My submission to the Georgia Tech Salon on vision (2011). Initiated by Barbara Maria Stafford, the Georgia Tech Salon aimed to collect various projects from around the institution dealing with some interpretation of a theme; in 2011 that theme was vision.

At the time, I was researching the Transportation Security Administration’s advanced imaging technology (AIT) for a paper/presentation at 4S. As AIT is a technology of vision, I became fascinated with how and what AIT saw rather than what it allowed us to see (this distinction is rather mirky I will admit). Picking 30 patent documents (1 per year for 30 years) from the same category as AIT (G01N-23/20), I focused on how these patent documents came to “see” the world, that is, how they became documents of world. The project addresses the question of “What does a patent see?” through 15 metrics of that are gleaned from the patent document. Admittedly, the questions are not typical of patents or even interesting on the outset (I certainly heard this criticism). The point was not to understand patents and vision in terms of what I thought patents or vision was or is, but to parse through the documents on their own terms. What this means is the subject of the patent could only be a portion of the questions.

The result is a looped video which shows static and dynamic graphics of the metrics used to understand the patents.