Old College, The University of Edinburgh
17-20 September 2003
ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS BY KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
[Click on name below to view abstract]
John Bender & Michael Marrinan
A delicate eye surgery conducted with computer-assisted reality offers a graphic
example of a convergence of dissimilar data in which both surgeon and patient
have placed immense trust. This trust does not develop because they believe
that the doctor sees the eye more completely in a digital display helmet than
with his naked eyes, but because this is the most functional way to ignore unimportant
qualities while tracking with great accuracy minute changes in the scalpel's
position. In this sense, the doctor's digitized data-stream is not a description
of the patient's eye but a diagram of it.
Between the so-called "classical" period of the late seventeenth
century and the middle of the nineteenth century, diagrams were increasingly
adapted to represent complex processes uncovered by scientific investigations
or instantiated by mechanical inventions. Was this an accident? We argue that
the hybrid visual attributes of diagrams facilitated their migration to such
complex tasks of representation. Diagrams, by proliferating discrete packets
of dissimilar data, may be apprehended in series or from several vantage points.
This disunified field of presentation--ruptured by shifts in scale, focus, or
resolution--provokes seriated cognitive processes demanding the user's active
correlation of information. We emphasize this potential for process--both cognitive
and historical--implicit in the types of visual configurations usually called
diagrams.
Diagrams have existed for centuries. Our point is neither to write that long
history nor to devise an all-inclusive, trans-historical definition. Nonetheless,
we do attend to some of the formal characteristics of diagrams: reductive renderings,
usually executed as drawings, using few if any colors, generally supplemented
with notations keyed to explanatory captions, with clusters correlated by means
of a geometric notational system. Diagrams array selective packets of dissimilar
data and correlate them in an explicitly process-oriented configuration that
has some of the attributes of a representation but is situated in the world
like an object. Indeed, diagrams make few concessions to mimesis--that is, a
staging of content as if belonging to a world both contiguous and similar to
our own.
Diagrams align functionally with the "working objects" of late eighteenth-century
anatomical atlases discussed by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. Our analysis
recovers an aspect of diagram that returns to the Greek use of diagramma in
mathematical proofs where, in the words of Reviel Netz, their perceived properties
"form a true subset of the real properties of the mathematical object.
This is why diagrams are good to think with."
Diagrams align, juxtapose, and contrast autonomous bursts of data. Legends
keyed to the imagery may attempt to stabilize this flux of information, and
to this extent words can be an integral element of diagrams. However, language
cannot fully specify all of the ways in which users employ diagrammatic material,
and this variable interaction of components is able to generate types of knowledge
impossible to infer from any single element. Process as knowledge is the premise
of today's real-time data systems, but the principal was explored well before
computers in the early history of the culture of diagram.
Vision between Spectacle and Community
Jonathan Crary
This paper explores some of the relations of return and recovery between early nineteenth-century figurations of the "spectral" and mid to late twentieth-century concepts of "spectacle". Developing issues from the 1960s, the first decades of the nineteenth century, and the present, it examines related ways of designating the deceptiveness of appearances but also of defining vision, not transcendentally, but as a capacity shaped by the social and shaped in such a way that the actual operation of the social world is concealed.
Miltonic shows: literature, magic and the origins
of modern spectacle
Simon During
This paper will analyse the emergence of commercial, public optical illusions
in the period from about 1780 to 1820.
Instances referred to will include de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon; the phantasmagoria;
the panorama and Fuseli's 'gallery of the Miltonic sublime'. It will argue that
this form of show business needs to be read simultaneously in different ways.
In particular it should be understood:
1) as an autonomous form of visual culture;
2) as closely related to theatrical design and special effects;
3) as an offshoot of literary interests and values, with the reception of Milton
being particularly important in this regard;
4) as structurally allied to what I will call the 'magical enlightenment'.
"Our vacant room", body and space in the
early modern world picture
John Gillies
Modern celebration and postmodern critique of the early modern cartographic revolution concur in relegating the body from the new world picture. While bodies proliferate in the ornamental margins of the post-Ortelian world map, they have at best an equivocal relationship with its de-sacralised cartographic content (in which direction, centre and place are no longer necessarily priviliged). In one account, the loss of bodily authority had frightening consequences. Unmirrored in the map, the body was lost, disorientated, fragmented. Donne's Anniversaries testify to the panic of a body unable to recognise an answerable architecture in the cosmos. There is of course a more up-beat account (one indulged by Donne himself as erotic cartographer) in which the map promises the body more and better room than it has ever known. While the body may not be in the map, it enlarges itself thereby - treating the map as a plastic space for the projection or extension of desire. Like Tamburlaine's sword, the map is now a kind of mental hand-prop, an organ of imaginative prehension, an extension of the eye. Panic and euphoria aside however, body and space are obliged to negotiate a new partnership in which one seeks a version of place and the other of affective ground. For this, the eye alone is insufficient. This paper explores versions of this renegotiation, partly in cartographic discourse and partly in the poetry of Milton.
Modelling Set-Ups in Paintings: the cases of Campin and
Caravaggio
Professor Martin Kemp
Working from the appearance of paintings to reconstruct the physical set-ups used by the artists is fraught with problems. What criteria can we use to avoid the accusation of circularity, i.e. using the paintings to build a model of the set-up and then saying that the model accounts for the appearance in the paintings? How can we develop a form of experimental art history that avoids this and other problems?
Previous efforts with Piero della Francesca and Vermeer have suggested possibilities. New work on Robert Campin and Caravaggio show different ways forward - one using computer analysis of an innovatory kind, and the other using a physical model in a traditional manner. Both analyses have important implications if correct. The Campin suggests that we need to re-think how the Netherlandish artists worked. The Caravaggio has implications for how we read his pictures and how we define "autograph" paintings. Both bear in upon the "Hockney hypothesis", but in ways that are permissive rather than conclusive.
The brand as a new media object
Celia Lury
This paper will present an account of the brands as objects that stand at the intersection of computing, information technology and media. Drawing on contemporary media theory and ANT, the paper will highlight the ways in which the brand may be seen not simply as a medium of exchange, but as a new media object. This will involve a consideration of the brand in terms of a multi-levelled ontological existence, the functioning of an interface, and the communication of information in terms of interactivity. Through a discussion of the logo, attention will be paid to the role of both marketing and the law in the dynamic objectivity of the brand.
Instrumentation, Photography and the Purging of Observers
in Nineteenth Century Physics and Bio-Physics
Joel Snyder
Some contemporary authors have claimed that recent advances in electronic imaging mark a rupture in scientific and more broadly, cultural practices that are creating a revolutionary shift away from verbal language and towards thought construed as a visual medium. My essay deals with the centrality of graphic visualization to scientific research in the mid-to late-19th century and with the replacement of observers in data collection by machines designed to register and give graphic expression to motions and entities that are beyond human detection. The replacement of observers by instrumentation created a revolution in some of the sciences, shifting attention away from phenomena and redirecting it to graphs and pictures which while taken to be accurate, stood in an indirect and often questionable relation to them. The paper will conclude with some thoughts about the difficulty of attempting to comprehend the shift to visualization in terms of the opposition of objectivity to subjectivity.
Back to Black: Color in the Age of Digital Architecture
Mark Wigley
What kind of vision does the architect have today? Architectural practice has
obviously been transformed in the last
decades by the pervasive use of computers to design, represent, test, and even
construct buildings. But this is not yet to say that the architect visualizes
differently. What do we see in a digital drawing? What is the architecture of
the drawing itself?