Marey goes so far as to liken his mechanical instruments to“new senses of as-
tonishing precision”, by which he means not technical prostheses of human
senses, but properlymachinicsenses capable of sensing what remains to us im-
perceptible.The point of Marey’s work, as Synder repeatedly emphasizes, is
not substitution (of machinic senses for human senses):“machines”, he notes,
“can be constitutive of their own field of investigation”, or as Marey repeatedly
asserts, they can have their“own domain”.
What digital technology adds to this model of technically distributed sensa-
tion, when it becomes the technical basis for inscribing, analyzing and visualiz-
ing elements of our experience that we can’t directly experience, is a capacityto
temporally modulate our encounter with these imperceptible elements. This capacity is
related directly to the capacity of the digital to operate at more fine-grained
temporal intervals than previous media technologies, including chronophoto-
graphy, but this technical singularity of the digital does nothing to change the
basic structure of the human-machine coupling as Marey had already envi-
sioned it. Thus, our coupling to digital technologies still involves a coupling of
two autonomous systems: on the one hand, a computational media machine
that can, for example, inscribe, analyze, and visualize movements at temporal
scales that are simply unrecognizable to our natural perception; and, on the
other, an embodied human perceiver whose experience can be re-composed as
a result of the feeding back of what was imperceptible in perception into new
future-oriented present perception. Put another way, digital technology brings a
marked increase in the temporal granularity at which our experience can be
parsed, which is to say, a magnification of the scale of inscription, but it also
brings an unprecedented flexibility to our subsequent interaction with the ex-
perience it inscribes and analyzes as data. Rather than being bound by the form
of the still photograph or the cinematic moving image, the sensory output of the
computational media machine can range across a much wider temporal scale,
and can even animate and complexify the apparently frozen or fixed time-
frames of these earlier visualization platforms.
In the process of performing thevery same two operations of Marey’s chronopho-
tography–inscription, analysis and visualization, on the one hand, and pictorial
depiction, on the other–the computational media machine brings together the
quantitative and the qualitative, or better, deploys the results of its quantitative
processing to effectuate qualitative effects. And, again like Marey’s chronopho-
tographic machines, the computational media machine performs these two op-
erations consecutively and asynchronously, or, in other words, while maintain-
ing some minimal incompressible interval between the first perceptual
experience that yields the inscription and analysis of the imperceptible and a
second perception that folds this into the ongoing experience of the perceiver.
In sum, in digital media no less than in Marey’s chronophotography, what is
Digital Technics Beyond the“Last Machine” 57