A memory is a means for displacing in time various events which dependupon the same information.

—J. Presper Eckert Jr.

This pairing of the image and the screenis so natural that we rarely theorize the screen as a medium itself, one with aheterogeneous history that develops in parallel with other visual and computa-tional forms.2What then, of the screen? To be sure, the computer screen followsin the tradition of the visual frame that delimits, contains, and produces the image.

Despite the prevalence of screen technologies for televisual and cinematicimages, these could not be readily adapted for use with computational technologybecause computer graphics, unlike film and television, do not begin as images.7Rather, they begin as numerical data sets consisting of simple geometric primi-tives: coordinate points connected by vector lines to form simple wireframeobjects. As such, the first screens for computer graphics were adapted fromradar or oscilloscope tubes and modified to function as vector-based calli-graphic or random-scan displays.

More important, perhaps, the frame buffer revealsa material connection between image and memory in digital systems, offeringnew insights into the temporality of computation as a visually mediated prac-tice.

Missing is a larger discussion of the CRT as a technicalobject that functioned within a much broader media landscape, one whose significance is perhaps less cinematic than it is scientific or, at the very least, elec-tronic. Not only is the CRT the material object that makes possible the first fiftyyears of televisual images; it is the basis for a wide range of nonrepresentationalmedia built around the display and manipulation of electrical currents, the mostsignificant of which are cathode ray oscilloscopes like those used by Laposky.

As she shows, the grid can be found in the structure of maps, tablets, notation, type,and even in the network architecture of the modern Internet. The impulsebehind this genealogy is, in part, a refusal of the supposition that the grid is anexplicitly modern phenomenon, as Rosalind Krauss suggests in her 1979 essay“Grids.”34For Krauss the grid of modernist art is a pointed refusal of the natu-ralism that defined centuries of earlier artistic traditions. In contrast to earliervisual forms, the grid is “flattened, geometricized, ordered . . . anti-natural,antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature.”35Channeling Krauss, Higgins suggests “the modernist grid is an emblem of industry. It reflects standardization, mass production, and the newly smoothmechanics of transportation. In the modern imagination, in other words, thegrid pits culture against nature and the body.”36The raster grid of the computerscreen would appear to follow in this tradition, emblematic of the standardiza-tion of the image form by digitization.

As with Laposky’s Oscillons, these images could not be viewed in their entirety without the use of long exposure photography, which in a sense functioned as the memory of these early displays, separating the act of calculation from the process of representation. The amount of time each image took to be calculated depended largely on the complexity of the object, along with the desired resolution of the image.