.The subject is no
exception: it is only presented, never present.The sub-
ject is absent from language: as a kind of zero, by anal-
ogy with Miller’s argument about logic, its exclusion
actually causes language.The purpose of language is
to speak the subject which started it”, each new signi-
fier adding another ‘plus 1’ to the chain in an attempt to
control, and perhaps to conclude the attempt to make
the subject whole again.This leads Lacan to argue, in a
phrase repeated by almost all the authors involved in
suture theory,‘a signifier represents a subject for an-
other signifier’.This, as Heath is at pains to describe,
is the obverse of the more familiar statement ‘a signi-
fier represents something for a subject’. As an effect of
language, the ‘something’ that is represented by a sig-
nifier is the subject to whom it is addressed.Therefore
the subject is present in language after all. For Miller
this contradictory condition is the basis of suture: a
flickering in and out of existence which is managed
through the succession of signifiers in the unfolding of
language.

32. vector