One of the characters in this 19th century novel by Arne Garborg imagines a future dinner party where the guests will have "screen tablets" where they can watch live broadcasts from the great stages of Europe: plays, ballets and operas from Paris, circus performances, a speech by Gladstone from the House of Commons in London, a concert from Berlin and so on. In the intermissions, the dinner guests will share their impressions of the different broadcasts they have chosen: one will be enraptured by Spanish dancers while another will be dying with appreciation of Gladstone's rhetoric.Â
Although this passage does not reference the digital and algorithmic machine vision technologies that are the central focus of this database, it is a fascinating example of how new visual technologies lead to new imaginaries of how that technology could be used.