Old College, The University of Edinburgh
17-20 September 2003

ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS BY SPEAKERS IN PARALLEL SESSIONS

[Click on name below to view abstract]

The Swift View: Tachistoscopes and the Residual Modern
Charles R. Acland
Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montreal
Email: cacland@sympatico.ca

Among the many laboratory devices that aided in the founding of experimental psychology at the end of the 19th century, is the tachistoscope - literally "a swift viewing instrument" - that measured the speed with which items could be visually recognized. Though relatively unfamiliar to many today, the tachistoscope, mechanically akin to motion picture projectors, was massively important to the establishment of ideas about modern perception, in particular reading. Jonathan Crary and Fredrich Kittler are among the few theorists who have begun to assess its impact. Doing so, however, they limit their discussion to the technology's place in the field of psychology. This chapter argues that the powerful influence of the technological ideal represented in the tachistoscope can be found in the way it traveled into a range of institutional locations through the course of the 20th century. This chapter presents the sluggish historical trajectory of the tachistoscope as it moved into a series of arenas with an interest in knowing and influencing the workings of the mind.

When Kittler writes, "The automatism of tachistoscopic word exposition is not designed to transport thoughts" (1990: 223-224), he neglects to appraise the technology's transformation into an educational aid. Indeed, behind its employment was a modern drive toward the efficient diffusion of ideas. In the end, it was no single technology, but an idea about technology that was variously deployed. As a diagnostic and therapeutic instrument, it identified and rectified extraneous action in the movement of eyes. As an experimental instrument, it helped measure optical processes. As a teaching instrument, it helped accelerate recognition and memory. As a speed-reading training technique, it disciplined eyes to take in entire fields of information rapidly. As a military instrument, it pushed target recognition into a reflex response. As a marketing instrument, it helped streamline decisions about copy and layout. Whether or not the device actually produced these results was a matter of debate. Regardless, this uncertainty did not arrest the repeated efforts to incorporate its procedures in those sundry endeavors. And in all its incarnations, the tachistoscope remained perfectly continuous with the logic of the accelerated replacement of text and with a understanding of how the mind was to read this stream. As such, it is an embodiment of a modernist worldview, with its mark-up on rapidity in and efficiencies of production, including the production of thoughts, perception and mental processes.
Tracing the life cycle of the tachistoscope, and the logic it drags along as it moves into an array of contexts, reveals its part in the advancement and reinforcement of an epistemology of attention, legibility, speed and the mass mind. Where Crary calls it paradigmatic of experimental control (1999, 305), I would add that it is equally paradigmatic of media control, of technologized instruction, and of the accelerated diffusion and consumption of texts.

Sample Bibliography:

Benschop, Ruth "What is a tachistoscope?" Science in Context, 11 no.1, 1998:
23-50.
Crary, Jonathan (1999) Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and
Modern Culture, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press
Kittler, Friedrich A. (1990) Discourse Networks, 1880/1900, trans. Michael
Metteer with Chris Cullens, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Williams, Raymond (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
_____ (1980) Problems in Materialism and Culture, New York: Verso.

Viewing pathology in nineteenth-century medical museums
Dr. Sam Alberti
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester
email: sam.alberti@man.ac.uk

"our Museum … may not inaptly be compared to some oceanic island, formed by the accretion of atoms and debris from the sea of suffering humanity upon the rock of scientific research…" - Bart's Hospital Report 1881.

"The average student, unfortunately, tends to regard the Museum as a gloomy sepulchre of pathological horrors."
- Bart's Hospital Journal 1933.

The Victorian public were able to see living monsters, freaks and malformations at countless shows, fairs and circuses. Upon their demise, however, the remains of many of these unfortunates - often against their explicit wishes - were acquired by any one of a number of medical museums, by fair means or foul. Nineteenth-century Britain was littered with collections of preserved body parts, from commercial establishments such as Kahn's Anatomical Museum to 'respectable' collections including the Hunterian at the Royal College of Surgeons. Prominent among these collections were the museums of the great hospitals, especially those at St Bartholomew's and at Guy's; the latter counted Thomas Hodgkin among its curators, and Richard Bright and Thomas Addison donated specimens.

Hospital curators set out their collections as maps of the human body, as natural histories of disease. Viewing the collection was to view the inside of the body, but in contrast to the ephemeral and rare occasion of the dissection, museums visitors could explore at leisure, and study in detail. Visitors were presented with a series of overlapping systems, bottled, injected or waxen. At the base was the healthy body, broken down according the function, with osteology the most prevalent (bones kept well). In many museums the human specimens were contrasted with those from the animal kingdom - comparative anatomy visually demonstrated the superiority of man over beast. The 'normal' specimens of both were far outnumbered, however, by the diseased. There were countless ways an organ could be deformed - by arrested development, by excess, by disease, by injury - and curators set out to gather them all. Those that could not be obtained or preserved were displayed by wax models, or in gruesomely detailed colour images. The pathologised body was a vast, diverse multi-media spectacle, in which the text of the label played second fiddle to its three-dimensional realisation.

This paper will explore these macabre sites, using curator's records, catalogues and visitor accounts to discuss their visual impact, and how they presented the diseased body to be observed. Innovative visual technologies in the nineteenth century came not only in brass and glass, but also in spirits and wax. Contrasts can be drawn with other spaces in the wider Victorian culture of display; with other contemporary sites for the display of human remains, orthodox and otherwise, and with their latter-day counterparts. Why did a series of dissected, preserved bodies, so familiar to the Victorian public, provoke such an outcry in twenty-first century?

Performing Technology: Photography and the Actor's Body in Nineteenth Century France
Jeffrey Bleam
University of Minnesota
email: blea0004@tc.umn.edu

Traditionally the theatre has been seen as a form uncorrupted by the techniques and ideologies of mechanical reproduction. It has primarily been the presence of its live performers through which theorists and observers have granted the medium such an ontological dependence; the non-repeatable and, in Benjamin's term, auratic performance of the stage actor. Recently, critics such as Philip Auslander have begun to reconsider this view, questioning both the nature and possibilities of 'liveness' within a televisual culture. One might be tempted, therefore, to seek a point of rupture between the purity of Benjamin's actor and the contamination of Auslander's, a point perhaps aligned with attendant shifts between the modern and postmodern. The establishment of such a point, however, serves in the end to merely reinforce a duality between live and mechanical which allows for a critique of the present while maintaining a sense of nostalgia for the past.

The purpose of my own investigation is to examine the relation between live performance and mechanical reproduction in a pre-cinematic culture; to describe an ontological interdependence between the camera, the stage, and the nineteenth century's larger project of subject reformation. Though rarely considered together, I argue that both photography and theatre represent and participate in the construction of the modern subject as, in Foucault's words, "a strange empirico-transcendental doublet." I discuss in particular the mid-century photographic practices of Adrien and Félix "Nadar" Tournachon, seeing already in their early collaborative work a correspondence between science and aesthetics (such as the representation of performative physiognomy in the Pierrot series). While acknowledging the importance of self-representation in Nadar's portraiture (which has been oft-remarked upon), I would focus more on Adrien's own work with Dr. Duchenne de Boulogne; in particular, the Lady Macbeth experiments.

I argue that photography creates (and is created by) a representation union of subject, science and stage - one whereby a sense of wholeness becomes achieved through a technological fragmentation. (See also Bertillon's system of criminal identification and categorization). Such a union, then, forms a foundation upon which Emile Zola, for instance, may issue the naturalist's imperative yet ultimately impossible mandate for presenting on stage a "man of flesh and blood, scientifically analyzed without one lie." Similarly, it opens a space wherein François Delsarte is able to formulate his system of 'mechanical' acting - the creation of a 'whole' performance and communication of emotion through anatomical isolation and manipulation, a theory not unlike Duchenne's electric prods.

Though beyond its immediate scope, I would hope this paper enables larger questions to be posed concerning the relative inefficiency of disciplinary boundaries and, more importantly, of temporal categories such as photographic, cinematic, televisual, modern and postmodern.

Viewing as possessing: the visual culture of natural history and the locality of colonial science, 1750-1800
Daniela Bleichmar
Ph.D. Candidate, Program in the History of Science, History Department, Princeton University
email: dbleichm@Princeton.edu

This paper argues that image production was the central practice of colonial natural history in the eighteenth century, and that images were the most important production through which Europeans identified, translated, transported, and appropriated foreign natures during the period. The paper engages with the larger historiography on exploration, science, and visual culture and expands this discussion by focusing on the eighteenth-century Spanish scientific expeditions to Latin America, which remain largely unexplored by Anglophone historiography, particularly in comparison to the vast literature on Cook, Bougainville, La Pérouse, Humboldt, &c. Between 1735 and 1800, Spain sponsored over twenty-five scientific expeditions to its colonies; eight of them focused specifically on natural history, employed over fifty artists, and produced a pictorial corpus numbering approximately 7,500 images. Examining the scientific practices and visual production of the Spanish natural history expeditions complicates the way in which much of the literature on the English and French expeditions has described scientific travel and illustration, since the situation between Spain and its American colonies was quite different -not first-contact experiences as in new colonies in the South Pacific but a Creole colonial society going back over two centuries with strong local identities and interests, and the end rather than the beginning of an empire. Similarly, the Spanish Americas help us rethink and refine many of the important arguments that post-colonial and subaltern studies have made about science and the visual. The conference description explains that one of the organizers' impetus was to explore claims about the dominance of images over the text as a phenomenon of our times; my research suggests that in eighteenth-century natural history images were much more important than text, and that they were a central strategy of colonial control and the appropriation of nature.

A first section of the paper presents an overview of the visual culture of natural history in 18th-century Europe, describing the importance of images in printed books on distant natures, their role in scientific training and research, and the ways in which academic art training, natural history training, and published guidelines for collectors of natural specimens ("professional" and amateur) served to construct expert eyes and hands that produced a specific type of representations and displays, used to claim authority and ownership over nature. Much of the writing on scientific images has focused on the transformation of science through the incorporation of visual technologies such as the microscope, the telescope, and mapping practices. While the role of technology is undoubtedly important, such emphasis on instruments would suggest that optics and mathematics were the exclusive technologies through which vision was mediated. Instead, I argue, natural history and artistic practices and traditions constituted a different kind of visual technologies that also shaped the way in which nature was apprehended and understood.

A second section of the paper discusses and contrasts natural history images from the Spanish expeditions, produced by European and non-European artists, with images of foreign natures produced by other Europeans in other regions, in this way exploring the generalities and local specificities of image-making and scientific production.

Changing the Aesthetics of History: The 3D Virtual Buildings Project
Dr. John Bonnett
Research Officer, Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council of Canada
email: John.Bonnett@nrc.gc.ca

One of the key performance standards that historians impose on themselves and colleagues is the inculcation of critical thinking skills in their students. If students, especially at the university level, complete their studies and fail to learn the fundamental distinction between a historical representation, and the object to which it refers, then historians have failed their students, and failed themselves. In recent years, historians have come to recognize that students better learn this distinction by generating historical models for themselves. As with colleagues in other disciplines, historians are increasingly turning to Jean Piaget's philosophy of constructionism to inform their teaching.

However, in the wake of the personal computer, historians are faced with a pertinent question: are they providing their students with the best raw materials - text and number - and tools - be it pen and paper, or word processor and database - to construct their historical models? The answer should not be assumed. As the Canadian communication theorist Harold Innis once noted, historical representations are based on aesthetic forms, and not all formalisms are equally adept at revealing patterns of economic, cultural, or conceptual interest to their users. Additionally, given the emergence of photo editing and 3D modeling software, the expressive potential of historians is larger than most assume.

Exploring the potential of 3D objects to stimulate student critical thinking skills is one mandate of the 3D Virtual Buildings Project. In this paper, I will first demonstrate the project's pedagogy. Compared to most history courses, the project's course of instruction is distinguished in three ways. It relies on photographs and maps instead of textual sources. It asks students to re-construct a concrete referent, a building, as opposed to more abstract objects pointing to political decision-making or social formation. And finally, it provides methods for students to critically appraise a historical datum, and in turn to translate it into information that can be used to generate a 3D model. I will next describe the outcome of two informal field tests that were conducted in high schools in Ottawa, Canada. The project enjoyed limited success, but important limitations in the CAD software package we used hindered many participants from realizing the goals that we had set for them, and I will address these here. I will conclude by making reference to innovations in interface design that may facilitate student use of 3D objects to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between model and referent.

Despite feminist critiques in the last decade in both Britain and the United States of the epistemologies and practices undergirding Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), the latter's increasing utilization of visuality and technology as complementary legitimating discourses has been consistently overlooked by theorists in the field such as Sarah Franklin (1990) and Charis Cussins (1998). Noting the presence of images in media representations of in vitro fertilization (IVF), Franklin discounts the ways such images can be read as contributing to, or indeed contesting, the written text's re-inscription of hetero-normativity. For Franklin, the visual is situated not as productive of knowledge, but rather as merely reflective of a knowledge that is wholly imparted by the more authoritative written text. Similarly, Cussins too figures the visual as reflective of, and not productive of, knowledge. According to her reading of the fertility clinic, this knowledge is embodied by female subjects and/or produced when doctors come into contact with them. While there is a sense that imaging technologies may be used to reveal knowledge held in bodies, absent in current theoretical work on ART is a critical engagement with how visual technologies actually produce the internalscapes of these bodies and knowledges about them.

This paper maps the visual knowledges and technologies constitutive of the ART egg donation. Its critical focus is on disparate visual artifacts and imaging technologies such as ultrasonography and laparoscopy, diagrams of male and female reproductive systems and snapshots of prospective egg donors and clinic staff, circulating in British and American fertility clinics' webpages, brochures, and operating theatres. Reading the marketing images and proliferating technologies deployed to sell and perform egg donation, I trace the contemporary Anglo-American fertility industry's construction of, and reliance upon, multiple self-legitimating visual knowledges. Produced by new and established imaging technologies alike, I argue that it is through these knowledges, which reproduce a visually dominant race and class-based discourse on 'legitimate' motherhood and reproduction, that egg donation is both constituted and sustained.

The paper foregrounds two distinctive examples of the way visual knowledges undergird the performance of egg donation. First, in programmes where the prospective egg recipient selects her egg donor through the use of snapshots and professional portraits of donors, whether they are displayed in a photo album or on an online donor database, these formulaic images are held in tension with written biographical statements and purport to evince not only the physiognomy of the donor but also notable personality traits. That the visual underwrites egg donation is further evinced in the surgical performance of egg retrieval. For example, once a recipient selects a donor and the woman undergoes a drug regimen so that her ovaries will mature a number of eggs, their size is checked via ultrasound. When mature, these eggs are collected by either ultrasound or laparoscopy. Although such examples provide evidence of two markedly different visual technologies at work in the fertility industry, significant to both is the fact that each is guided emphatically by imaging technologies without which, eggs cannot be retrieved and ART sold.

Bergson's Duration and the Disappearance of Ordinary Thought
René Bruckner
Ph.D. candidate, Program in Visual Studies, University of California, Irvine
email: rbruckne@uci.edu

"When one relates movement to any-moment-whatevers, one must be capable of thinking the production of the new, that is, of the remarkable and the singular, at any one of these moments: it is a complete conversion of philosophy." - Gilles Deleuze

Philosopher Henri Bergson's systematic discourse on thought and duration led him at one key moment, in 1907, to put forth the cinematograph as his model for the delusional nature of ordinary thought. However, despite his dismissal of film as deceptive, Bergson's interrogation of the apparatus shows how helpful it can be for understanding the elusive object which his philosophy strives to put into words: the way in which time is inscribed as it passes and because it passes-time as an image which gains substance in its very passing out of sight. In his resurrection of Bergson, Gilles Deleuze has argued that the product of cinema would eventually be a "direct image of time" which acts as a model for modern thought. Language cannot explain or convey duration, Bergson admits, because it works like the intellect, like film, treating reality as if it were made up of immobile snapshots. Conversely, if cinema can project a "direct image of thought," it is only because it is produced before perception, prior to the intellectual process it mimics. For Deleuze, the "thinking image" projected on the screen does our thinking for us; his two volumes on cinema constitute a philosophy gleaned from his experiences as a film spectator. We should wonder whether Bergson's concept of duration, critical as it is of the cinematic apparatus, would have been possible to think before that apparatus existed. Put another way, do we think, write, philosophize about our visual technologies or through them?

My paper approaches these questions by revisiting one facet of the pre-history of cinema. I look at the work of American photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose well-known photographic motion studies express a fundamental drive to produce images which disappear. The paradox of his work is that, in producing sequences of instantaneous views which purport to capture motion itself, he cannot in fact picture real movement, in the Bergsonian sense. The snapshots bracket, but do not depict, the movement which occurs during the interval between them. The invention of the cinematograph consists largely in the mechanical reintroduction of movement back into similar sequences of snapshots. In a film, everything happens out of sight, between still frames. The "immobilities" which flash before our eyes do not contain the movement which we nonetheless see. In this sense, the cinematographic image does not appear, it disappears. Bergson's sees this paradox of disappearance at work in everyday perception and thinking, which should shed new light on his claim that "we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us."

Haunted Images: The Aesthetics of Catastrophe in a post-Holocaust World
Angi Buettner
English, Media Studies and Art History, The University of Queensland, Australia
email: a.buettner@mailbox.uq.edu.au

Contemporary so-called catastrophes are often represented in the media with rhetoric and imagery taken from the Jewish Holocaust. This paper is not about the visualizing of the event of the Jewish Holocaust itself, but about the cultural and political consequences of the use of Holocaust images for the news coverage of other, contemporary events (such as, for example, the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, the second intifada in Israel, or the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Great Britain). It reads "the Holocaust" as an image and discourse of enormous cultural capital, and argues that the perseverance of the Holocaust and the practice of the transfer of its images pose many important questions for the economy of representation in the narration of news events.

In the global appropriations of the image of the Holocaust, a significant shift has happened from the Holocaust as event to Holocaust theory: the use of "the Holocaust" and its ideological representations as a political and critical tool and as a genre, as well as its commodification within and for contemporary cultural production. With this shift, the Holocaust has been integrated into Western thinking and consciousness. It has become so much part of Western culture, that it supplies artists, intellectuals, or media professionals with epistemological categories, and thus constitutes some form of epistemological break. With this growth in cultural power, the Holocaust also plays an important role in the development of an aesthetics of catastrophe. In the representation of catastrophic events, the Holocaust has come to influence and structure the West's narratives of catastrophe (as in the representation of genocides, for example). The Holocaust has also come to provide the critical apparatus for theorizing this representation: the various epistemological and aesthetic approaches; the ideas about the role of the media in catastrophic events; the ideas about how to disseminate and construct a certain understanding of such events; and ultimately the ideas of how to analyse and gain an understanding of contemporary world events. With increased removal from its primary referent, the Holocaust and the uses of its images turns more and more into an imaginary, the French idea of imaginaire as the constructed landscape of collective aspirations, as Arjun Appadurai has outlined it. The question is what kind of scripts are formed out of Holocaust imaginary about how to represent, think, and live in the face of catastrophe: how, for example, does the activation of Holocaust imaginary help to further specific ideas about humanitarian action, or the formulation, definition and putting to effect of laws (particularly relevant in the case of the creation of UN war tribunals, for example).

Focusing on the uses of Holocaust imagery in the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the second intifada, this paper asks what kind of epistemological move is performed when the production and consumption of images of catastrophe take place within the framework of Holocaust iconography; it also probes the implications of a practice that circulates images well tried and tested for their "profitability". The persistent use of Holocaust imagery is just one of the many examples showing that a considerable part of contemporary news photography consists of tropes imported from "old" images. This transfer and recycling of well-established-and often already iconic-images gives important insights into the operations of the news and image industries, about the processes by which news and images are produced, distributed, and used in modern electronic culture. The paper concludes on the importance of the shift toward greater aestheticization in news photography, and of the role of aestheticizing impulses in recording-and photographing-events.

Luminous Labyrinths: Mirrored Palaces at the 1900 Paris Exposition
Elizabeth Carlson
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Minnesota - Minneapolis
email: carl3299@umn.edu

My essay reconstructs and critically examines how public mirrored interiors staged vision as part of emerging spectacle culture in 19th century Paris, becoming a modern technology of vision, like the stereoscope and the camera. Unlike smaller, more personal mirrors that permitted individual self-reflection, expansive plate glass mirrors found in cafes, theaters, department stores and world's fair pavilions framed social interaction and display by reflecting, multiplying, and exaggerating public life. Unique to all technologies of vision, the mirror visually marries both the subject and the object. Inside the mirrored interior, people see themselves, are seen by others and enjoy both watching the spectacle of the crowd and even being watched themselves. In addition, the mirror blurs the distinction between reality and the illusion of reality by simultaneously reproducing images and reversing them. These spaces, therefore, added to the spectacle of urban life by offering the mobilized public viewer multiple, fragmentary, simultaneous views of the modern crowd. This paper specifically examines the mirror's production of vision through three temporary palaces at the 1900 Paris World's Fair - The Palace of Electricity, The Optical Palace and The Luminous Palace. Photographs, drawings and historical accounts of these spaces reveal how public and commercial uses of the mirror staged and formed modern, fleeting cinematic vision.

While ubiquitous today, the mirror was a novelty in the 19th century. With increasing technological advances in tinning, France's Saint-Gobain mirror factory was able to commercially produce huge clear panes of the looking glass. The French used the Paris 1900 World's Fair as a platform to promote and display this new technology. Most extravagant of the three pavilions, the luminous palace located within the Pavilion of Electricity, was surrounded by walls of mirrors measuring seven meters high by three meters wide, enhanced with tiny lights. The combination of mirrors and electrical lights created a mise-en-abyme, infinitely reflecting a mirrored wonderland and the visitors within it. The placement of mirrors at multiple angles produced kaleidoscopic pictures of immense crowds. The Optical Palace showcased the modern mirror technology through mazes of convex and concave mirrors, which distorted reflection, creating a funhouse effect that audiences could enter and experience like an amusement park ride. The center of this palace displayed a giant telescope, measuring over four hundred meters in length for visitors to view magnified astrological formations. Lastly, the Luminous Palace was made entirely of glass, including mirrored walls and ceilings with crystal staircases and floors. The whole glass building was manufactured by the Saint-Gobain glass and mirror factory.

These celebrations of the mirror transformed vision into a fantastic atmosphere, prefiguring what cinema will later do. In fact, my essay concludes by arguing that the mirror was the first ancestor to cinema as it frames, derealizes, and spectacularizes the real as do moving pictures. Through these mirrored tourist attractions in Paris, 1900, this essay exposes the prehistory of our current hyper-visual society before television and cyberspace.

Logos or the Resonance of Branding: close reading of the visual landscape of Warsaw.
Dr. Ella Chmielewska
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Canada
email: ellach@mac.com

The intensifying visual nature of the contemporary culture is not only related to images penetrating its every sphere, but perhaps even more so to text, visible expression of language: words, letters, word-pictures, written messages inscribed on every visible surface. Some of the most succinct and nuanced forms of visible texts, brand names and logos, powerfully insert themselves into the local landscapes and impress most profoundly on the specificity of places. They affect the locality by questioning or augmenting the meaning of the particular place, and by affecting the local language.

Logo carries in its amalgam linguistic idiom both the visual symbolism and its acoustic register. Both are interlocked in a complex way - the visual presence resonating with a specific sound. Rendered in English (the logos of technology and glamour) the visual presence of logos and brand names inflects the local language and impresses itself upon the symbolic, cognitive and conceptual frameworks specific of the place and its history. The spelling of the English language, with its ambiguous phonetic regime, imposes itself on the local rules of pronunciation.

Logos and brand names attached to urban places may seem merely opportunistic in their choices of sites of display. Even if loud in their technical brilliance or overwhelming with scale and volume, their placement is thought innocuous. In their linguistically subtle forms, however, as they attach themselves to specific places, brand names and logos rupture the symbolic and linguistic dimensions of the local. They disrupt the semantic and phonetic frameworks of the native language.

This paper inquires into the specificity of the local impact of global visual language. It focuses on the contemporary visual landscape of Warsaw and discusses the consequences of the palpable presence of the English language on the surface of the city. Two particular examples are examined in their specific contexts: CitiBank on the bank's headquarters located behind the restored façade of one of the city's most symbolically charged buildings, the pre-war City Hall, and Coca Cola, on the largest billboard in Poland, situated at the main intersection of Warsaw, and dwarfing the presence of the Polish Saving Trust (PKO), also a building imbued with much history. Two questions are probed here: How does the specific historical and symbolic meaning of each site change through the presence and form of these logos? What is the effect of such linguistically foreign idiom on the local language?

Warsaw is an important site for such an inquiry, the surface of the city having recorded numerous traumas, changes, and conflicts (cultural, linguistic, and political) that were played out against forces of history, modernist visions for urban development, technological and market pressures. Although all previous changes in the visual landscape were traumatic for the human and material fabric of the city, they never succeeded in unsettling the population's linguistic and cultural identity. Both the spoken language and the language of local artistic expression resisted intrusions on their fused identity by way of an outright struggle or creative accommodation. Do they stand a chance against the current visual encroachments, against the technological brilliance, high volume and overwhelming scale of the global visible text?

The Creation of a Global Landscape in British Visual Culture c. 1750-1820
John E. Crowley
Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia,Canada
email: crowley@dal.ca

This paper discusses the connections between imperialism and landscape art in British culture from the Seven Years' War to the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. In the second half of the eighteenth century British artists devised a widely influential topographically picturesque style for representing imperial landscapes. A topographic impulse encouraged Britons at home and overseas to produce recognizable illustrations of places that they had viewed first-hand. Such representations of colonial landscapes became frequent at the same time that Britain extended its imperial interests on a new global scale - in Canada and the trans-Appalachian West, in India, and in the Pacific.

The research focuses primarily on prints, singly and in books, because they readily commodified the landscape and circulated socially as items of cultural consumption. The principle in selecting them as evidence for this study is that the illustration in question claim authority from having been recorded first-hand at the site represented - "taken on the spot," as so many of their reproductions claimed. Cartographic evidence crucially frames the imperial context for this topographic art by making territorial assertions explicit in ways that cried for illustration to satisfy the viewer's curiosity.

In the second half of the eighteenth century accounts of British realms began to illustrate landscapes with an emphasis on specific locale. The new "British" world extended beyond England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, to realms overseas in North America, the Caribbean, India, the Pacific, and numerous strategic outposts. Previously, the scenery of Britain's colonies simply had not aroused Britons' visual curiosity, and the less Britain's visual culture differentiated the colonists, the happier they were. A dramatic increase in travel accounts, natural histories, and publications of exploratory expeditions responded to the reading public's broad and deep curiosity about exotic places and peoples.

The Seven Years' War, with its outcome for Great Britain of a global territorial empire over non-British peoples, critically changed governmental and visual relations between the metropole and its new peripheries. The British Empire was becoming more exotic - less "British" - at the same time that people at home were taking a new topographic interest in how Britain's landscapes actually looked. After 1763, as force was used more forthrightly and on a larger imperial scale than before, ideals of trusteeship increasingly shaped metropolitan responsibilities toward newly colonised peoples. Correspondingly, the representation of benign imperial landscapes compensated for the forthrightness of their conquest. The supposed authenticity of topographic landscape art helped people at home to identify with Britain's new possessions overseas, while the familiar picturesque style of these imperial landscapes lessened the controversies surrounding them.

Screening Words: Rapid Reading and Visual Knowledge in America from 1879 to 1940
Dr. Susan Currell
School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham
email: sue.currell@virgin.net

This paper will look at how psychometric machinery to measure eye movements and reading speed developed in tandem with new visual technologies during the period 1870-1940, showing how attempts to measure and improve reading speed were outcomes of the same technological inventions that also led to the growth of mass culture, cinema, as well as the "taylorization" of the workplace. The paper complicates the notion that visual knowledge is in some way opposed to textual knowledge by exploring the elision of the visual with text, and text within the visual. Fundamentally responding to, and altering, perceptions of knowledge in the early part of the 20th century, the paper positions scientific enquiries into reading speed as attempts to ensure knowledge "progressed" at a pace with modern industrial society.

Beginning with the first attempts to scientifically measure eye movements in 1879, the paper discusses the evolution of psychometry as an extension of central philosophic enquiries into knowledge; the relationship between external reality, language, and human perception. The psychology of reading and perceptual processes appeared as a rich seam of information that could open up the doors to understanding the human mind and answer questions about perception, reality, meaning and consciousness, that had been central issues of philosophical enquiry for centuries.

This new method of measuring the mind, it was hoped, would provide a scientific picture of the functioning of the mind - less a snapshot of consciousness than a motion picture of it. Recordings of eye movements became more sophisticated with the introduction of photographic methods similar to those utilised by Marey and then Muybridge to record motion in animals, and by 1905, Judd, McAllister and Steele acknowledged the generosity of the Edison company in providing assistance with a kinetoscope camera to make more accurate records of eye movements. By the 1930s these experiments on the eye not only involved recording of movement but aimed to speed up reading through training "by means of a motion picture technique." From the mechanics of measuring using new technologies, experimental psychologists had evolved "eye training" that would increase and standardise reading speeds at a mechanical rate, controlled by the machine itself.

The paper ends its enquiry in 1940, though historical links will be suggested with accelerated learning technologies of today - from speed-reading courses to new learning software that claims to speed up brain function and reading ability.

Between the Retina and the Body: Regimes of Visuality and the Truths of Modernity
Dr. Sudeep Dasgupta
Assistant Professor in Media Studies, Department of Media and Culture, University of Amsterdam
email: s.m.dasgupta@hum.uva.nl

The relationship between regimes of visuality and the claims of knowledge have always been intimately tied with questions of technology - whether the camera obscura apparatus of the eye itself, to the mediation of mechanical reproduction and recent shifts in digital technology. This mediation of techne has problematized the truth claims of "visual knowledge" bringing into doubt what Jonathan Crary (1999) calls the "veridicality"of the image. The truth of illusion and the illusion of truth thus function as two sides of the same coin, where ocular bases for knowledge have been historically critiqued from at least the mid 1800s.
Recent deconstructive critiques of the image ( Derrrida and Stiegler 2002) have thrown further suspicion on the truth claims of the analogico-digital image. This relationship between a historical understanding of the truth-claims of the image and the evolving technological developments as critiqued within philosophy frame the essay.

The essay will engage with Crary's recent analysis of the "suspension of perception", in particular the implications for thinking the divide between truth and illusion. This divide also runs across the tension between the regime of optical perception based on the retina, and a physiological optics spread over the body as a heterogenous ambulatory apparatus. Crary's argument focuses on the latter, expanding recent philosophical discussion of the image in Deleuze, and social theories of globalization and biopower in Hardt and Negri. The essay will interrogate this turn to "bio-power" as the location for splintering the hegemony of the eye on two fronts. Firstly, it will investigate the historical specificity of the film apparatus within modernity as a site for questioning the claims of hegemonic regimes of visuality and truth. Secondly, it will interrogate the notion of the "mobile bodily apparatus" as an alternative to scopic regimes of visuality through an analysis of the films of the Indian film-maker Ritwik Ghatak. In particular, a reading of Meghe Dhaka Tara, within the period of massive displacements of people during the partition of India in 1945, will argue for thinking the conjuncture between a modernist aesthetic of vervreemdung and the figuration of the human body on screen and in the audience. For in this conjuncture, the Brechtian/Benjaminian insistence on the refunctionalization (Umfunktionerung) of the media apparatus directly underscores regimes of societal truth with visual/media truths. Ghatak's reworking of the visual mode of film-making also subtends his figuration of the body outside the contemporary discourse of libidinal modes of resistance and biopower as line of flight from truth - claims of scopic regimes of power.

The essay will contend that the truth-value of the images of modernity are mediated through both the specificity of the (dis)placed body and the formal possibilities of the technology of visuality. While for Crary, formal contingency and errant bodily dispositifs enables a subjective and creative flight into the suspension of perception, my argument will insist that it is precisely through a physiological optics of contradictory (em)placement of the body and embedded historicity of the image that a politics of visual knowledge in modernity emerges. The discrete image (Stiegler 2002) when read historically is an accented image which
registers this embedded and (em)placed body as the locus of visual knowledge in modernity.

Genescapes: visualization and value finding
Heather Delday
Ph.D. Student, Gray's School of Art, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen
email: heatherdelday@hotmail.com

This paper develops the understanding of visualization by locating art within a matrix of other disciplines. Using a particular methodology the artist extends our current understanding of visuality within genetics. This position is in relation to the making of scientific information 'visible' and, the use of information graphics to explain science to people requiring a consultation.

This paper argues that locating art practice within a specific social context (e.g. within genetics), art as a process of making visible, is understood as an exploration of human values.

The methodology is based on dialogue between the artist and a group of clinical geneticists centred around visual material (e.g. prints, drawings, photographs). The material is developmental in the sense that it is not finalised artwork, and is shaped through processes of exchange. For example a series of black and white photographs were made by the artist showing boxes placed in different physical locations. The boxes were made from autoradiograms - a form of DNA imaging (see for example 'Genescape 3', 'Genescape 18', 'Genescape 21'). The photographs evoked notions of pattern, repetition, scales, chiaroscuro and ambiguities of 'real' and 'abstraction'. The artistic intention of showing these was to stimulate thought in terms of discovering specific individual interests within the field of genetics as well as seeing/hearing aesthetic preferences.

What became evident in the dialogue were the different professional and personal values of the individual (geneticist) as well as differences and synergies between clinical geneticists and artist. The next stage was to develop the artwork in response to what was revealed.

The understanding that visual thinking, or the images assigned to ideas have a reciprocal influence on the ideas themselves underpins the thinking in this method of working. The methodology - a shared exploration (between artist and scientist) of visual/verbal communication makes it possible to extend the language (tools and forms).

Digital Technology and Seeing the Ancient World Better
Judith de Luce
Professor of Classics, Miami University, Ohio
email: delucej@po.muohio.edu

Digital technology has allowed us to know better a world the evidence for which is often fragmentary at best. In the study of Greece and Rome we have often had to rely on fragments: an incomplete text, the ruins of a temple. Even when we have a site as rich as Pompeii, lacunae still exist. When we teach, perhaps even more than when we study, we must grapple not only with the fragmentary nature of our evidence but with the obvious reality that most of us cannot walk out the door into what remains of the ancient world. If we are to study the visual world of antiquity, we must rely on increasingly expensive visual resources.

Classics is especially well endowed with digital resources, from the enormous Perseus Project (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/) to the MOO of VRoma (http://www.vroma.org/), but in addition digital technology such as Adobe Photoshop also enables us to learn about the ancient world in ways that were not possible before. In 1999 Eric Case (Miami University '01) and I created the Virtual Sculpture Gallery (http://mandarb.net/virtual_gallery/) in which we painted digitally, using Photshop, fifteen pieces of Greek and Roman sculpture. We also created four Quick Time VR movies of four pieces of sculpture. "Painting" ancient sculpture (which was painted anyway) digitally gives us a unique opportunity to study the composition and impact of ancient art. In particular, this painting process allows us to get closer to the piece of sculpture than we could in a museum, albeit we do this in two dimensions. There is much to learn about a piece of sculpture seen in this way. For example, one of the things that is especially striking when painting this sculpture is the impact of painting in the eyes. The current technology also allowed us to create a Quick Time demonstration of what the Nike of Samothrace, for example, looked like if spun 360 degrees, and that allowed us to understand better the impact of the composition of this piece of sculpture. Being able to scan and manipulate visual images allows us to understand the artifacts better and on their own terms.

In this paper I will consider the extent to which digital technology has allowed us to get to know the world of Greece and Rome in greater depth and in new ways. I will begin with a brief overview of the history of Classics and digital technology, then provide examples from Perseus and VRoma of what we are able to learn and how. I will conclude with examples from the Virtual Sculpture Gallery, to suggest the philosophy behind the use of technology in Classics and the kinds of visual knowledges we can now acquire.

Illusion v/s Knowledge. Geographical teaching and movies: a new approach
Maria Teresa di Palma
Dipartimento Storico-Geografico, Università degli Studi di Pavia
email: minefe@libero.it

Introduction - Movies are often used in the school to illustrate geography of overseas countries. Unfortunately, this teaching method: i) does not allow pupils to develop a critical awareness and a significant knowledge, but favours rather a passive learning, since they are simple recipients, and ii) does not sufficiently highlight that a movie is only fiction, not reality.
My question is: how use the cinema to make pupils the chief actors of the learning process and to favor the grow up of their critical awareness? Solving these problems could be very useful for teaching, because movies affect dramatically the geographic imaginary of teenagers. Therefore, I carried out an experience with 28 pupils aged 13 years (a classroom) aimed to use the cinema for an active geographical learning.

Methods - I first grasped what are the dominant geographical stereotypes among pupils, by which movies are these stereotypes disseminated, and finally, what geographic elements are lacking in student's knowledge. This is a new approach, since, so far, a movie has been presented and analysed more from the director's point of view, and focussing on the vision or messages it envisages, rather than from the audience's perception, represented in this case by teenagers. To accomplish this task, the path-experience started from some scenes selected directely by pupils to answer some general questions, e.g. " Show me a movie fragment illustrating an equatorial forest". Then, it was established a comparison between pupil's stereotyped visions and real data from geographical text-books highlighting differences and deficiencies in pupil's knowledge.

Overall, in order to reverse the dogmatic view conveyed by movies, it is hardly enough the "ipse dixit" both of teachers and text-books: it would be an asymmetric "fighting". The use of text-books is only an intermediate step in a correct learning process, an important step, although inconclusive. How to reach our goal? Critical awareness results from a creative work: if movie's watching is only a passive task, movie's planning force students to actively self-solving practical problems by applying their geographical knowledges. Therefore, the experience ended with students planning a movie's plot based on scenes previously selected. In this task, they had to deal whith movie's location and habitat background.

Results
1) Students acquired a good knowledge of world environment's location and distribution, as documented by comparison of their scores in two tests carried out before and after the experience;
2) They focussed on movie's location, i.e. on the geograhic sites and related habitats;
3) They improved their ability in connecting things, facts, ideas, etc.;
4) They practiced a new and creative writing process;
5) They enjoyed themselves a lot.

The astronomer as artist: Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687) and the problem of accurate representation in seventeenth-century telescopic astronomy
Ms Jennifer Downes
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
email: jdd26@cam.ac.uk

Several recent studies on testimony in the seventeenth century have examined how experimental philosophers used techniques of verbal description to convince their audiences that their accounts of experiments were genuine and reliable. Verbal descriptions of experience and experiment had a counterpart in visual practices, especially the description of observations made using the new technology of the telescope and microscope. According to Mary Winkler and Albert Van Helden (1994), the practice of using highly detailed and controlled images to represent vision through an instrument has an important early example in the precedent set by Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687), who introduced new standards of 'naturalistic' visual language into astronomy, in particular in his series of lunar images, Selenographia (1647). This book, which received considerable acclaim on its first publication, stated on its title page the intention of observing the moon 'more accurately than before'. Galileo had already used visual evidence to demonstrate the existence of lunar mountains; Hevelius undertook a different project, that of creating a standardised version of the lunar features and attempting to place them in their true positional relationship to each other. Winkler and Van Helden argue that Hevelius guaranteed the accuracy of these images by taking care to retain control over every stage of the observation process, and describing his instruments and the process of observation to his readers, so that they could feel confident that what was portrayed on the page was a realistic image of what the astronomer had actually seen.

This paper aims to show that Hevelius's visual language was more complicated, and potentially more vulnerable to his critics, than the idea of a simple victory for realistic representation in astronomy would suggest. I will explore how Hevelius understood 'accuracy' or 'faithfulness to nature' in representations and in astronomical observations, and how his concept of accuracy was later challenged in a debate with Flamsteed and Hooke in the 1670s, which reveals conflicting ideas of the nature and purpose of observations made using the telescope. In Hevelius's view, skill in astronomy resided not only in developing accurate instruments which would record nature more effectively, but also in the personal ability of the astronomer to see and depict: his eyes were instruments in their own right.

The creation of standardised representations of the lunar face appears to be an attempt to do away with the obvious presence of the artist in the image order to come close to the objects themselves 'as they are'. Yet, as Winkler and Van Helden have established in their analysis of Hevelius' control over the observation process, it was only through having knowledge about who the artist was that the reliability of the representations could be confirmed. This paradox meant that Hevelius's reliability, while convincingly established at the time, could be called into question as being merely the judgement of an individual. The accuracy of telescopes was contested and tested in the later part of the seventeenth century, with the Accademia del Cimento, for example, manufacturing cards with printed letters to be viewed through telescopes in order to measure their power. But the accuracy of the individual eye using the telescope was a harder thing to measure or contest. Yet the problem of individual artistic skill remained an important question in determining how readily telescopic observations could be trusted.

This paper will discuss how Hevelius's reputation as a 'lynx-eyed' astronomer, while initially established by his observations, was later eroded in the course of disputes over the nature of telescopic observations. In the conflict with the Royal Society in the 1670s, Hevelius's reputation was challenged by Hooke, Flamsteed and others, who claimed to possess observing equipment - telescopic sights - that was of superior reliability to Hevelius's naked-eye sights. Although this quarrel was not related directly to Hevelius's skill in drawing, it was fought over a reputation established by someone for possessing good eyes, not just good instruments. Hevelius argued that while telescopic sights might be useful as an aid to those with weak vision, the trained accuracy of his eyesight meant that they were not necessary for him. Where Hevelius saw the telescope primarily as an instrument of depiction, which was to be manipulated by skill and judgement in vision, later users of astronomical instruments saw their primary aim in using the telescope as making positional measurements which could be recorded mathematically.

Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: Alphonse Bertillon at the Paris Prefecture of Police
Josh Ellenbogen
PhD Candidate, University of Chicago
email: jmellenb@uchicago.edu

My paper concerns Alphonse Bertillon's science of criminal identity and the role of photography within it, engaging the focus of "The Camera's Eye" panel on observation, forensic techniques, and the question of memory. Bertillon's endeavor, which unfolded at the Paris prefecture of police in the fin-de-siècle, deployed photography as an integral part of its "science signalétique," a set of procedures aimed at the production of permanent individualities and identities for the criminal class in France. This was a task that had come to seem especially pressing in the 1880's owing to the harsh penalties the Third Republic had established for recidivism-in the absence of a reliable individuation technology with which the state could contradict their dishonest utterances, repeat offenders, on the occasion of their re-arrest, had a tremendous incentive simply to lie about who they were and what they had previously done, thus escaping the stiff sentences mandated for habitual crime. The Bertillon system, by incorporating photographs of criminals and a record of their bodily measurements into the state's identity files, sought a means to infallibly and systematically yoke malefactors to fixed life histories they could not avoid, "furnishing them with a permanent self."

What makes this deployment of photography so important within the history of the technology's scientific use was a shift in criteria of pictorial adequacy that lay at its heart. That is, to Bertillon, the finished identity document to which the photograph contributed had an avowedly tenuous connection to the sensory data that one might derive from looking at the criminal. To whatever extent the document with its photograph contained information that was available to the everyday, ocular experience of looking at the pictured criminal, Bertillon felt that it had comparatively little utility to putting the study of identity on a scientific footing. For Bertillon, the proper task of scientific photography was the production of pictures that, by virtue of their discrepancy with visual experience, established the possibility of a rational system for the recording and classification of identity. In treating photography as a picture-making technology that had to discharge such a mission, Bertillon undercut what had previously been the central criterion of photographic adequacy in the nineteenth century, that of resemblance. Within Bertillonage, the power of photography no longer derived from a capacity to make pictures that resembled a person, if one means by resemblance the creation of a picture that reproduced visual experience. Bertillon's work, thus, stands at the beginning of a fundamental renegotiation of photography's position vis à vis human observation.

Part of the reason why Bertillon took this approach to photography was the question of memory. That is, Bertillon thematized the central tasks of his science, the attachment of criminals to permanent records of deeds and acts, and the storage of nearly a million such records in a systematic way that would allow their subsequent recall, as a species of memory. In Bertillon's estimate, however, "unreasoned images" that duplicated objects as they presented themselves to sense perception made very poor candidates as memory images-according to Bertillon, it would have been impossible to establish coherent relations and rational classification among this disparate array. In order to arrive at a framework that can address this matter, the alienation of photography from vision in the name of a sound mnemonic procedure, my talk will turn to certain aspects of late nineteenth-century French philosophy of science, above all the work of Pierre Duhem. Duhem's work, exactly contemporary with that of Bertillon's, has a special power in the discussion of the science of identity, since it viewed science as being primarily a memory system, one that only works by the exclusion of visual information.

Profiling Machines
Greg Elmer
Department of Communication, Boston College
email: elmergr@mail.bc.edu

The mystical "criminal profiler" has become the superhero of the new millennium. With the powers to delve into the so-called dark side of the human mind, the profiler is called upon to master nothing short of time and space itself. The profiler must call upon the past to predict the future, both of which inscribe themselves in spatial routines and patterns. In a world full of questions and few concrete answers, it is no wonder that Hollywood and the cable news channels have deified the profiler. With the power to
predict future actions and behaviors, profilers are our modern day saviors.

Profiling technologies are, however, decidedly less sensational and heroic, they have little to do with than timely insights, vivid dreams or other such gifts. As with much else in contemporary life, the power to profile is embodied in machines, hence the title of my paper Profiling Machines. Of particular interest is consumer profiling; its logic, commercial imperative, topography, architecture, and technologies.

Theories of panoptic surveillance seem unequipped to explain the convergence or "bundling" of profiling techniques within the very act of consumption, whether it's at the cash register, online "e-tailer", or through the new generation of digital television recorders. Profiling technologies do not merely watch, track, or discipline consumers - they systematically and continuously collect, network, diagnose, map, and deploy personal information in an attempt to govern future market relationships and spaces.

In the presentation theories concerning the relationship between representational function of the picture and its role in schoolbooks to mediate understanding of concepts, will be discussed. This understanding is the result of the interaction of spatial understanding and the pupil's capacity to assimilate the basic criteria of pictorial representation, that is, that pictures and models represent real objects and environments and can also communicate thoughts and feelings.

Although it is true to say that the viewer generally instantaneously and directly perceives pictures, their interpretation usually requires a considerable effort on his or her part. By interpretation we mean, of course, that the observer is be able to read and understand the individual details which make up the picture and combine them to create a meaningful whole. This applies to artistic and instrumental pictures alike, regardless of genre. The interpretative process varies, however, depending on the type of picture to be interpreted. The first schoolbooks are in several subjects based on illustrations, which means that the young pupils are expected to solve different problems by first interpret the pictures and then doing the exercise. For many children this is an easy task, for other not. In a current study I am investigating in which degree contemporary and earlier editors of schoolbooks pay attention to research and knowledge about the perceptual and cognitive processes that are involved in pictorial interpretations. Interestingly I have found that the knowledge about the complexity that interpretation of visual representations offer was much greater during the late nineteenth century than today. Apart from the influence of genre on our interpretation of an image, the observer's previous knowledge and experience are decisive elements. Interpreting a picture is a dynamic process, which is the result of interaction between the picture and the observer. This process is in turn determined by other factors (how and by whom the picture was produced, the artist's skill, the material employed, etc.) but also by the viewer's ability to interpret pictures. To interpret a diagram of the structure of a molecule of water, we must have some previous knowledge of its structure. The same applies to map reading. Someone who is not familiar with conventional map symbols will find it hard to make sense of a map.

The gap between the contemporary scientific illustrations and the pictures in schoolbooks are larger than in the early days when illustrations where introduced in educations. One fined surprisingly many representations in schoolbooks that are very similar to the earlier pictures. These uncover the fact that contemporary schoolbooks illustrations are built on an epistemological theory originally from the Enlightenment, namely that there is an unmediated relation between the physical environment and the representation. On the other hand many pedagogical CD-ROM for children includes modern and very advanced medicine illustrations from inside the body. The children meet, from the very first school day, representations from different centuries. They are expected to be able to interpret traditional illustrations in different techniques and new digital representations, without any conscious training on the agenda. I will discuss some of the consequences of the growing believe and need for visual representations in relations to the reduced, at the same time, awareness of the complexity that an interpretation constitute.

Hierarchy and Display in Painting and Print: Exhibiting Images of the Lower Orders in Late Eighteenth-Century London
Dr. Jill Fernie-Clarke
Blackpool and the Fylde College
email: jfc@blackpool.ac.uk

Francis Wheatley's Cries of London series originated as a series of oil paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy in the 1790s. The fourteen paintings show London Street traders interacting with their social betters. The treatment of the subject matter made these images of the lower orders palatable to the middling and upper classes and presented a transformation of existing social relations at a time of social unrest.

As with many oil paintings of the era, print seller Colnaghi who subsequently published the images as stipple engravings commissioned them. Through an inquiry that relates specifically to Wheatley's images this paper examines the relationship between the exhibiting context of the public space of the Royal Academy, the print trade and contemporary press reviews all of which worked together to present and promote acceptable images of the lower orders within the spheres of 'high art' and the popular print.

Microscopic evidence: prints and the reproduction of knowledge in early Microscopy
Angela Fischel M.A.
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik
email: angela.fischel@culture.hu-berlin.de

The paper focuses on the instrumental aspects of images in early microscopy-books. In science images define our knowledge about nature in many aspects. They are instruments of establishing and communicating the new in the literal and material sense of the word 'instrument'. The main attention of the paper focuses on the special functions of images in the communication of facts, especially in the pictorial and rhetoric argumentation of images in scientific contexts. The paper concentrates on early popular books about microscopy. The microscope gained much popularity in mid-seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Books with elaborated prints of the microscopic-world served as an agent between dilettante reader and the scientific community. As a 'school of seeing' it established a most artful graphic definition of the microscopic. As instrument of investigation, scientific images are the panel where epistems are shaped and defined. Once depicted, knowledge can be communicated and reproduced as proof of evidence, as surface of calculation and orientation. The following paper is concerned with the history of early scientific images and seeks to examine the position of images in the perception and communication of facts.

The microscope and its popular use is of special interest in the paper. The rise of this instrument can be traced back to the 17th and 18th century, when the first popular microscopy-books where published. Not only a few specialists but many interested dilettantes started to practise microscopy both for entertainment and for education. Since than the perception of the microscopic dimension is part of the general education and shapes the common 'view' on nature.

Much of the popularity of the microscope was due to the appearance of the elaborated images printed microscopy-books. Yet there is hardly any image so artificial as the microscopic image. The celebrated "Micrographia" by Robert Hookes was published in 1665. One hundred years later a popular book by Martin Frobenius Ledermüller came up with less scientific argumentation but even more and colourful images. The tremendous success of these early popular scientific publications was the success of the elaborated prints. The most skilfully executed etchings depicted a world formerly unseen by the contemporaries: the micro-structure of the world. In the context of the book the large scale prints simulated the gaze of the microscopist. Literally, the page functioned as a virtual microscope. By observing the minutely printed structures the spectator compared these observations with the written statement by the expert. In turn, the text constantly pointed to the prints in order to verify the given statement.
But the printed image is by no means a mere 'reproduction' in the mimetic sense of the term. After reading the book, many inspired readers actually began to practise microscopy themselves: in the beginning with poor results. Blurred structures and colour refraction disturbed the view. Only after many hours of training something comparable to the print became visible in the ocular. However it was impossible to reach the clearness and completeness of the print. How nature had to be seen, was mainly defined in terms of graphic design. What the prints 'simulates', is the technical ideal of the instrumented, scientific gaze on nature.

The authority of the image as 'representation of nature' was crucial in this process. There are many interference's between the definition of nature by artefacts and techniques and the ideal nature in the pictorial rhetoric's. 'Microcosmos' was defined, investigated and discussed in reproducible images: the printed page.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth century microscopic views where delineated by drawing and by print. In any case the reproduced image is comparable to an interface between individual scientists. The repetition and the comparison of drawing and observation in the microscope was the procedure to verify or falsify a statement. The authors of popular microscopy books developed different aesthetic concepts of the microscopic, closely related to contemporary imaging and art theories. Focusing on the pictorial argumentation in early microscopy books the paper will not understand art as a role-model for sciences, or assume that science could be understood in artistic terms only. But the analysis of pictorial strategies is especially crucial for the understandig of these images because their authors insisted in the scientific character of their presentation in contrast to artistic presentations and set the concept of the 'natural' in contrast to human craft and art.

Dirty Dancing meets Watson's And Crick's theory of DNA:
The use of rock musical presentations to promote science and technology in schools
Lindsay Fitzclarence
Faculty of Education - Churchill Campus, Monash University, Australia
email: Lindsay.Fitzclarence@education.monash.edu.au

This presentation explores the tension between formal schooling and out of school popular culture. The primary assumption of the presentation suggests that students are increasingly expected to mediate two contrasting and conflicting message systems. One message system involves increasingly rationalised and tightly controlled curriculum frameworks that employ strict testing regimes and accountability measures. The second message system, which plays off the first system, involves sophisticated advertising and popular culture messages that promote ideas of freedom, choice and lifestyle development. This presentation explores a third option that unites formal curricula with popular culture through dance/music/narrative. In employing this approach this presentation employs a line of inquiry developed by Aronowitz & Giroux 1985

The empirical base of this presentation is a video presentation that represents work in a research project titled the Scitech Eisteddfod in the Rock Eisteddfod. In short this is a project designed to promote learning about science and technology through a school based dance/rock music competition for secondary schools in Australia. The specific medium for this outcome is a film presentation designed to provide focussed attention to science and technology issues embedded within an 8 minute rock musical production. Some background information is necessary at this point.

In New South Wales, a state of Australia, in the early 1980's a small competition, based on dramatisations of rock music, started amongst secondary schools. Since that time the event, now known as the Rock Eisteddfod challenge, has grown to a nationwide event incorporating the combined efforts of tens of thousands of students, teachers and school communities. The format of a production involves participating schools in an 8 minute stage presentations using dance/rock music routine. The final of each year's competition is broadcast on national television and attracts a significant teenage audience. In 1997 the event was broadened to include a focus on science and technology. This ancillary competition, known as the 'Scitech' eisteddfod was sponsored by the Federal Department of Industry, Science and Tourism.

The 'Scitech' eisteddfod in the rock eisteddfod challenge provided the opportunity for schools to dramatise contemporary science issues. At the same time it promoted the opportunity to engage in a sophisticated information exchange forum where science and technology ideas could be applied in practical ways to solve technical problems. The intellectual problem was to find a medium whereby students could engage, as participants and spectators of dance and rock music, and at the same time recognise science technology themes and issues. This problem was resolved through use of an instructional videotape designed to focus attention on science/technology themes.. This production used images from a selection of winning schools in 1998 and provided a 'voice over' commentary of the way that science and technology had been applied throughout the different performances. The aim of this exercise was to provide guided viewing towards the many taken for granted aspects of an eight minute production. The presentation for the VISUAL KNOWLEDGES CONFERENCE will use excerpts from this videotape and provide a brief commentary about the literature that informed its production and some of the outcomes of its use.

Cité Multimédia: Noise and Contamination in the Information City
Jennifer Gabrys
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University, Montréal
email: jgabry@po-box.mcgill.ca

The media city, like a sort of contemporary garden city, presents an encompassing vision of an ideal metropolis. But instead of harmonious integration with a green landscape, in this case the media city is a site for the perfect integration with technology, where information flows freely to compose an idyllic urban whole. But this synthesis, arguably, is only possible through the logic of information, and in the end such strivings after coherence are always challenged by (the incoherence of) urban space. So in the process of wiring our cities toward a global geography, we discover a relationship between urban space and information that is about more than the blissful exchange of data. One such media city, the Cité Multimédia located in Montréal, is situated in the thick of these events, a post-industrial landscape reinvented to host businesses working in the information technology and multimedia fields. This case study of the Cité Multimédia explores the wider phenomenon of media cities as sites for the accumulation of information, and how information is continually transformed through urban context. In this study, I will consider the media city as it is mediated, that is, how it plays back into the feedback loop as a visual image and "virtual" construct.

The notion of an information-suffused city using telematic technologies surfaced more than twenty years ago in both the United States and Japan, where the information city was hailed as the home of the advanced information society." From Dubai to Shanghai, Flanders and Hamburg, and from media park to media city, media metropolis and internet city, a new global geography emerges. Making the city known internationally, particularly through images (and web sites) is an important step in establishing this centrality. Yet the image, as the site, changes according to the task at hand. Attempting to reinvent itself as a post-industrial city (and in time for the Olympics), Montréal set about demolishing its waterfront silos in 1976 to increase the city's imageability. In this way, "the old city offered the greatest visibility on the promotional level and thus contributed in an essential way to the image of Montréal. In an economic environment marked by burgeoning growth in tourism, trade, and international cultural exchange, promotion by image became a basic development tool. In fact, the image of the city seen from the river was widely used in promotion of Montréal abroad." At this point, we can see how the city and its architecture become media. Colomina writes that this is less about the "relationship between architecture and the media," and more about "the possibility of thinking of architecture as media."

In a similar light, Marcos Novak suggests that in effect we are building a "shadow planet," or in other words a "parallel planet on a substrate of telecommunications and computation" that permeates the physical world and forms another zone of occupation. With this reasoning, we go beyond images to an inhabitable "imagescape." At another extreme, Lev Manovich writes that the "the role of architecture becomes purely utilitarian: to be a shelter for the image, not unlike a TV set, a billboard, a cinema hall, turned inside-out.'" Yet within the space of images, Elizabeth Grosz finds that the virtual may be a realm of excess and invention, presenting the possibility for other logics and practices of space, because "the virtual is the realm of productivity, of functioning other than its plan or blueprint, functioning in excess of design and intention." The city as the site of the "unforeseen" proves to have advantages beyond the stripped flow of data. Yet the unforeseen is a quality that arguably emerges at the disjuncture between the virtual city of image and information; and the noisy, residual city of base materiality. This study will consider how cities emerge through the contamination between virtual and actual spaces.

Droege, Peter. "Tomorrow's Metropolis-Virtualization Takes Command," in Intelligent Environments: Spatial Aspects of the Information Revolution, ed. Peter Droege (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1997), 4.
La Mothe, Bernard. "The New Montreal: A Longstanding Public Project," in The New Montreal: Major Urban Projects in Old Montreal, Marc H. Choko, curator (Montreal: Design Centre / UQAM, 2001), 30.
Colomina, Beatriz. Privacy and Publicity: Architecture and Mass Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994),15.
Novak, Marcos. "Cognitive Cities," in Intelligent Environments: Spatial Aspects of the Information Revolution, ed. Peter Droege (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 1997), 387.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 441.
Grosz, Elizabeth. "The Future of Space: Toward an Architecture of Invention," in Olafur Eliasson: Surroundings Surrounded, ed. Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe, Germany: ZKM Center for Art and Media, 2001), 268.

Exhibiting Imperial Knowledges: Curious Specimens of China in the 1870s
Dr. Judith Green
Cultural History, King's College, Cambridge
email: jtg22@cam.ac.uk

Objects collected by John Henry Gray, Archdeacon of Hong Kong, during his long residence in China were transported across the globe to be displayed at the Weltausstellung, Vienna (1873), the Crystal Palace, Sydenham (1874) and the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (1877). These three exhibition spaces - an International Exhibition, a commercial Pleasure Palace and Park, and the Chinoiserie annexe of a provincial civic museum - provided very different contexts for the display of Gray's Chinese collections. Such different contexts of display also subtly shaped the knowledge about China produced by these exhibits - ranging from incorporation of China into discourses of free trade at the Vienna exhibition, to the contrast of authentic Chinese objects with Chinoiserie at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton.

Despite their differences, all three exhibitions can, however, be viewed as producing imperial knowledges - and particularly effecting the transition of 'curiosity' from a marker of rarity or singularity to being a marker of difference. Analysis of the ways in which these exhibitions transform their material contents into specimens of China, that is their mechanics of representation, will form the core of this paper. I will be particularly concerned with the seemingly oxymoronic notion of curious specimens, as well as with the distinction between specimens of everyday life (producing knowledge about cultures of use) and specimens of technical virtuosity (producing knowledge about culture through production).

In conclusion, I will comment on the ways in which any material residue of social interactions between foreigners and China, however banal or trivial, could be transformed through the medium of display into forms of imperial knowledge.

The Aberdeen Beastiary, Television Soapies and God's Imaginary
Dr Mary Greig
Lecturer in English Text and Writing, University of Western Sydney
email: m.harvie@uws.edu.au

This paper argues that the Aberdeen Beastiary as a viewing technology not only made God's imaginary visible through concrete images of saints, angels, men, women and animals but made aspects of bodies visible that separated man from beast.In so doing this technology transformed our own philosophical imaginary and conceptions of the human and animal bodies endowing both with dimensions and perspectives they formerly lacked from classical mythology and theory. The first section of the paper looks at the strategies of representation by which the Beastiary constructs heavenly bodies for believers and locates them at the centre of a universe at the spatial periphery of which is a world of threatening monsters which are neither man nor beast, but aliens and devils. Classical mythology on the other hand accommodated man/beasts and human/plants.

The second section of the paper refutes the claims of scholars such as Barbara Stafford, Martin Jay, and Timothy Binkley that our own culture is currently, in the wake of the electronic revolution, undergoing a shift in which the visual medium, traditionally playing a secondary role as the illustration of text, is becoming the dominant medium of thought. The paper argues that just as text and image are not complementary but interdependent in the Beastiary, the imaginary in the word of God has always relied upon visual technologies of church architecture, vestments, stained glass windows, ritual, and illuminated manuscripts as powerful and necessary technologies for the construction of a particular culture of perceptions knowledge and experience.

The third and last section of the paper projects forward to compare the Beastiary and television soapies as media which through public authorised schedules for listening and viewing and the practical rituals of everyday life create, what Silverstone describes as, "the framework within which the ontological security of the everyday normalities can be sustained". Specifically the paper will draw on the work of David Morley to problematise the strategies of representation by which members of today's Westernised societies construct heavenly bodies for themselves and locate themselves at the centre of a universe at the spatial periphery of which is a world of threatening others.

The Camera and the Spade: Photography in the making of archaeological knowledge
Dr. Sudeshna Guha
Research Associate, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge
email: sg10012@hermes.cam.ac.uk

Photography introduced changes in recording practices and shifts in human engagement with material objects. The camera promised a unique value for vision. It could produce new evidence, allow human activities to be seen, and observations to be classified. Photography could transform observed entities into 'facts', and could create a 'precise' visual vocabulary that geared developments within the realm of social sciences. The close links forged from the 1860s between archaeological practice and photography was based on the belief that the technology could generate reliable representations of observable phenomena. The nascent discipline of archaeology, struggling to emerge from antiquarianism, enthusiastically adopted the camera and thrived into an empirical science by producing a specific kind of visual evidence of its own practice. Photographs from excavations came to be understood not only as objects that depicted the rationality of archaeological methods, but also as artifacts that confirmed the veracity of intellectual interpretation.

Despite the recent trend towards self-reflexivity within the discipline, photographs of fieldwork are largely ignored as sources for devising interpretive frameworks. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that such photographs form the core of the evidential structure on which the discipline of archaeology depends. This paper is specifically related to the use of the camera within archaeological excavations, and aims to show how photography transformed disciplinary boundaries. By situating my arguments within the context of South Asian archaeology, I would like to show how the technology of photography was appropriated to provide the discipline with a visually recoganisable identity. I wish to draw attention to the archaeological creation of knowledge during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and explore two related themes: the relationship between field photography and 'scientific methods' in archaeology, and the kinds of pasts that were aimed for and obtained.

Photography provided meaning to observations in the field, and helped in transforming the nature of what constituted as archaeological evidence. My paper seeks to determine the extent to which the camera's eye lent credibility to the spade.

Dreams for Our Perceptual Present: Archives, Interfaces, and Networks in Cybernetics
Orit Halpern, Doctoral Candidate, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University
Tal Halpern, Instructional Technology Specialist, Information Technology Services, New York University
email: ohalpern@fas.harvard.edu

In his memoirs the MIT professor and cybernetics researcher Norbert Wiener once wrote, "I longed to be a naturalist as other boys longed to be policemen and locomotive engineers. I was only dimly aware of the way in which the age of the naturalist and explorer was running out, leaving the mere tasks of gleaning to the next generation." Later in the autobiography he would write, "even in zoology and botany, it was diagrams of complicated structures and the problems of growth and organization which excited my interest fully as much as tales of adventure and discovery…"

Writing in 1953, in a reflective moment after World War II, Wiener's comments seek to mark the passing of a time in which scientists and explorers went out into the world and brought back representations of it to a central location such as the State Archive or Natural History Museum; a time when the naturalist and scientist captured a "world out there", in need of representation through technologies such as photography and film, and brought it back to a 19th and 20th century urban populace; a time in which the carefully crafted museum hall and the single glowing screen of cinema's dark amphitheater could command our attention.

Today, however, we are surrounded by a new architecture of knowledge and perception. Seated behind our personal computer monitors, we stare at an interface of multiple screens, and no longer aspire to go out and explore the world. There is no "unknown" left to discover. We have come to expect that the world will come to us, whenever we want it, on demand, through multiple windows and ongoing information streams filling our personalized and individual computer screens. We are instructed to refresh a web browser and new information will appear on a screen, dynamically generated from a server or database, which we no longer care to locate in physical space. Images become navigational tools and points of reference to elsewhere, helping us communicate with our networks. We have come to think of screens less in terms of spaces of representation and more in terms of places where we interface with other worlds, translation zones, re-mediating between different registers-textual and visual-and different entities-human and machine. As interfaces, therefore, our computer screens rarely seek to represent any fantasized external reality. Rather, they attach themselves to larger storage and information retrieval systems whose overriding ambition is to annihilate the gap between our desires and their ostensible fulfillment on-screen.

How would one, then, go about telling a history of this form of perception and the cultural forms of the interface and storage systems upon which it rests? What points of reference could we find that might open new imaginaries about our "closed word" of networked systems? One might start with the 19th century and its various technologies of amusement, attention and distraction, or one might begin with the emergence of the cinema or the television. For our purposes here, however, we would like to begin at an early post-World War II moment when the aspiration for this mode of perception-this architecture of seeing, and in fact thinking-was first formally articulated and became a visible sign of discourse in the bastard science of cybernetics. This paper takes as its focus the discourses of archiving and interactivity in these sciences as a preliminary point from which to consider the re-organization of perception and knowledge that computer systems both resulted from and induced.

The Limits To Art History's Perspective
Francis Halsall
History of Art, University of Glasgow
email: F.Halsall@arthist.arts.gla.ac.uk

The central argument of this paper is that the dominant mode of Humanist art historical practice, iconography, has been defined by, and is beholden to, the particular visual model of single point, linear perspective. In addressing this issue the paper seeks to address 3 questions of increasing specificity. They are:

· What type of knowledge is Art History?
· In what sense might the model for art historical practice be found in the object of its study?
· How might the Humanist art of the Renaissance be seen to provide the diagram for the method of its own interpretation?

Panofsky famously argued that single point, linear perspective could be seen as the Symbolic Form of Renaissance rationality. Using this as a starting point numerous commentators have discussed the continuum between Alberti's perspectival model and amongst other things: the objectification and mathematisation of perceptual space; Cartesian rationality; Gutenberg's pioneering of moveable type; the birth of Western Capitalism and the genesis of the modern subject.

It is suggested that amongst these arguments an organising principle can be identified in so far as all are concerned with the act of representation and the systems which frame that act. Conceived in such terms a parallel can be observed between these various systems of representation; be these perceptual, epistemological, social and so forth and the visual model of linear perspective.

As a system of representation linear perspective functions by virtue of it being a systematic abstraction which, in Panofsky's words, 'transforms psychophysiological space into mathematical space.' In doing so it is assumed that we observe with a single and immovable eye and that this experience is mediated by the transparent planar cross-section of Alberti's pyramidal model. Thus as a model of representation perspective is characterised as a system which is seeks to be objective, rational and transparent. It was in these characteristics that Panofsky identified this particular mode of visual representation as emblematic of an emergent Humanist faith in normative rationality.

It is argued in this paper that Panofsky's own method of art historical practice is itself dictated by this visual model of representation. Hence as a system of historical representation the Humanist model of iconographic (and iconological) Art History, which seeks to interpret works of art in terms of their participation in a rational scheme and their visuality, is also characterised by the attempt to be objective, rational and transparent, and is also motivated by a faith in normative rationality.

In conclusion it is argued that the interpretative pre-determination in a particular visual model is both the strength of and the limit to the interpretative strategy of Art History as a Humanistic Discipline. For whilst it can be seen to have the diagram of its modus operandi in the object of its study it is also unable to provide satisfactory accounts for those artistic practices which do not fit into its rational schema. In other words an interpretative strategy, such as is exemplified in Panofsky's, which deals with art works in terms of them participating in a rational visuality will be confounded by those works of art which are not, for whatever reason, rational or predominantly visual. And for works such as these new methods and vocabularies are required.

The Figural and the Moving Image - Jean Epstein vs. Bill Viola
Karl Hansson
PhD-student, Department of Cinema Studies, Stockholm University
email: karl.hansson@mail.film.su.se

How can the concept of the figural help us understand moving images? Why is the figural put forward today in several writings on film and art history? What's the role of the figural in the "visual turn"?. In this paper I will test some ideas regarding the figural as an aesthetic concept and do a reading of the concept in relation to moving images and new media art. I will do this from a theoretically film-oriented perspective, but as you probably know the figural is a concept initially used when talking about static pictures, paintings, but nevertheless of some kind of process or dynamic event in the images. Something that triggers interpretation.

My intention with this paper is to develop the figural in three short steps. First some general remarks on the concept and it's contemporary versions. Secondly I will try to establish some connections with the films and texts of Jean Epstein (1897-1953) and Bill Viola (1951-), and thirdly I will hint at some possible connections with digital media.

I think it's fair to locate some kind of origin in the use of the concept to Jean-Francois Lyotard and his dissertation Discours, figure. For Lyotard the figural is an inherent dynamics in images, but something that is not primarily representation. Lyotard opposes the reduction of art to linguistic units and he tries to position himself against some linguistic theories that has been very influential and were so indeed when Lyotard wrote this book, that is in 1971. In the introducing chapter he calls his book a protest against the idea of text and in so doing he is promoting what some has called a "visual turn" where the visual becomes the primary mode of thought. To narrow this down you could say that the figural is an aesthetic concept I will use to discuss dynamic fields in images where the focus of the aesthetic experience is connected to the materiality or plasticity of the images. It may also be related to a breaking up of the relationship between the plastic and the linguistic, a blurring of the categories of text and image. This is of course an extreme simplification, but necessary here, and I think of it as an operational one that might facilitate a meeting between images and concepts.

In both cinema studies and art theory the concept of the figural has gone through a small revival the last five or ten years. Mostly in Europe with film scholars like Jacques Aumont, Philippe Dubois and Nicole Brenez and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, and recently D.N. Rodowick published his book Reading the figural or philosophy after new media. I think there are different reasons why the figural is put forward today, but one common denominator is a desire to put focus on the image as image (and not firsthand an image of something) and what might be some neglected dynamic fields in these images (that is for example a central issue in Didi-Huberman's analyses of the paintings of Fra Angelico).

In new media it is clear that experimentation and manipulation becomes easier, it becomes easier to model the image. A fact that has, as we know, influenced the status of an indexical image of reality. The idea of indexicality has lost a great deal of its importance and, I think, that the figural could be a mode that, let's say, takes over some of this importance.

Diffusion and its discontents: the computer/cinema interface
Dr Janet Harbord
Media and Communications Department, Goldsmiths College, University of London
email: cos02jh@gold.ac.uk

The diffusion of new forms of visual culture is not always a process of gentle adaptation and usage, but of resistance and crisis. This paper explores the relationship between the visual layout out of the computer interface and film aesthetics.

Lev Manovich suggests that new media loops us back to earlier traditions of visual culture, and simultaneously remediates current forms. The multi-layered images of the computer available top view within one screen, he states, has reinvoked a Renaissance perspective of spatial narrative. A logic of addition and co-exitence in the multiple windows of the computer screen returns us to the tradition of frescoe painting (Giotto),where a number of events are represented within one frame. The conclusion that Manovich draws is that a spatialisation of narrative will profoundly influence cinema, and challenge the single image format.
Examples of multiscreen films that support this influence are 'Timecode' and 'AKA'.

This paper challenges the one-way logic of Manovich's claims, arguing that the possibility of multi-image film creates a crisis for the institution of cinema. The multiple screen format suggests a dispersed, individualised form of viewing which mitigates against the collective viewing practices of cinema. Here, the diffusion of technology meets the materiality of cultural tradition, throwing into relief the distance between new, individualised ways of viewing and older, collective traditions. Resistance as well as diffusion operate in the uptake of new formats and ways of viewing.

The Musesphere and the E-Museum
Susan Hazan
Curator of New Media, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Goldsmiths College, University of London
email: co901sjh@gold.ac.uk

In a media saturated society we are surrounded by a deluge of texts, some visual, and others aural, as well as the multitude of written texts we negotiate every day, yet people all over the world recognize that once inside the walls of a museum there will be an engagement with a specific kind of text, the real object. The museum however is changing. The visit to the museum now typically includes, electronic kiosks in the galleries that often replace wall panels and catalogues, information centres that entice visitors to sit in front of monitors during a museum visit, as well as electronic collections distributed beyond the museum walls. While archaeological collections present the missing object through electronic surrogates some of the original art works in the contemporary art gallery, are no longer encountered in a material manifestation but appear in the gallery in digital form. The electronic phenomenon for museums is a relatively new reality, with implications both for concrete museums as well as for their distributed, electronic surrogates. The institution of the museum is adapting, as new electronic architectures demand new strategies.

This paper will discuss the 'Musesphere' the term which connotes the emerging space of analysis, to contain the theoretical enquiry inscribing a complex project, encompassing both the desire to collect and exhibit while on the other hand facilitating a desire to gaze and to be seen to gaze. Even as the museum project is intrinsically about the real object, exhibitions are often enhanced and extended through a wide selection of analogue solutions, facsimiles, reproductions, dioramas, and models as well as the textural embellishment of the label, wall panel, and catalogue. This paper will argue that while new electronic architectures produced for or by the institution do not signify a critical break from traditional museum practice through radical technological determination, there are several trends that exemplify the impact (or integration) of new technologies on the institution of the museum.

Electronic architectures, either as the representative of material collections, digitally born art, augmented archaeological projects or virtual reality, both within the museum or beyond the museum walls are now common museum practice and afford new opportunities to enhance interpret, and extend material collections for visitors while at other times actively replacing the original object with an electronic surrogate. This paper reveals less about electronic architectures having an impact on the museum, as a disruption encroaching into the liminal space of the museum but rather as a description of the ways in which new media have been integrated into the museum project as they have been interwoven into the fabric of the institution in a series of overlapping layering of the new technology replacing the old.

Extending the Realm of the Visible into Prehistoric Times: Natural History and Animal Visibility in the Age of Digital Imaging Technologies
Dr. Vinzenz Hediger
Research Fellow, Film Studies Department, University of Zurich, Switzerland
email: vhediger@hotmail.com

Natural history films have for some time been one of the most institutionally well accredited – not to mention commercially successful – forms of the production and distribution of visual knowledge. While mainstream fiction films are still regularly blamed for anything from killing rampages to the breakdown of the American family, few, if any, critics doubt the fundamental pedagogical value of animal documentary films, and few forms of filmmaking enjoy the cultural prestige the BBC label bestows on films produced and released by that company’s Natural History filmmaking unit. Digital technology, or the „digital revolution“, as it is sometimes called, has brought new forms of the creation of visible evidence to the field of Natural history filmmaking. BBC, along with a range of international co-production partners, has been quick to capitalize on the technological advances by producing the computer animated natural history mini-series „Walking with Dinosaurs“ and „Walking with Prehistoric Beasts“. These films are remarkeable from the vantage point of an analysis of visual technologies for two main reasons. First, using computer generated imagery or CGI, these films create what looks to a fault like a photographic record of animals which have been extinct for millions of years, thereby extending the realm of the visible well beyond the visually pre- and unconscious into prehistoric times. Second, these films lend credibility to their representations of extinct animals by combinging digital imagery with a more traditional technique of the visible, namely the formal conventions of the natural history film. Thus we see Brontosaurs gathering at a waterhole in the evening framed in a zoom long shot, suggesting that the filmmakers may have been lying in waiting for the animals in safe distance from that waterhole for an entire day (as if, that is to say, the digital filmmakers and the pre-historic animals, like conventional present-day natural history filmmakers and, say, a lion, shared the same spatiotemporal situation). At the same time, however, these films also draw on conventions of narrative fiction films such as close-ups, which are absent from natural history films, to suggest emotional reactions in animals. Drawing on the work of philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière, this paper will argue that by rolling the entire fossile record into a virtual, but photographically certified contemporaneity with human life, such uses of technologies of the visible mark a significant step in what Agamben calls the biopolitics of human life and a shift in what Rancière terms the distribution of the perceptible. If Agamben is right that the conflict between man and animal is the most decisive political conflict of all, and if Rancière is right that the nature of political conflict is fundamentally linked to the problem of visibility, or access to visibility, then digital imaging in representations of extinct animals merits study not just because it is an extension of natural history filmmaking by other means.

Impermanence and Ephemerality: artistic and critical responses to the emergence of the Electronic Age
David Hulks
Modern and Contemporary Art, University of Southampton,
currently compiling a sculpture anthology for the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds
email: hulksdl@hotmail.com

This paper examines both critical and artistic responses in the late 1960s to the impact of Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media (1964). Critics as diverse as Adrian Stokes and Alvin Toffler perceived two general problems with the shift from human dependency on machines to dependency on electronics. The first difficulty was to do with McLuhan's description of the expanded psyche and the body as something that would finally be left behind due to the limitations that had been apparent for some time. This contradicted the opposite theory, proposed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others, that human perception should be understood as something fundamentally issuing from and dependent upon the physical limits of the body. Even if it were admitted that expansion beyond the body were possible or even conceivable, what would be the consequences of aiming for metaphysical omnipotence? The second difficulty was not to do with the spread of modern communications so much as the increased speed of communications in an information age, the inevitable stress and possible social breakdown that this would cause. Instant communication would have immediate advantages, but the long-term effects were less easy to predict. The worry was that a superficial society would emerge where individuals would be unable to think or properly to reflect, or even that this might lead to societal breakdown rather than the hoped-for 'concretization of human fraternity'.

The ensuing sense of mild panic that followed the publication of Understanding Media coincided with the arrival of the war in Vietnam and the realisation that in the information age both 'hot' and 'cold' wars were not about to end. In such circumstances, a sceptical or ambivalent response to the announcement of an electronic age was inevitable. In the visual arts new avant-gardes emerged inspired by the idea of engaging more directly than their immediate forebears with the rigours of modern life. Painters began using or referring to electronic media and took to the ephemeral art of performance, while sculptors began making their works absurdly 'kinetic' or deliberately impermanent. There also emerged the Conceptualists, who gave up traditional media altogether and became obsessed with the circulation of data and text as a way of critically engaging with the media revolution. If these new methodologies in art and the critical writing that underpinned them were developed in order to re-orientate audiences toward a new age, to what extent was this work effective and how prescient was it about what Jean-Francois Lyotard was subsequently to name 'the postmodern condition'?

McLuhan argued that in the new electronic age artists would no longer be able to be as visionary as they had been in the past. They should now build 'Noah's arks for facing the change that is at hand'. Art, he felt, would be indispensable in order to make the changes ahead possible and bearable. This paper argues that the role that emerged for advanced art was rather different to the one envisaged by McLuhan. Not only were artists able to keep ahead of developments, they also understood the need to record a critical or ambivalent response. The art of the late 1960s needs to be understood as at one and the same time complicit and resistant, not simply consolatory or reparative.

Becoming photographs: imag(in)ing selves
Dr. Joy James
University of British Columbia
email: joyh@interchange.ubc.ca

The following proposal for a presentation on the "eventfulness" of the photograph - the force of its becomings and its continued potentiality - is informed by recent philosophical discussions regarding processes of thinking and seeing, and by the multiple histories and theories of photography that have arisen since its introduction as a reproductive technology.

This paper will examine a small selection of photographs, all of them portraits of one sort or another, dating from the end of the nineteenth century through the first few decades of the twentieth century, and produced in diverse geographical, cultural and political settings. Each of these images is exemplary, so I will argue, in its representation of that ineffable quality of photographs that has plagued the medium since its advent in the early 1800s. As we shall see, these photographs are excessive in what they bring to visibility. They exceed any signification that can be attributed to them by histories of art and visual culture or by current theories of photography. It is the thesis of this presentation that each of these photographs marks out a field of activities on a material level, which parallels modes of potential in the virtual, and hich can in turn be extrapolated to diagram collective imaginings that open new possibilities for existence. In other words, I propose that all of the pictures under consideration were futural, made for a people to come.

An investigation of how these photographs functioned in the generation of new cultures of experience is important in at least two ways: first because it complicates dominant historical understandings of the relation of image to text; secondly, for the manner in which it opens up the potential and implications of another significant tremor in the shock to thinking/seeing, the move into virtual reality and digital imaging.

The Magic of Figures: Visual Narratives in the Nineteenth-century Case History
Meegan Kennedy
Program in History and Literature, Harvard University
email: kennedy@fas.harvard.edu

If the curious case history of the eighteenth century offers a medical gaze which owes much to the voyeuristic and the spectacular, the nineteenth-century clinical case history promotes a visuality that is no less compelling. Visual narratives in the Victorian case history were generally framed as signifiers of scientific objectivity and quantitative, rational thinking. I argue that, ironically, this status as a scientific rhetoric enables them to promote magical thinking and a rhetoric of "the curious" despite the degraded stature of these markers of a discredited medicine.

Most nineteenth-century technology was devoted to seeing the patient in new ways. The development of medical technologies like the otoscope, the ophthalmoscope, the laryngoscope and the Xray, combined with the vast improvements in the microscope and the rapid rise in popularity of the speculum, permitted the physician to peer more deeply and more precisely into the workings of the body. These new medical instruments famously augmented visuality (the physician's) but also demanded it (in the text). Texts discussing medical inventions required illustrations and diagrams of these machines. The progress in pathological anatomy required detailed illustration to convey symptoms visually. The sphygmometer, then the kymograph, the electrocardiograph, and other devices offered physicians a way to see what had previously only been available to them as an aural or tactile rhythm. Much later, the camera and the roëntgenogram accelerated the rendering of the patient as a visual artifact within the text. As a result of these changes, clinical medicine records both the patient and the material technology used to assess him through a trail of explanatory and descriptive drawings, diagrams, tables, charts, graphs, photographs, and Xrays: the figural technology of the clinical case history.

This figural technology offered a valuable new rhetorical technique for the clinical case history. It registered medical knowledge both as a concrete product of the new medical instruments and a theoretical link to the numerical method of statistics; it thus symbolized the physician's membership in the privileged space of science. Figural technology allows the clinical case history to foreground all its most "scientific" discursive elements - standardization, detail, quantification, a specialized terminology, references to other sciences, visual analysis of the body's surfaces, and a clinical voice - as well as its use of the new instrumentation.
But these new visual instruments, despite their cultural valence as indicators of scientific objectivity and progress, in fact powerfully revived the magical thinking (and curious gaze) of an earlier age. By expanding and fine-tuning the physician's abilities, the new material technology allows the physician to deploy precision, knowledge, and scientific progress in aid of the patient. But it also makes his new vision seem magical, standing in for the now-discredited spectacular sights and marvelous feats of the curious case history. Even visual "figures" in the text typically elaborate a "curious fact," authorizing its presence by an appeal to the magical authority of figures. Oddly, visual figures in clinical texts continue to signify scientific rationality despite continued attacks on quantification and statistics throughout the century. Figural technology thus magically allows the case history to indulge its fascination with the curious while retaining the new cultural authority of clinical discourse; and the physician's use of "figural technology" both supports and complicates his claim to a specifically scientific knowledge.

The Creativity Age: thinking differently in the Age of Networked Capitalism
Andreas Kitzmann
Department of Media and Communications, University of Karlstad
email: kitzmann@andreaskitzmann.com

If the pundits at Tony Blair’s think tank “Demos” are anything to go by, we are entering yet another new age. This time around it’s the “creativity age,” which is in many ways a (fashionably)dressed up version of the so-called Knowledge or Information Age. As Blair’s personal guru Charles Leadbeater breathlessly intones, “the real assets of the modern economy come out of our heads not out of the ground: ideas, knowledge, skills, talent and creativity.” Such pronouncements effectively reframe creativity within the major paradigms of contemporary global capitalism, with the Network and the entertainment industry serving as eponymous lynchpins.

My presentation will focus on two contrasting issues. The first concerns the manner in which creativity is being transformed into a commodity or consumer item such as in the case of Apple’s line of computers and its slogan “think different.” The second addresses the fact that the general public’s opportunity to actively engage in creative media production and thus to gain entry into the media industry is increasing, as exemplified by the artistic innovations of “laptop artists,” independent filmmakers or the creative resistance enacted by activists around the world. Thus the inevitable question. Can such increased creative engagement, which is partly the result of consumers having a greater range of media tools to choose from, be equated with a more democratic and accessible creative environment? Is it thanks to consumerism and global capitalism that we can “think different” and therefore “go create?” Are the boundaries of “visual knowledge” being extended or otherwise significantly altered?

The responses to this question are complex and paradoxical. On the one hand, the ubiquity of the global communications market, which appears to leave no form of media production or consumption untouched, seems to fulfil the worst fears of Adorno and Horkeimer’s critique of the culture industry. Yet on the other, creative independence can be found in all corners of the contemporary media industry thereby leading one to believe that overall, we are “wealthier” in terms of creativity and knowledge. While drawing from the more conventional sides of this debate and their historical precedents, I will pursue a theoretical and critical path that is informed by the lessons of complexity and dynamic relationships. Accordingly, I hope to avoid falling into the irresolvable

‘Embedded’ in the French Revolution – Waxworks as reality reports around 1800
Dr. Uta Kornmeier
Berlin
email: uta.kornmeier@rz.hu-berlin.de

Probably the most sensational attraction Madame Tussaud exhibited during her stay in Glasgow in 1803 was a group of waxen heads of four French Revolutionaries that looked as if they had been freshly severed by the guillotine. Other exhibits such as the illusionistic wax figure of Jean Paul Marat lying murdered in his bath tub or the group portrait of the late French royal family proved similarly popular. While all the visitors to the waxworks would have heard of, read about, and already felt the consequences of the recent developments in France, they had not seen the main protagonists eye to eye and were still lacking reliable images that would provide documentary evidence for events. When she arrived in Great Britain in 1803, Madame Tussaud volunteered to cater for this need of ‘ocular proof’ by exhibiting her representations of all the main
characters that were in the news.

The images she presented during her tour through Britain were more convincing than any of the others – satirical and broadsheet prints for example or drawings or paintings – for several reasons: Firstly, she came from the heart of the Revolution, from Paris, where she had lived for nearly forty years and claimed to have been ordered by the new government to produce the wax portraits of the executed enemies (Robespierre) or slain heroes (Marat) of the Revolution. Secondly, she claimed that the technique for her portraits was the casting of death or life masks: in other words they had come off the sitters’ faces as a kind of contact print, and therefore were spacially and chronologically the closest and most ‘authentic’ visual documents of what had happened. Thirdly, the final finish of the waxen images with glass eyes, eye lashes, real hair, and carefully applied blood splatters, was so life- respectedly death-like that they must have appeared as the straightest presentations imaginable; it must have been difficult for any viewer to doubt their truthfulness.

Madame Tussaud’s staggering success and resulting popularity in Great Britain corroborates the assumption that she served a need for visual information and satisfied a new lust for images triggered by the French Revolution. Her special talent lay in making wax figures so illusionistic that they seemed to be the person him- or herself. This technological reduction of distance between the viewer and the viewed – an effect, increasing significantly in the visual culture of the enfolding 19th century – alters the perception and experience of news events: the viewer becomes an eyewitness. Yet while the illusionistic powers of the material make the waxworks seem to be documentary, non-mediated representations, the fact that the Revolutionaries are shown as decapitated heads undermines the rational perception of information: rather than simply stating ‘that person looks like this,’ Madame Tussaud’s portraits now provide additional information that engage the beholder at gutlevel. This emotionally charged, close-up visual ‘coverage’ of the French Revolution, I would argue, helped create a new culture of ‘knowing’ about events distant in space and time.

Tight Sight - Liberal Arts in the Service of the Visual Content Industry
Cheryce Kramer
Deutsches Museum, Munich
email: c.kramer@deutsches-museum.de

This paper examines the transformative role of a new institutional paradigm that has taken shape over the past twelve years: the centralized, virtual image databank. Currently the two major players vying for market domination are Getty Images and Corbis -- large conglomerates of former stock libraries which license and distribute the images in their collections for worldwide usage. They peddle everything from historical photographs to contemporary fashion from life-style to wild-life from politics to sports. Each company started with a distinctive business plan and service model, Getty saw itself as an aesthetic innovator in the sphere of stock photography while Corbis strove to become the world's premier virtual museum by acquiring digital rights to the grandmasters from all quarters. But in the heat of contest they have grown increasingly similar. One of the striking points of resemblance between them is the central role held by liberal arts educated employees up and down the company ladder.

This paper examines the glaring contrast between the liberal arts ethos, as embodied by the personnel structure of both companies and articulated in their respective editorial policies, and the impact this novel distribution mechanism is having on the configuration of public space and ideology. Despite the proliferation of digital cameras and home imaging techniques, the diversity of image material in circulation is arguably decreasing. Not only the graphic materials on display, but vision itself is being 'branded'. Casting these businesses as vast technological and infrastructural systems revolving around a soft core of liberal arts educated editors, content managers, creative directors and so on, the paper asks why interdisciplinary humanists have proven to be so useful to the pursuit of narrow commercial interests.

A central ideological rift is identified between the celebration of cultural diversity, in one sphere of public life, and its repudiation, in another. Indexing practices and search engines are dismantled so as to de-mystify the process of how images are tracked and located by customers. Two exemplary case studies are presented, Otto Bettmann's commercial archive (a collection recently acquired by Corbis) and Tim Flach's animal photography (a key Getty photographer whose aesthetic captures the corporate values in question) so as to characterize the changing role of the humanities in the global management of visual content.

From Expedition Drawing to Ethnographic Photography: The Portraits of Brazilian Indians in the 19th Century
Beatrice Kümin
Museum of Ethnography, University of Zurich
email: beakuemin@access.unizh.ch

In the beginning of the 19th century, Brazil was one of the most exciting places in South America. Its colourful nature, the exotic scenery and the „wild tribes" attracted the curiosity of European scientists and artists. They formed expeditions and traveled through the then unexplored parts of Brazil. Following the great South American explorer and geographer Alexander von Humboldt they studied the tropical land, described it in diaries and letters and documented it through drawings and paintings. The emphasis lay on precise and authentic visual reproduction. So it is not suprising that some artists employed optical aids, for example the camera lucida, for rendering their drawings as true to nature as possible.

In one of these expeditions which was commanded by the Russian Baron von Langsdorff, a young French painter with the name Hercule Florence took part. He created some extremely impressive and ethnographically valuable paintings during this long journey before he settled down in a small village near São Paulo, where he tried to find a way to capture permantently the natural wonders of Brazil. Unknown to the rest of the world, he succeeded in inventing photography in 1832 - seven years before Daguerre, also a painter, announced the discovery of photography in Paris.

It may not be accidental that Hercule Florence was a painter before he experimented with photography and started to draw with light. On the basis of ethnographic images, I argue that photography appeared in the footsteps of drawing and painting and was born in a positivist spirit of capturing the world as real as possible. The field of Anthropology welcomed photography as a long awaited scientific instrument of documentation. From the very beginning it was the preferred media for documenting the different societies. In my paper I will discuss whether or not the invention of photography led to a more authentic and more reliable representation of indigenous culture. Was there a fundamental shift in either? Did photography change the style of visual record, and did it change European perception of native Brazil?

Supported by visual evidence, I demonstrate that the camera's eye did not just replace the artist's eye and hand. The Caduveo Indians, for example, renouned for their exceptionally beautiful and skilful body paintings, were portrayed over a period of more than one hundred years in various iconographic documents; from the drawings of the „Viagem Filosofica" by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira to the photographs of the painter and photographer Guido Boggiani (see attachment „Images_Caduveo"). By comparing these images, the astonishing similarities in expression and style, but also some differencies shall be explored more closely.
To clarify the pattern of the body painting of the Caduveo Indians Boggiani decided not to take photographs but draw some sketches. This serves as a good example that each medium has its own advantages as well as disadvantages. Even though photography became the preferred tool of ethnograpic illustration the drawing remained an important element in visual anthropology.

How Do Discoverers Discover?
Gerhard Lang
Schloss-Nauses
Email: ehflang.s-nauses@t-online.de

Introduction

Coming from a particular theory regarding the perception of landscape (Strollology), I will talk about the difference between fragment and unity, near and distant or present and absent in connection with our understanding of nature and the application of images in scientific research and artistic practice.

Focussing on the skull and physiognomy, I introduce particular methods of visualising in the field of Palaeanthropology and Criminology. Refer to a work I did with the help of the Palaeanthropologist at the Senckenbergmuseum (Frankfurt) and the German Criminal Investigation Office.

Talk about Sir Francis Galton's research (Eugenics) and Composite Photography, a powerful visual technique which had an enormous impact on how Galton influenced other scientific investigations and the way his ideas were considered in the field of science.

Refer to the work “The Typical Inhabitant of Schloss-Nauses 1992/2000”.

Will look at a certain period of the history of Meteorology, its interdisciplinary concept and why the visual was so important for the general acceptance of the first cloud classification written by Luke Howard in 1803.

By showing a particular expedition (Nubeology, Cloud Walk 5) which has been supported by Professor Jaeschke and Dr. Bingemer (Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Frankfurt University), I demonstrate essential courses in the atmosphere, also looking at the clouds (water drops and aerosol particles), showing, on a more materialistic basis, the
elemental relationship between the human being and landscape.

Talk briefly about the problem of invisibility (subvisible clouds).

Summarising and final statement.

"Modest Recording Instruments": Science, Surrealism and the Medium of Visuality
Dr. David Lomas
University of Manchester
email: dclomas@talk21.com

This paper will examine the status of visuality within early surrealism. A relationship between the graphic trace in surrealist visual automatism and representational practices in nineteenth century science will be argued. Surrealism shared with the new experimental physiology and psychology an orientation towards an invisible realm of forces which both scientists and surrealists sought to register. In choosing to regard the unconscious as the repository of imperceptible, yet powerfully active forces they were not alone. Freud, for example, spoke of the unconscious in terms of an energetics of instinctual cathexes, circuits, and such like. The surrealists adopted a number of features of an experimentalist scientific approach in their efforts to access this new domain. They set up a bureau de recherche and spoke of their works as objective 'documents' produced under conditions that were meant to bypass subjectivity. My main claim is that the development of new instruments for the registration of invisible bodily and psychic processes brought about a revolution in the medium of visuality that provides an essential background to surrealist images and representational practices. André Breton's First Manifesto description of the surrealists as 'modest recording instruments not mesmerised by the drawing they trace' is more than just a picturesque metaphor in the case of surrealist visual automatism.

In the discourse of automatism, the visual image appears at a singular disadvantage when compared with the written word. Max Morise, in an article that appeared in the first issue of the surrealist review, La Révolution Surréaliste, insisted that temporal flux was a necessary factor in any genuine surrealist manifestation. Writing has the capacity to keep pace with the flow of thought, something that the slow labour of painting or drawing does not permit. Reinforcing his view about the inherent superiority of verbal means, Morise has recourse to an aesthetic discourse stemming from Lessing according to whom verbal signs are arrayed sequentially in time whereas visual signs are disposed simultaneously in space. The notion of parole intérieure, which has been claimed as a source for Breton's conception of surrealist automatism, also supported the bias towards the verbal sign. Here the proliferation of graphic traces within the repertoire of scientific imaging practices proves highly significant since a distinctive property of these as visual representations is the incorporation of a time axis. Popularised from mid-century in France in the field of experimental physiology, by Etienne-Jules Marey most notably, by the end of the century inscription devices were in wide use in psychology, eg. by Alfred Binet, and in clinical medicine. The rise of the graphic method has been studied intensively by historians of science and visual culture, but to date surrealism has not been considered as partaking of this fundamental shift in visual representation practices. My paper will track specific references to graphic traces in the work of Max Ernst, who is known to have attended courses on psychology at university. I shall also posit a more general influence in terms of a possible reception of the drawn or painted automatist line as the trace or transcription of unconscious psychic force and fluxes of energy. This latter will be argued in the case of André Masson whose automatic drawings were widely reproduced in early issues of La Révolution Surréaliste with the sanction evidently of the surrealist group.

Neurotracing the Brainchild
Shannon Lowe
Doctoral Candidate, Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University
email: s.lowe@lancaster.ac.uk

This paper investigates the role of neuroimaging technologies in shaping popular, biomedical sensibilities toward childhood Attention Deficit Disorder with or without Hyperactivity (AD/HD) and its symptoms. It examines the prevalence of neuroimages and their supporting visual, medical language in children's popular, medical fiction and non-fiction literature. By examining the construction of childhood biomedical subjectivity through visual knowledge, it begins to meet with and challenge contemporary theorisations of the biopolitical which elide the role of the visual.

AD/HD research has been bolstered by neuroimaging technologies to such an extent that neuroscience research has recently become the most studied area of the disorder. While AD/HD is still diagnosed by symptoms, there is mounting evidence which argues that the root cause of AD/HD can be found in neuroimages which indicate underdevelopment in the right pre-frontal cortex of the AD/HD brain.

Whilst neuroimaging technologies are contributing to the knowledge production and consequent development of AD/HD as a classified mature disorder, the broader popular scientific knowledge that is being shaped is evidenced by the visualised brain frequently appearing as neuroimage or illustration based on neuroimages in self-help books, newspaper articles and editorials, AD/HD online community logos, and children's literature. The popular life of technoscientific images has been neither commonly discussed in relation to children's texts nor related to problematisations of childhood biomedical subjectivity mediated through visual knowledge.

The paper presents a study of fiction and non-fiction accounts of AD/HD treatment specifically written for children. For example, fictional biographies of an AD/HD child (aimed at children suffering from AD/HD) have the child protagonist frequently referring to their brain, it's 'feel' and particularly its state of well or ill health. And non-fiction accounts of the disorder (again targeted at child readers) inform the child of the operations of their brain, how it acts, and what it looks like (including colourised illustrations of the chemical structure of neurotransmitters such as dopamine). A neurotrace is drawn through these texts while the visualised brain is argued to be moving AD/HD sensibilities and knowledges across scientific and popular scientific/fiction texts alike thus borrowing from and transforming both and contributing to the construction of the disorder.

By studying the way that popular AD/HD children's literature grounds, borrows and transforms its knowledge (images, frameworks, terms) in new visual neuroscience which 'locates' AD/HD in the brain, I will suggest that an historically specific, popular scientific, visual sensibility towards medical disorder marks an important point of departure in contemporary understandings of the formation of biopolitical subjectivity such as they fail address the visual as a terrain of the biopolitical.

The Cinematographe in Rural Ireland 1896-1905
Niamh McCole
School of Communications, Dublin City University
email: Niamh.McCole@dcu.ie

We routinely hear accounts of the effects of the first cinematographe screenings on startled audiences during the last years of the 19th century. Whether running from theatres in fear of advancing trains or marvelling at the realism of the new medium, now canonical accounts of cinema's first decades rarely concern themselves with actual accounts of audience reception of the new medium, particularly outside of metropolitan centres.

I argue for a reassessment of the usefulness of the underlying assumption that new technologies bring with them an ineluctable set of meanings. Rather, I propose that the specific cultural environment constitutes an important resource which is mobilised and referenced in consideration of the merits of the introduced media form.

My research concerns the arrival of the first cinematographe shows in rural Ireland during the decade 1896-1905. Based on analysis of the local press of the period, advertisements and newspaper notices offer a useful insight into how the cinematographe was promoted. The corresponding reviews, which Janet Staiger refers to as 'traces' of events, offer a means to evaluate how the new medium was actually received. An alternative picture becomes possible in which several key themes emerge. In the Irish context, the absence of a well-established visual culture forms the background for widespread lack of interest in technologies of visual representation. By contrast, the introduction of the gramophone is accorded greater importance as a technology of reproduction. A preference for forms of popular culture based on oral tradition becomes a decisive factor in influencing audience's patronage of entertainment events. The influence of cultural-political organisations such as the Gaelic League in promoting interest in "Irish" culture and in denouncing any form of entertainment considered "English" constitutes an important element in relegating the cinematographe and other visual media entertainments of the period to the periphery.

The character of bande dessinée's historical knowledge: technological lag and epistemological anticipation
Dr. Amanda Macdonald
Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, The Australian National University
email: amanda.macdonald@anu.edu.au

The "invention" of the bande dessinée-comic strip or graphic novel-is attributed to Rodolphe Töpffer and the "little stories" of "mixed nature" that he produced in tableaux and texte as early as 1831. Although Töpffer was charmed, it is clear, by the fanciful qualities of his word-image creations, his reflections upon the generic novelty he worked at so seriously make it plain that for him there was also an epistemological experiment entailed in the diversion, as well as a reliance upon sophisticated processes for turning Töpffer's handiwork into printed form. So far as the epistemological goes, Töpffer's "Essai de physiognomonie" (1845) has his little imaged stories prefigure Saussurian semiotics of pertinent difference, and has been persuasively linked by Groensteen and Peeters to nineteenth-century forensic technologies aimed at establishing a semiotic of the civic and counter-civic face. Perhaps three of the most compelling aspects of Töpffer's properly theoretical understanding of his own work are (i) the commitment to "weak" drawing as inevitably informative about character in a way that thoroughly disciplined drawing could not be; (ii) the conviction about the mutually enlightening qualities of word and image; (iii) the insight into the significance of the "trait" shared by the hand-drawn image and the hand-written word from the same pen. Indeed, each of these aspects goes to questions of "information" and "character" in ways that cut across contemporary presumptions placing drawing in a binary with writing, a binary that defined drawing away from the realm of information. Interestingly, developments in photography and other lens-based technologies of the image would substantially alter the relationship of images to the category of the informative, through the notion of the document, but in ways that arguably left the virtually a-technological practice of drawing even further removed from the complex generic regimes of information and knowledge that emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than had any logocentric classicism.

However, the franco-belge tradition of the bande dessinée, or BD, represents a vital anachronism, one might say, in its ongoing commitment to the drawn image and the manuscript as devices of information and knowledge formation. One can point to various instructive "histories of ..." that have appeared in BD form in France and Belgium since the 1960s. While Hergé's Tintin series owes something to technological advances in printing of the day, BD scientificity and historicity are, by the 1960s, effectively anachronistic, technologically speaking. Yet the exploration of the real via the manuscripted word and the drawn image continue, however dully at times, to insist on the value of character and trait to representations of knowledge objects. This paper proposes to consider the play of notions of character, trait and distraction in knowledge-production that is exercised through bandes dessinées. It proposes to do so in ways that both take into account a certain technological non-momentousness about such BD exercises, and contemplate the epistemologically forward "moment" of a genre that constructs its words and its images out of the one graphic trace, thereby refusing any contest between word and image. In this form-cum-genre where the sense of "character" is manifestly acknowledged as entailing both fundamental and elaborate functions, the role of character in knowledge formation arises. Technologically established procedures of reproduction seem to be enabling a genre that anticipates the exhaustion of the characterless document of information.

Through examples drawn from late twentieth-century and contemporary New Caledonia, the question of technological belatedness will be interrogated via the notion of character that is exercised in a range of knowledge-driven, New Caledonian BD projects. The role played by portrayals of Kanak characters in BD histories of New Caledonia will be examined in a generically-situated fashion. New Caledonia is a tiny country disproportionately subjected to lens-generated documentation (ethnographic, intelligence-gathering and journalistic), but which can reasonably expect never to see produced any enacted screen history, in whatever technology of viewing. The BD histories it produces constitute singular forms of representation of national knowledge of racial character. It will be demonstrated that the project to produce New Caledonian history in an approachable and affordable form for a low-literacy country and small population base, happens to establish Kanak historical characters in a generic environment that otherwise allows for almost no such characters, especially in relation to historical knowledge. In BD histories, Kanak are characters in words and image because a cheap, old, accissible technology permits them to be. The object is to ask how drawing, weak and strong, in tandem with manuscript in print, modulate national historical knowledge through character.

Looking for Life: Microscopy and Modernity
Roberta McGrath
Napier University, Photography and Film Dept, School of Design and Media Arts
email: R.McGrath@napier.ac.uk

Visualisation was absolutely central to the rise of the microbiological sciences. The rise of cell theory, improved staining techniques and photography in the nineteenth century placed microscopy at the centre of modern biomedical universe. By the end of the century detailed, abstract visual imagery had conjured up a new understanding of what was meant by the concept of 'life'. Drawing on the history of photography and visual culture, feminist theory and the philosophy of science, I argue that photomicrography has played a significant role in creating the paradox whereby visual representation has been used to take women out of the picture of human reproduction.

Photography and scientific microscopy emerge in the same historical moment and are conjoined. In its early stages of development photomicrographs were extensively produced and distributed, yet this biomedical history has largely been repressed within dominant photographic historiography, as has the history of increased visualisation within the discourses of biomedicine. Both technologies shared a capacity for dissection, for cutting and extracting, isolating and framing. The camera and the microscope are instrumental in their precision and have a capacity for anatomisation as well as an obsession with forensic detail. In this paper
I argue that ancient, residual theories of generation and older modes of representation were incorporated into what in the nineteenth century were ascendent technologies. Such images form a bridge between much earlier, seventeenth century works in microscopy employing engravings, and the seamless, smooth images of the creation of 'life' that surround us now.
These historical representations are crucial in understanding how the subject of human generation has become the corporate science of reproductive biotechnology.

For further information see: Roberta McGrath, Seeing her Sex: Medical
archives and the female body, Manchester University Press 2002

The visual text. The experiences of collaborative creation of hypertext fiction
P. McKinney, R.Sharp and S. Ross
Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute, University of Glasgow
email: P.McKinney@hatii.arts.gla.ac.uk

An image is a text. It can be read in different ways, and like language, offers disparate meanings to all readers. However, this paper will explore the flip side of this concept and look at text becoming an image. We propose that the written word, in the specific circumstance of hypertext fiction, has become a visual image. We will address the premise that the visual medium - the medium of cyberspace in this instance - has given rise not to a demoting of text, but rather a new way of viewing and reading text.
For the past two years, students of HATII's (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute) Investigating Cyberspace module have been exploring the role of hypertext fictions upon the act of reading, and the importance of text. Our experiences of teaching the class have been two-fold. On their first experience with hypertext fictions (Michael Joyce, et al), they are bemused and sceptical. Their initial reaction is the need for closure. The students need to have the order of a book. They want to be able to find the finite in the story, the author-led meaning. Moreover, they found the visual navigation, and interpretative images more important than the actual text; they were distracted and came away from the readings with no understanding or attachment to the fiction. However, we discovered that a rejuvenated, and perhaps new level of comprehension of text and language becomes apparent when they begin to create their own fictions, when they construct collaborations of language on their own terms. They trust their own language, and they understand the use of the visual not as a distraction, but as a creative part of the fiction itself. As they create the hypertext the visual becomes paramount both in the planning stages, and also in the conceptualisation of the navigational structure.

What we propose is that reading these fictions online (and in particular, the poetry that our classes created) demand a new method of reading. Where traditionally books create images over a number of pages, the classes' writings create short, visual images in a matter of a few words. It is more akin to the reading of poetry, but less controlled and protracted; far more immediate and visually dependant. The written word in the hypertext must be visually alive, it must capture the essence instantly and present a visual image immediately to the reader. Rather than the language being the signs to be interpreted, they point to a visual image that can be interpreted by the reader with their own knowledge and experience.

The pages exist not only within the undiscovered whole of the fiction, but also as entities as of themselves. They are discrete, individual visions of text. Within cyberspace, they have to be arresting within the language, otherwise the jaded and skimming reader skips the text and misses the meaning. These random sets of images that the reader has selected then form within their mind as a collective whole. A story is formed. This formation of meaning, and the route to comprehension will be shown to differ quite markedly from traditional reading where the visual is indeed only there to furnish the principle medium of text.

W. G. Sebald's work makes use of various forms of intermediality between text and image. One of the predominant aims of incorporating images is the blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction, i.e. collecting, recording and reconstructing historical and biographical data on one hand and selecting, narrating and re-imagining history on the other hand. This paper investigates the "mutual illumination" (Walzel) of textual and photographic strategies of stating and staging the past and argues that Sebald's texts mirror the visualisation of memory in our culture. His archaeology of the cultural subconscious lays bare what I call the paradoxical double-movement of the privatisation of memory and social strategies of its convertibility into cultural memory in a time of reproducible memory. He can be read as a modern, privatised, traumatised version of the Renaissance and baroque idea of topicality and ars memoria, a reconfiguration and idiosyncratic re-appropriation of a combinatory rhetoric by virtue of photographic inlays.

Sebald's concept of interspersing his texts with visual material owes a lot to Benjamin's concept of archive. The interdependence of image and text shows how the seemingly mimetic approach to reality is always already shot through with contexts that have to be reconstructed. Like Benjamin's "ponderer", who is brought into a dialectic process of thinking by ordering fragments, Sebald enacts his 'recherche à la temps perdu' by spelling out a series of photographic tableaus as a resistance to succumbing to mimetic voyeurism. He creates a realm of translatability and convertibility between non-sensuous and sensuous correspondences (text/image). The author becomes a voyeur who detects idiosyncratic correspondences he can textually process as allegories of cultural memory. Sebald offers a 'mise en abîme' of this triangle of historical subject, present voyeuristic historian-writer and the historical fragments, that evoke stories of re-contextualisation as a constant realm of translation between idiosyncratic condensations of historical memory and its return into collective topicality: In "Austerlitz" the reader is confronted with the blurred picture of a porcelain rider on horseback who is just rescuing a female figure; this little sculpture is behind a shop window which faintly reflects the face of Austerlitz and/or the author taking the photo. The border between the documentary character of the photo as a "message without a code" (Barthes) and its translation into a dialectical language of genealogy is blurred. Sebald's paradoxical aim is a language without a code, which establishes itself during the process of forming one's thoughts in the process of speaking.

Photography has changed our way of conceiving of history; it has also re-defined the way we root individuality in history. Photography does not allow us to evade the gaze of the past:
"[…] ich spüre, dass sie alle drei herschauen zu mir, denn ich stehe ja an der Stelle, an der Genewein, der Rechnungsführer, mit seinem Fotoapparat gestanden hat."
Photography does not "shelter" us from reality, as Barthes thought. It exposes us to history.

1. Sebald, WG: Austerlitz. Frankfurt/Main 2002, p. 284.
2. Ibid., p. 22, referring to Kleist's seminal essay "Uber die Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden"
3. Sebald, WG: Die Ausgewanderten [The Emigrants]. Frankfurt/Main 1994, p. 354f.

The MOO (a Multi-User Dimension Object Oriented Server) has been made famous by Sherry Turkle as a game-space offering people the psychologically healthy (by-and-large) opportunity to experiment with various identities. Recently Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes have developed an open source software program called "Encore" which makes for MOOs an easily usable visual interface, enhancing further its educational capacity (pioneered by Holmevik and Haynes in High Wired). From 1998 to the present, I have been using the MOO to teach critical surveillance of three kinds of territory: the British landscape (the country house), the canon, and postmodern critique. I have asked students, as an alternative to writing seminar papers, to create networks of visually- and textually-furnished MOO "rooms" (characters can move through these Web sites; they have chat capacity). My students do write essays, of the standard, critical sort, in which they find instances of classism and imperialism, for instance, in country-house design, and the deterritorializing capacity of postmodern thought; but they also actually build the country house and the postmodern art gallery or building, deploying their critical capacity in furnishing visual details.

In this paper, I use as examples their papers and my own illustrative class materials in order to show the use of visual detail in MOO virtual reality - that is, the visual detail ordered sequentially, in a network that can be mapped - for stimulating critical thinking about the country house, the canon, and postmodernity - the latter providing our basis for critical thinking. All of these phenomena are conceivable as power-mapping. If indeed design of and landscaping around the country house, as well as in the eighteenth-century arts of pastoral and painting that captured them, were designed to display both the "wasteful magnanimity" and the capitalistic power of their owners, then such strivings ought to be visible in the disposition of artifacts. If the fact that the whole body-image is the best picture of the human soul is due to the construction of authors by print technology, mightn't one be able to dismantle that notion by spreading the human image out across web pages, or perhaps even by constructing novels as rooms in which we can enter and chat, refusing there to reiterate the author's sacred words? And finally, if postmodernism maps territories, how might its own mapping techniques be spread out in virtual space in order to reveal something about how a liberatory geography works and what might be its limits.

These three questions are broached in the MOO papers and classroom materials that I will present during this thirty-minute session.

When the illustrated press was a new media: Confrontation between image and text
Michèle Martin
School of Journalism and Communication, Carleton University, Ottawa
email: mimartin@ccs.carleton.ca

19th Century mass produced illustrated press was very different from the daily press. First, it was usually a weekly paper which did not necessarily concentrate on the 'news' but was rather a reflection on the events of the week. Second, the image was an essential part of its content and, as such, had a predominant role. Actually, not only were the images independent from the texts, except of course the commentaries which described them, but they sometimes contradicted them.

Taking this type of contradiction into consideration, the paper I am proposing will discuss the way the combination image and text could open a new space for debates which could not be expressed otherwise. In that context, it will analyse an important part of the generalist French and English illustrated press (as opposed to the specialist illustrated press such as humouristic press for instance) during the six first months of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. It will use four English periodicals - The Graphic, The Illustrated Times, The Penny Illustrated Press et The Illustrated London News - and five French illustrée. It will essentially analyse the illustrations in the form of engravings in their papers - l'Illustration, le Monde Illustré, l'Univers Illustré, le Journal illustré et la Presse entirety, namely with their captions, titles and commentaries, using visual examples to support the discussion. It will also take into consideration the chronicles in order to do a comparison between the visual and textual content.

The analysis will be put into a larger context. Indeed, it will look at the competitive conditions within which these papers published, either nationally or internationally, their importance and limits, taking into account some of the problems specific to the illustrated press, namely the fact that the text and the image did not travel at the same speed : while the former could be communicated via telegraphy, this was not the case for the latter. This caused a certain amount of paradoxical situations. These questions will be seen as over-determining the content of each paper, in ways which was more or less significantly different from its competitors according to the economic and political conditions within which they were published. At the horizontal level, this affected the formation of public opinion as understood in the classical definition of the 19th Century, and at the vertical level it influenced the public of different classes.

Corpus Anamorphosis: The Embodied Space of Renaissance Perspective
Lyle Massey
Department of Art History, Northwestern University
email: l-massey@northwestern.edu

In the late twentieth-century, philosophical and social theoretical treatments of perspective largely excoriated the way in which this technical innovation historically reduced both vision and representation to an unmovable, centric, metaphysical viewpoint, at the expense of embodied aspects of visual experience. For instance, Martin Jay says of perspective that it "led to a visual practice in which the living bodies of both the painter and the viewer were bracketed, at least tendentially, in favor of an eternalized eye above temporal duration." This has long been the defining framework within which perspective and its history has been viewed. Perspective has been equated with a relentless opticality, which when combined with early modern empiricism and rationalist philosophies, provided an imposing and largely insurmountable epistemological model for centuries to come. More recently, Jonathan Crary has augmented this model by arguing that the distinctly specular nature of modernity was constituted in and by various technologies of seeing based on principles adopted from perspective. However Crary has also argued that within his own explanatory apparatus, vision is only ever one part of the body that lends itself to control and objectification. Even within the visual field the body remains capable of "evading institutional capture and inventing new forms, effects and intensities." Crary at least suggests that the body remains resistant to a given regime of opticality, but his argument remains firmly focused on 19th and 20th century cultural and visual forms. A similar critical look has yet to be turned on the far earlier practices and theories associated with the invention and dissemination of perspective.

In this paper however, I propose to do just that. I will argue that the history of perspective reveals a more complicated relation between body and viewpoint than is generally assumed. In the period between ca. 1413 [probable date of Brunelleschi's experiment] and ca. 1648 [publication of Manière universelle de M. Desargues…by Abraham Bosse], when the pursuit of perspective was a genuine combination of mathematical and artistic modes of inquiry, the body of the viewer/artist posed a consistent problem to theorists and treatise writers. There were several embodied aspects of perspective that were never successfully subsumed to encroaching mathematical abstraction and this in turn may ultimately have led in the 17th century to the splitting of perspective into two directions: toward projective geometry on the one hand and a shorthand technique for creating illusions on the other.

The problem of the body is especially apparent in a class of images that I call "pictures" of perspective: the various diagrams, demonstrations and machines that are not meant to show what perspective can produce so much as they are intended to show the viewer/reader what perspective itself actually is. These images are in many respects familiar icons of Western art history and are often called upon as evidence to support the position that Jay outlines above. But they also struggle to reconcile the finite, embodied space in front of the picture with the infinite, rationalized space beyond the picture plane. I contend that these images show us that the body simply refuses to disappear into the world of geometry. Looking at demonstrations, machines and anamorphic toys illustrated by Albrecht Durer, Vignola/Egnazio Danti, Ludovico Cardi da Cigoli, Jean-Francois Niceron and others, I will argue that they often exploit the ambiguous area in front of the picture plane, and question our assumptions about the body's role in perspective.

Texts, Images, Knowledge: Visualizing Cervantes and Picasso
Carlos Monroy, Richard Furuta
Texas A&M University, Center for the Study of Digital Libraries

Eduardo Urbina, Enrique Mallen
Texas A&M University, Department of Hispanic Studies

email contact: cmonroy@cs.tamu.edu

We are currently developing and using a visualization tool called Interactive Timeline Viewer (ItLv) to depict information in different ways that can help users to explore, browse, and visualize a repository of data. The main goal of this tool is not only to enable users to discover facts, patterns, and relationships among the elements in that repository of data; but also, help users to deepen analyses and raise hypothesis that would otherwise be difficult if not impossible to perform. Here we will present the application of ItLv to two collections; the first one is a textual collation of different editions of Cervantes' Don Quixote, published between 1605 and 1637. The second one is a collection of about 5000 reasoned digital images of Picasso’s paintings.

ItLv and the Cervantes Project
A textual collation is a process in which a text called "base text," is compared against several texts called "comparison texts," identifying all the differences–variants–among them. We use a tool called MVED (Multi Variant Editor for Documents) to perform this process. These variants are in turn stored in a database and can be categorized and annotated by scholars. At this point, on of the challenges is how to present the results of the collation in such a way that the user can analyze them. In ItLv, the results of a textual collation are depicted in a two-dimensional display, in which the X-axis can depict any attribute related to a variant; for example, the edition in which they appear. Similarly the Y-axis depicts the offset in characters from the beginning to the end of a chapter (this is the unit we chose for our analysis). The variants are depicted with rectangles whose length is proportional to the variant's length in characters.

The user has now different lenses to see the collation results. By looking at the initial display, it is possible to see how different or similar the editions are. But the strength of ItLv's resides in its interactive features. For example, the filtering option enables users to filter the elements in the display based on a logical condition. For example, at one point we were interested in determining the use of the abbreviation in the first chapter of Don Quixote. After applying the filter, we discovered that this abbreviation was used mainly in certain pages but not in others; therefore, we raised the hypothesis that this abbreviation could have been the preference of the compositor in charge of the pages in which it appears. The variants are synchronized with the images of the pages in which they appeared. This enables the user to further explore the variant in the original page.

ItLv and the Picasso Project
In our second application, we are using ItLv to browse, explore, and analyze information from an extensive 'reasoned catalogue' of Pablo Picasso's artworks. In this context, we want to discover patterns, relationships, and hidden facts about the artist's artistic production. One case is the study of series of paintings and sketches to determine a possible order within the series, since different orders are defended by various scholars. We are also using a text/thumbnails parallel display to enable users to find correlation between Picasso's writings and paintings.

In the case of discovering patterns, our goal is to use ItLv to answer questions such as: a) Is there a pattern in what Picasso painted during specific seasons? b) How did events in his personal life influence his paintings? c) Which patterns can be identified between different decades? d) What determines membership in a distinct series? e) How do the various series correlate with each other? To illustrate this with an example, we found – based on the artworks so far catalogued – that as Picasso spent his summer in Cannes (France) in 1927, he was particularly productive and mostly used India ink with pencil and pencil alone. We also discovered that flexible, multiple organizations within specific series in 1927 – the Cabana Series, for instance – allow for a more enlightened interpretation of the individual works making up the series. From the art scholar's perspective, the different visualizations allow us to raise a wide range of hypotheses. Thus, we could stipulate that, along many other factors, place and time might have influenced the technique the artist used, and that the integration of a work in one of the series might have determined the extension of its features to other members of the same series and the simultaneous demarcation of differences with respect to works in other series.

Reading Montage: German and American Photo-Books and the Construction of Historical Memory
Andrea Nelson
PhD Candidate, University of Minnesota, Department of Art History
email: nels1646@umn.edu

Through an examination of photo-books-projects that employ a sequence of images to construct visual arguments-my paper will critically examine the logic of montage in order to articulate its effects on visual culture and historical memory. Montage was not simply the practice of combining, overlapping, and repeating photographic fragments in order to produce a discontinuous and shocking image, but was a newly emerging cultural model which included archival projects that collected and structured photographic narratives. The logic of montage involves the suspension of contradictions: montage both disrupts and assembles; it is both critically subversive and ideological; it is neither pure integrity nor pure rupture. Montage proceeds via its interstices, its gaps; the sites of its meanings are the places 'between' the elements of which it is comprised. As a model of visual culture, montage produces doubt about representational truth, especially photography's direct relationship with reality. Therefore through rupture, satire, and sequencing, montage reveals the constructedness of all visual representations. Yet at the same time, it has a deep association with the visual mastery associated with commodification and capitalism. As a model of history, montage offers a non-linear "anti-narrative" characterized by disjuncture and discontinuity. Yet, it also offers an image of the historical narrative constructed out of the fragments of events, and in this sense it is characterized by building, collecting, and engineering. Thus, on one hand it disrupts temporality, but on the other, it has the capacity to show events over time, to suggest duration and development in a more visual and spatial manner.

I will argue that photo-books were critical in the development of a complex visual literacy established by the widespread use of mechanically reproduced imagery produced for and received by a mass audience from 1920-1940. The development of photo-magazines and the illustrated press in Germany had a visible effect on mass media in the US. My paper will examine German and American photo-books such as Kurt Tucholsky and John Heartfield's Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles (1929), Franz Roh and Jan Tschichold, ed. Foto-Auge (1929), M. Lincoln Schuster, ed. Eyes on the World: A Photographic Record of History in the Making (1935), and Walker Evans' American Photographs (1938). These examples reveal the conflicting relationship between image and text as the most effective means of communicating knowledge and history. Many photo-books were understood to be self-explanatory, but what exactly were they saying? In order to analyze these projects, I will examine the writings of Walter Benjamin, who proposes that the process of history is recollection, a space of remembrance, and that memory disrupts historical continuity with political interpretation. According to Benjamin, history is understood in spatial terms, bound into images, not stories, and the task of the historian as technician is to collect, scrutinize, and assemble fragmentary images and insights into a powerful montage that would be read collectively. The role of mass culture in the construction of historical memory is discussed not only by Benjamin but also by other contemporary writers such as Siegfried Kracauer, who argues that widespread photographic production actually devastates the memory image.

In general, scholars have looked at montage incompletely, often focusing on its stylistic effects and debating its exact definition via materials and processes rather than examining montage as a broader cultural phenomenon. In addition, the photo-book has not been established in the critical literature of the history of photography nor art history. An examination into the logic of montage is not only important for the history of modernism, but is also relevant to today's experience of mass media and photographic imagery. Montage is now always everywhere. The use of the internet in knowledge consumption and production is one example of how today we think in montage as hyperlink text leads us to new information sources in an overlapping and serial manner. In mass media, montage still balances precariously between political efficacy and superficial appropriation.

Picture-it!: "One dime - one minute - one picture"
Dr. Rolf F. Nohr
Associate Professor, Institut für Medienforschung, HBK Braunschweig
email: r.nohr@hbk-bs.de

On September 17, 1889 the Frenchman Ernest Enjalbert applied at the Kaiserliches Patentamt [Royal Office of Patent] in Berlin for a copyright for a photographic machine called "Durch Einwerfen einer Münze zu bethätigender Apparat zur selbstständigen Herstellung von Photografien" [self-operating machine for the autonomous production of photos by dropping a coin]. From the 1890s on, this was followed by some similar patents. For example the "Bosco photographic procedure" of Conrad Beritt or the "photo self-selling machine" by Anatol Marco Josepho in the year 1924. In November 1927 the foundation of the European-American Photomaton Inc. and the International Photomaton Inc. with a capital of 3.5 million Marks and an economic profit of 88 million Marks in 1928 took place.

The technical differentiation of the apparatus and cultural form of photography can therefore be described as accompanied by the discourse of "picture-it!"-technologies from its beginning. It is not the precise technical-apparative differentiation which interests me (of course it is also interesting to think about the self-photographing-machine as a predecessor of Polaroid for example). But I am far more interested in the photographic and historical discursive traces within this meaning productive and representational arrangement. Many phototheoretical ideas (such as questions of the use of the apparatus or the production of visual knowledge) are connected to the history of the photomaton. Others are very genuine problems of this special form of the technical production of representation. Very obvious, of course, is the euphoria of the current - or the effects of realtime. Also inherent is the "emancipational gesture" of an "authentic" and "anti-aesthetic" way of producing photographic images (like the German worker photo movement of the 1920s, to the Polaroid series of Andy Warhol in the 1970s and 1980s until to the lomographic movement of the 1990s).

On the other hand the "picture-it!" cabin introduces its very own impulse in the field of technical produced images. For example the very own relation of the subject of the photo and the apparatus itself: the mirror as a panoptic tool of a (picturable) discipline of the self - or as a Lacanian imago, compensating between the apparatus and the "moi"? At least this situation can be described as an opposition of the subject and its reflection "in absentia" of the technical tool (like the lens or other optical devices) or a form of operator. We can speculate if this is maybe a strategy of a technical veiling, a naturalization of the technical and ideological system.

Of equal interest is surely the specific (in the words of Foucault certainly describable as "heterotopy") spatiality of the "picture-it!" cabin. The idea of the cabin puts a clue on a certain spatial situation of isolation and stepping out of an public topology. There are lot of similar places: toilets, the voting booth, the dressing cubicle, the porno cabin or the confessional are some examples of those other "places". The concept of this specific topology continues in the prefered places to put the photo cabins up. Railwaystations or department stores are transistory places (in the words of Marc Augé), passages (Walter Benjamin) or specific places of consumption.

So we have a specific topology of possible strategies of naturalisation as well as a connection to self evident processes of image-making. And this is a last argument for a discursive argumentation of the interference of technical and epistemological formations of the "picture-it!" technology with a wider field of visual knowledge in an genealogic as well as an archaeological sense. Topics of surveillance and video techniques of panoptical systems are as well parallel discussable as the more spatial and subject orientated aspects of the "self-operating machine for the autonomous production of photos".

The Emergence of the Museum in the 'Spectacular' Nineteenth Century
Julia Noordegraaf, MA
Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
email: J.J.Noordegraaf@uva.nl

The emergence of new practices in museum presentation at the beginning of the nineteenth century formed an integral part of a new, visual regime, in which the arrangement and display of objects functioned as a novel way of acquiring and disseminating knowledge. Departing from Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer (1990), I argue that this new scopic regime replaced an older tactile mode that distributed information through a physical handling and a tangible demonstration of objects. Expanding the argument of Vanessa Schwartz' Spectacular Realities (1998), I argue that museum presentation reacted, mirrored and contributed to a commonly experienced, 'spectacular' culture which, constituted by the various visual media at the turn of the century, entailed a new way of looking.

A crucial example for this shift, and the focus of this paper, is the Teyler Museum in Haarlem that in 1784 opened as the first purpose-built museum in the Netherlands. Devoted to the advancement of the science and the arts, the Teyler Museum originally presented its exhibition pieces - scientific instruments - on a large open table placed in the central gallery. This practice of demonstrating objects came to an end in 1802, when the demonstration table was covered with glass cases for the display of fossils, minerals and ores. The choice to cover the tabletop with glass cases signalled a change in the function of this piece of furniture, from demonstration space to exhibition space.

This transition reflects an overarching shift in the visual culture around 1800, for example in the realm of shopping. In the eighteenth century, shops stored their goods in cabinets or drawers, taken out only on request. Thus, it was the salesperson that established a tangible connection between product and consumer. With the advent of arcades and department stores this immediate, personal practice yielded to a new form of visual display that made products visible as windows display and showcase pieces. An analysis of the architecture and layout of the building, the techniques of display and the use of the museum serves to describe the nineteenth-century museum as part of this new, scopic regime. In the concluding remarks I relate the visual orientation of the museum and other nineteenth-century exhibition spaces to the discourse on changes in perception.

The appropriation of the microscopical
Dr. Ohad S. Parnes
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College, London;
History and Philosophy of Science, University of Bern
email: parnes@gmx.de

How is microscopical knowledge acquired? While the history of microscopical instrumentation is a relatively well-studied field, little as been hitherto said on the actual way the microscopical realm has been appropriated by the life sciences over the last the hundred years. Truly, it has been often noted that the microscopical gaze is never naïve, that is has to be learned, and that microscopical observations are often 'theory-laden'. However, theories are in essence verbal, deductive, and hardly visual in their essence. Thus the question remains: how, exactly, are the visual perceptions acquired at the microscopes translated into meaningful biological assertions?

Understanding the dynamics of microscopical knowledge, I will argue, requires an analysis of the imagery involved. By imagery I refer to those words, metaphors, narratives and pictorial elements (iconography) which are neither a logical, necessary derivative of the observed object, nor do they compose part of the scientific theory involved. Instead, imagery is always extrinsic and auxiliary; it has a mediating role, establishing a meaningful connection between an established corpus of scientific knowledge and a given array of visual perceptions.

In the first part of the paper, I will shortly discuss two prominent cases from the history of microscopical biology: the discovery of the animal cell by Theodore Schwann in 1838, and the demonstration of the etiological role of bacteria in infectious diseases by Robert Koch around 1880. In both cases, I will argue, it was not the new microscopical technology that enabled the discovery, but the introduction of a new imagery which enabled the integration of the microscopical observation within an existing body of knowledge. In the second part of my paper I will discuss one of the most dramatic and recent examples of the employment of microscopical techniques in the life sciences, namely PCR (polymerase chain reaction). The reaction is basically an amplification technique, enabling the determination of a complete DNA stretch on the basis of an extremely short and fragmented traces of nucleotide sequence. It is used for a variety of purposes - e.g. in forensic medicine, for the identification of a deceased person or a criminal suspect. Most notable, however, is the employment of PCR for the identification of hitherto unknown disease agents - viruses and bacteria. In this case, the PCR process is complemented by electron microscopy, through which the artificially amplified stretch of DNA is used for the detection and envisioning of the microbial agent in the lesion. When applied successfully, the suspected microbe then appears within the hitherto undifferentiated tissue structure. Unlike traditional microbiological methods, the microorganism is not isolated or cultivated, and its existence is demonstrated solely on the basis of the PCR-based envisioning technique. Here, too, technology alone does not explain the actual way by which the visual perception is endowed with biological meaning. Instead, it is an analysis of the imagery involved - of organisms, agents and diseases - which may provide a better understating of the epistemology of the microscopical observation.

'With Hooke then Through the Microscope take Aim': Lenses, Poetry and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century England
Jane Partner
King's College, Cambridge
email: jcp21@cam.ac.uk

Poetry played a prominent role in the impassioned debates over the epistemological status of seeing that shaped the cultural life of later seventeenth-century England. Scientific and literary discourses existed in dynamic relation as both disciplines participated in the disputes over the power of sight to afford accurate knowledge. As the opposing opinions of the Royal Society microscopist Robert Hooke and the natural philosopher and literary author Margaret Cavendish demonstrate, the status of the knowledge offered by optical technology was particularly fiercely contested. Hooke's Micrographia (1665) opens with a well-known encomium upon the power of sight to enlarge the dominion of human understanding, whilst Cavendish's literary-scientific repost in the Blazing World (1666), describes a utopian society in which every fallacious lens would be destroyed.

Within the context of these discursive crosscurrents, my paper considers the roles of the poets John Milton (1608-1674) and Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) in exploring the more ambivalent possibilities of knowing opened up by lens-based technology. These authors both made searching use of the microscope and telescope in their respective considerations of the morality of empirical enquiry into the material world, and the individual experience of certitude.

Following Milton's meeting with Galileo, the Italian astronomer became the only contemporary figure to appear in Paradise Lost (1667). In an epic concerned above all with 'that false fruit which promised clearer sight', the telescope forms a prominent metaphor for the morality of scientific investigation and the bounds of human knowledge. The challengingly ambiguous references to Galileo's optical research that recur three times in the poem, along with the emphatically negative description of Satan's 'Aerie microscope' included in Paradise Regained, form a central part of Milton's larger treatment of the complex relationships between vision, optics and knowledge. I will set these references in the broader context of other symbolic interpretations of optical devices, and show how Milton exploited the paradoxes inherent in the conventional use of the telescope as a figure for nonmaterial Christian insight.

In contrast to Milton's expansive concern with empirical observation of the macrocosm, Marvell's work makes use of minutely sensitive lenses to scrutinize inward experience. In 'Upon Appleton House' (pub. post. 1681), Marvell employs the early 'flea glass' form of the microscope as part of his visually dazzling presentation of the unstable processes of physical sight as models of cognition. He extends his interest in the spherical lens employed in the flea glass to explore the philosophical potential of other physically similar structures. In 'Eyes and Tears', he denigrates the rigid geometry of Euclidean optics in favour of the paradoxically distorting lenses that are provided by tears, whilst the geometrically constructed sphere that he describes in 'On a Drop of Dew' functions simultaneously as a lens, an anamorphic mirror, and a model of the eye. As delicate tools of introspection, Marvell's lenses use refractive technology to update the literary motif of self-scrutiny in the speculum tradition.

The boma and the peripatetic ruler. Mapping colonial rule in German East Africa, 1889-1903
Michael Pesek
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Seminar für Asien- & Afrikawissenschaften
email: habari@arcor.de

In 1885 German Emperor issued a Protection letter on territories in Eastern Africa, based on treaties with local chiefs made by the young German adventurer Carl Peters one year before. In the following years this rather virtual territory grew steadily either by new treaties made with other chiefs or by treaties with other European colonial powers. For some years this territory was only existent on the maps of German colonial enthusiasts and politicians in Berlin. In 1889, the year when the German state begun to took over the control of affairs in Eastern Africa, Germans claimed an area of nearly two Million qm2 belonging to their colony. But for many years Germans lacked the sufficient personal resources to settle an effective control over this huge territory.

In the interior colonial rule was established through military expeditions and by building up the so-called boma, military and administrative outposts. When German DCOs described the political influence of the boma, they often used the image of circles of control and influence around the boma. According to their reports the influence of colonial rule was the highest nearby the boma, while this influence diminished with greater distance from the boma. Therefore, in large parts of the colony colonial rule was maintained through expeditions. Colonial rule was in most parts of the colony, what I would call a peripatetic rule.

In my paper I will deal with the consequences of such a peripatetic rule. This will be done both for the perception (and even imagination) of the colonial territory and for the everyday praxis of colonial rule. In colonial discourse the lacking presence of the ruler was blurred by portraying the boma as a pars pro toto of the colonial world. The boma was seen as a promise for a coming colonial penetration of African societies. But in many places it remained a promise and the invention of the colonial territory was a play with Potemkin villages. Maps of the colony, in which the boma were inscribed as main places, created a virtual colonial
territory.

Colonial expeditions were not only military undertakings, but also explorations of an unknown territory. To arrive on a certain place and to gain some knowledge of it was in many cases equivalent with establishing colonial rule. But the presence of the peripatetic ruler was ephemer. In everyday colonial praxis Germans tried to redouble their presence by impressive performances of their military power and even by spectacular stagings of their arriving on the scene. To impress Africans was one the most used and often commented strategies to establish colonial rule. This was an early example of what we know today as “shock & awe”. The Germans meant exactly the same. Their spectacular appearance was seen as the magic moment in which the Africans became the subjects of their rule.

Regarding painting through the eyes of a woman. A social technology of gendered viewing in seventeenth-century Rome
Phillippa Plock
School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds
email: finpp@leeds.ac.uk

In the preface to an edition of Annibale Carracci's drawings of market workers, published in 1646, Atanasio Mosini includes a story about how Annibale came to understand the true affect of two paintings by regarding through the eyes of a woman. Carracci, as an educated man, did not have access to an experience of pure affection. Mosini's story is visualised in both of the paintings Carracci tried to judge: two scenes of The Martyrdom of St Andrew by Reni and Domenichino. In both paintings men in authority watch the scene quietly whilst women are prominent, reactionary spectators. These linguistic and visual articulations of viewing arose from cultural constructions of how different people responded to works of art.

This paper considers a social 'technology' of viewing in the historical context of seventeenth-century Rome. Much attention has been focused on the impact of technological advances in observation during this period. For example, the reliance on the microscope in the research of natural philosophers, which tended to exclude bodily sensation, is central to Foucault's analysis of the change between the episteme of resemblance and representation in The Order of Things. Extending our understanding of what a technology can be, we can consider through this paper how these new ways of looking produced a desire to invest in social technologies of viewing. Instead of seeing through an instrument, a gentleman regarder could see through a person considered other to himself.

Whilst scholarly looking was becoming technically controlled and dispassionate, the arousal and appreciation of emotion was increasingly located at a cultural level in the female body. The rise of opera produced a radical change in the cultural dynamics between gender, viewing and affection in seventeenth-century Rome. We can recognise through linguistic, visual and aural mediations of viewing that female pleasure had a social function in this culture. The gentleman regarder could utilise perceptions of female experience in order to vicariously enjoy the emotions from which his public male body was restricted.

Painters, like the musicians of opera, were concerned at this time to uncover the 'true' visual representations of the affetti, which would impress upon the regarder the corresponding emotion. The intense interest in classifying emotions, which arose out of the change of episteme between resemblance and representation, meant that gender characteristics were included in the language of the external signs of the body. The implication of these practices and beliefs is that the gender of a male regarder could be affected by the affetti that were impressed upon his body through his practices of viewing.

Through analysis of a different social and historical context this paper will seek to highlight some areas we may wish to consider when theorizing gendered viewing in our own culture. Whilst Martin Jay has demonstrated how the construction of the patriarchal masculine viewer contributes to current denigrations of vision, we might also like to consider some of the functions of the 'technologies' of the maternal, lesbian or female heterosexual gaze within our own society.

Previewing Digital Visual Knowledge
Stephanie Polsky
Goldsmiths College, University of London
email: stephpolsky@yahoo.co.uk

In Steven Spielberg’s film ‘Minority Report’ we see a vision of the future in which digital visual technology is employed with the aim of orchestrating a moral choreography over its users. Whilst in the twenty-first century visual technology has given us a greater parameter to ‘see’ humanity in all of activities and occupations it has in the same gesture, blinded us to the significance of intention as a filter through which we might engage a view of such actions in the context of the world. Digital visual technology is employed in such a way that it is not concerned with the conflicting motivations of the individual it is focused upon, but rather about what course of action it is most probable for him to take given the various pressures upon him. Moreover, in the film digital visual technology has acquired the ability to ‘preview’ crimes before they are committed, and in doing so functions as a deterrent to crime, a way of curbing humanity’s potential indiscretions before they are ‘realised.’ Preview, rather than being conceived of as a unfettered activity -one that we engage in constantly through the basic physiology of seeing – becomes something hinged to a schema of moral pre-coding hardwired into the core mechanism of human preservation – the human mind. The human mind in this instance runs as short hand for its most highly prized function, sight.

One of the issues raised in the film is that as digital visual technology continues to become ever more sophisticated in its application, sight itself is comes under threat, insofar as it functions as a means of verifying the truth. However, it would appear with the rise of digital visual technology that truth (insofar as it is morally inflected) is not of the essence in visually speaking. Indeed, given the recent findings of physiological research, digital visual technology - in terms of the focus of its interest - has more in common with human vision, than its predecessor, the standard SLR camera. As it turns out, the brain does not employ sight to make an analogue copy of the world in order to store in its memory banks as a precursor to moral engagement with the world. Rather uses the imagery it gathers as raw material from which to constantly re-model and filter through an image of world that serves its interests, namely the preservation and perpetuation of its existence embodied within man. Through this constant reappraisal of the world human sight is then per definition a security mechanism constantly realigning itself in rhythm with the pressures endured by its rapidly bombarded sensorium, a challenge to its survival dating back to the last century. In response a distinct choreography has emerged as mankind attempts to deal with a rate of interactivity with the world unprecedented in its history. The question becomes one concerning what new knowledges will be raised by this interface as the century wears on and what will replace truth in moral significance when it comes to evaluating what we see before us. This essay attempts to guess at these outcomes as we move towards an ever more perfect immersion of the individual within visual culture, one moreover whose knowledge formation has been constituted within the shadow of a network of digital visual technologies.

Re-viewing the Muse: Cartography and Visual Enquiry in Early Greek Thought
Dr. Alex Purves
Department of Classics, University of California, Los Angeles
email: purves@humnet.ucla.edu

This paper seeks to disentangle the complicated visual relationship embedded in the Greek root for knowledge (idein - to know/ have seen) by examining the effect of one particular technology - the map - on patterns of knowledge and thought in the 6th - 5th centuries BCE. It is already evident in Homer that, of all the senses, sight is the only one that is epistemologically valid for the early Greeks, and this sentiment is prevalent in literature down to at least the middle of the 5th century. I will argue that an important shift in the way that the relationship between seeing and knowing is understood takes place with the Presocratic philosopher Anaximander's simultaneous 'invention' of both cartography and prose in the 6th century. I suggest that Anaximander's map and scientific treatise on the 'nature of the earth' marked a turning point in the transition from epic poetry to the prose writers of the 'Ionian school' which followed him. This sparked a radically new form of visual enquiry in which knowledge, for the first time, was no longer gained second-hand via the all-seeing eye of the muse, but rather seen by and for oneself from a human perspective.

The prose writers' decision to reject the muse and her ability to "see/know all things" led, on a very formal level, to what I categorize as a substitution of map for muse in Greek thought. This movement from a divine, inspired eye to a human, technological one also has a profound effect on the way that knowledge and vision are produced. Through an examination of a select number of early prose writers from the Ionian school, ranging from scientists to architects, medical practitioners, and geographers, I will examine how the invention of cartography shaped not only the Greeks' world-view, but also their methods for recounting and recording data accessed through empirical perception. I argue that these writers designed their prose treatises according to a new visual template of their own invention, and which was based on the sphere of vision set in motion by the model of cartography. By the time of Herodotus in the mid-fifth century, therefore, we are faced with a writer who attempts to carve his own path through old and new ways of accessing visual knowledge by attempting to interlock the epistemological vantage point of cartography with his own perspective as a geographer. At the same time, I will unpack Herodotus' criticism of the Ionian map for its overly simplistic attempt to provide the onlooker with a fully synoptic vantage point. It is through Herodotus, in particular, that I shall draw out the implications of what it means to write according to what you see, without recourse to an epic model (cf. Hartog 1988, Romm 1992).

Stafford (1994) has commented on the denigration of the value of visual media in our reading of previous eras and cultures. The selective vision which has caused us, as scholars, to repeatedly refuse to read the invention of prose alongside the invention of cartography speaks to our own attempt to separate literary practices from visual culture. This trend is deep-set, continuing at least since the 19th century's recasting of Herodotus' occupation as histôr, or 'visual enquirer,' into what we now understand by the term 'historian.' On a larger scale, by stressing the far-reaching consequences of visual innovation on ancient thought and practices, this paper seeks to modify the prevailing teleology of placing the ancient world at the opposite end of the spectrum from modernity's "scopic regime" (Jay 1992).

Constructing the Surgical Gaze: Visual knowledge in operative surgery (1760-1830)
Christelle Rabier
Centre d'Histoire des Sciences, Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
email: rabier@clipper.ens.fr

These sketches represent what no can ever see, viz. the manner in which the rectum is guarded, and the knife guided by the fore finger of the left hand, while the knife is struck into the urethra, and run onwards so as to divide the prostate gland. They represent what no one can draw truly, without being at the same time an anatomist, a practical surgeon, and a draughtsman. The parts cannot be so divided and so presented by the anatomist to the artist; what is here represented can never be seen, but only felt in the moment of operation, and can be represented only to one accustomed to operate.

In the "Explanation of the plates", engraved by Mitchell, of his Treatise on the operation of lithotomy (Edinburgh, 1808), Robert Allan emphasises the dramatic surgical evolution which began during the Enlightenment and continued well into the nineteenth century: the creation of a new visual knowledge in surgery. Focusing on the surgical texts that circulated in Paris, London and Edinburgh between 1760 et 1830, I will argue that, parallel to the transformations of the "medical gaze" in the physicians' discourse M. Foucault analysed in his Birth of the clinic, surgeons developed a graphic form of operative knowledge. Drawing on evidence taken from engravings and original drawings, I will study the operational gesture as demonstrated in generalist texts, with an emphasis on obstetrical developments, and the operation for the stone. I will address the problem of the depiction of gesture on the living body, that states the realistic issue at stake in the history of anatomy anew. Better known for the wonderful anatomical atlases they edited, with the help of artists like Rymsdick (M. Kemp), surgeons, under the pressure of the demand for up-to-date operative knowledge from students and colleagues, pass it on by the means of images in the periodical press or textbooks. The operative knowledge, which has been successfully experimented on corpses and patients, is thus rendered by the surgeons themselves in a diagrammatic-realistic approach. Radically new in its dynamic sense, the operative image proves to have heuristic qualities for "imagining the unseen" (B. Stafford), while it serves rhetorical and pedagogical purposes. Its form as knowledge, that was born at the turn of the 19th century, is still sensible in the recent laparoscopic surgery.

Playing at Distance: Photographic Perception and the Aspect of Touch
Susanne Ramsenthaler
Edinburgh College of Art
email: s.ramsenthaler@eca.ac.uk

" The game of distance is the game of near and far..." Maurice Blanchot tells us in The Step/Not Beyond. Food for thought indeed for those of us involved with any kind of photographic practice, be it as makers or viewers.

The topic of distance is at the very heart of the medium of photography. Distant in time and /or distant in place, the photograph has a myriad of roles to play, many if not all of them related to the act of remembrance. These two dimensional mementos traverse space and time, even while the photographer's view is separated from the environment by the black space of the camera's interior.

Following Blanchot's observation, this paper re-examines the commonly held belief of the photograph as 'index' and as a result posits a reclassification of the camera image versus the photogram, a photographic technique based on the contact of the object with the light sensitive surface.
As an extension thereof, the X-Ray also implies the notion of contact while demanding an adjustment in the way we 'read' the resulting image.
As well as the photogram the X-Ray operates equally in the registers of science and art, acting as an important catalyst for the Structurist movement while its medical image changed from an 'image of death' at the time of its discovery to 'a picture of health' during the mass TB screenings of the 50's.

Through their connection with this aspect of touch, these processes challenge the Cartesian hierarchy of the senses while invoking aspects of Gilles Deleuze's fossil and Walter Benjamin's fetish and implying the return of the Aura, so famously negated for the genre of photography by the latter.

Vision and Illusion: Photography, the moon landscape and SFX model-making
Frances Robertson
University of Glasgow, Department of Art History
email: 0003543R@student.gla.ac.uk

In 1874, James Nasmyth (1808-90) published his book 'The Moon: considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite', notable for its 22 photographic plates of the cratered lunar surface and views of the harsh airless moonscape, seared by direct sunlight beneath a black sky filled with unwinking stars. In actuality, these images had been generated from photographs of small plaster hand-made models, backed by paint-spattered black card. Nevertheless, one of the most remarkable aspects of the reception of these constructed images at that time was the willing acceptance of their reality by astronomers with direct experience of observation such as Lassell, Herschel, and de la Rue. Moreover, their own observations had been mediated by the telescope and depended partly on an active imaginative reconstruction by each viewer. The evolution of the photographic plates for Nasmyth's book, and their several stages and processes of production, which included telescope observation, drawing, modelling, and photography, will be considered in relation to the construction ofthe 'virtual reality' of these illustrations. That reality was dependent on the participation of the viewers and exploited their familiarity with some aspects of the technologies of vision, in combination with a shifting repertoire of technologies of reproduction. Photography, for example, was used for its integrating, or mark-making, function to produce an illusory environment, and as a mode of reproduction. In the process it also simulated a direct connection with that distant object, the Moon. This paper will draw on a range of sources, including unpublished correspondence with astronomers, the publisher and printers from the John Murray Archive, while placing this within a wider consideration of the role of the audience in constructing illusory images.

Mosaic time of the image *
Richard Rushton
Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University
email: r.rushton@lancaster.ac.uk

Fredric Jameson has dismissively described some aspects of contemporary images in terms of their "enfeeblement of narrative time", while Gilles Deleuze has celebrated, in the cinema, the unravelling of narrative chronology in what he calls "the time-image". Is the upsetting of narrative time ¾ an almost universally regarded tendency of the contemporary image environment ¾ therefore indicative of the erasure of traditional hierarchies (such as "dramatic unity") and a key to furthering the freedom of the image, as Deleuze would argue? Or is the waning of narrative time more indicative of a negative slide into a kaleidoscopic world of commodity images, as Jameson has protested?

These issues will be discussed in terms of a number of ways in which the contemporary image environment has been theorised. They will briefly be discussed with reference to:
· "flow" (Raymond Williams) and "modularity" (Manovich)
· "fragmentation / hyperstimulus / attractions" (eg., the "cinema of attractions")
· "eclecticism" (Lyotard)
· "enregistrement" (Jameson) and "haptic cinema" (Laura Marks)
· "distraction" (Benjamin, Kracauer)

My claim is that these contemporary states of the image can only be regarded as positive if the are:
(a) inventive, ie., if they create new states of being and/or knowledge, and do not merely replay, in a fragmentary way, well known and pre-rehearsed states of things; and
(b) non-teleological, ie., if they do not presuppose an end-point where the fragmentary invention of the image would be resolved or closed down.

* The notion of "mosaic" time is taken from Bill Nichols' analysis of the structure of Frederick Wiseman's documentaries; see Nichols' Ideology and the image: social representation in the cinema and other media, Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1981.

Investigating vision: Thomas Young, Michael Faraday, and David Brewster on microscopical deceptions
Dr. Jutta Schickore
University of Cambridge
email: js427@cam.ac.uk

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, a number of British men of science, among them Thomas Young, David Brewster, and Michael Faraday, investigated microscopical deceptions. In my presentation, I examine the contexts of these investigations and consider if these researches had any lasting epistemological consequences for the microscopical enterprise. Contrary to what one might expect, investigations of microscopical deceptions were not immediately inspired by particular instances of erroneous microscopical observations in microanatomy or natural history. Rather, they emerged from the multifarious field of optics, which comprised the study of light, optical instruments as well as vision. In the first part of the paper, I illustrate how Young, Faraday, and Brewster studied the nature and mechanisms of visual perception: They not only employed the conceptual framework of optics but also conducted experiments to elucidate the process of vision and what might go wrong with it. In these experiments, they varied the circumstances of the perceptual setting, as, for example, the illumination and the colour of the perceived objects, and they designed novel optical devices to produce peculiar perceptual environments. In these experiments, the microscope functioned as one circumstance among others in a malleable perceptual environment; it was thus on a par with other optical contrivances and peculiar modes of illumination. All three investigators located the actual source of visual deceptions including microscopical ones in the observer's judgement. Their notion of the process of vision suggested that deceptions could be avoided through correct interpretations of actual perceptual situations. In the second part of the paper, I draw attention to the fact that these investigations of microscopical deceptions do not substantiate the account of early nineteenth-century vision studies that Jonathan Crary has offered in Techniques of the Observer. Crary has argued that the 'radical transformation' of the image of the observer in this period had grave and far-reaching epistemological consequences. In particular, he maintains that through the relocation of vision in the 'physiological thickness' of the body, vision was "redefined as a capacity for being affected by sensations that have no necessary link to a referent, thus imperiling any coherent system of meaning." But as I show in my presentation, the epistemological consequences that were drawn from the studies of perception and its failures were rather optimistic: Precisely because the sources and mechanisms of perceptual fallacies could be explained, they did not ultimately threaten the possibility of acquiring perceptual knowledge.

Alien Life: Ultrasound as Extension of and Challenge to the Medical Gaze
Jennifer Shaw
Emory University
email: jlshaw@LearnLink.Emory.Edu

This paper explores the contrasts in usage and terminology between visual technologies based on locating and diagnosing pathologies, and that of ultrasound in obstetrics in order to complicate and extend Foucault's arguments concerning medicine and the visibility of the body.

As Foucault has argued in The Birth of the Clinic, in early modernity medicine had already mapped the body into knowable areas, and classified those areas according to their functions and their health: the ability to make the invisible processes of the body visible was well underway by the time of the Enlightenment. However, the ability to view and identify the interior of the body without cutting, as with the x-ray, and to observe the dynamics of the life processes without interfering, as with the photographic experiments of Muybridge, altered the medical landscape beyond anything previously imagined. It is not simply that the body became ever more visible during the nineteenth century: visibility transformed our understanding of the body from an opaque material network into a knowable, measurable, visible series of surfaces which then can be laid bare. From the earlier inventions of the microscope to the later uses of tomography, the body has been transformed into a fully visible, and therefore knowable, terrain.

In particular, this paper contrasts the use of ultrasound to monitor pregnancy with the usual procedures of medical visual technology. In contrast to other uses of visual technology in medicine, which are primarily employed for the diagnosis of pathology, ultrasound is regularly used in an otherwise non-pathological situation. The very terms used to describe radiology examination, such as "detect," and "target," are indicative of the medical attitude towards pathology: that it is alien, secret and dangerous. In the case of pregnancy, the fetus itself is the alien presence which must be regulated: yet it cannot be cast in the same terms as pathologies. The visual monitoring of the fetus extends Foucault's argument concerning the medical gaze into the last frontiers of visibility: the interior workings of pregnancy. This extension yields two distinct effects. The fetus is a challenge to the gaze, insofar as it cannot be treated as another body part or alien presence. At the same time, because surveillance begins before birth, the modern medical subject is now made object of the gaze earlier than ever before: this paper will discuss the cultural consequences of this development.

Perspective, Remembrance and Techniques of the Virtual
Rob Shields
Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University, Ottawa

This paper considers the parallel intersection of the virtual and visual, memory and representation . It demonstrates the importance of illusion and the virtual (the 'ideally real') in visual apprehension of the 'actually real'. Although contemporary communications technologies highlight one form of the virtual, it has long been with us in the form of social techniques of memory and more mechanical approaches to visualization, such as perspective. Using the case of perspective, the virtual and visual will be shown to offer us pathways to understanding the relationship between recollection and representation.

Techniques of the virtual create the illusion of presence through props, simulations, partial presences (such as a voice conveyed by telephone or thoughts written in a book) and rituals which invoke the past and make absent others, present. They aide the movement from the virtual to the actual by giving concrete presence to intangibles and memories. In the twentieth century, 'the decoupling of space from place accomplished through the use of the telephone implies that 'virtual' life has been coming for a long time' (Hakken, 1999:90) - and has been with us even longer in the form of social technologies of memory.

The ontological status of the virtual destabilizes realist epistemologies based on simple oppositions between real and abstract. Virtualities are intangibles which are nonetheless real. Following Proust, Bergson and later Deleuze describe memories as virtual. Neisser and others provide cognitive and psychosocial models of how memory is actualized through performance. Recent research in information theory provides the linkange between representation (information) and knowledge-making.

Recollection is also facilitated by representation. Perspective, used in images since the renaissance, is one such technique of the virtual. It is a convention for representing scenes, and giving representations the appearance of being virtually real. Rather than being strictly accurate, perspective creates the illusion of space of a two dimensional surface for fantasy and contemplation. The secret of great classical art is often how it breaks the mechanical rules of perspective to create a convincing illusion. For example, many of Michelangelo's sculptures (eg. the various Pieta) are not simply images of actual bodies (as in an abstract representation), in effect they are virtualities. In the case of perspective, the realist preoccupation with simulating the material world is defended on geometric grounds, but static perspective compositions composed from single-point are not the 'natural' way of seeing things. But perspective becomes more than a technique; 'seconded', perspective becomes naturalized as a way of seeing that dictates a visual approach to the world in which we are preoccupied with space and geometric alignment. Time, lost without the sequentiality of movement, is rendered virtual with the effect that images come to be frozen snapshots of some point always in the past. In effect the line between actuality and virtuality is one which shifts, lending techniques such as perspective an often-neglected historicity.

'A Warehouse filled with statuary that sent its goods principally to the English and American markets' (J.F.Cooper 1838). The Micali emporium in Leghorn, 1760 - 1868
Dr. Cinzia Sicca
Associate Professor, University of Pisa
email: sicca@arte.unipi.it

This paper intends to look at a little studied phenomenon, that of the emporium or warehouse which arose in the free port of Leghorn during the second half of the eighteenth century, and thrived for roughly one hundred years. From an analysis of contemporary guidebooks, it appears that no equivalent existed in the ports of either France or the rest of the Tyrrenian coast, and Leghorn, which enjoyed a particular fiscal and political status, was not just an important market place but also one of the first places in which the concept of "department store" was first tested out in its early form.

Although there were several shops in the city, only the one established in 1760 by Giacinto Micali offered a wide range of goods, material objects as well as artefacts. Surviving catalogues, as well as epistolary exchanges, or descriptions such as the one by Fenimore Cooper, enable us to reconstruct not only the goods on offer but also the way in which they were exhibited, with ancient Egyptian pieces displayed alongside English prints, Wedgewood ware, embroidered Chines silk, jewellery, ceramic, crystal objects, as well as marble and alabaster sculptures - either copies after the antique or from celebrated modern pieces.

The paper will argue that these spaces, and the magazzino Micali more specifically, played a crucial and understudied role in breaking up the system of supply of artefacts in Italy, removing it from the sphere of the connoisseurs, and the exclusive domain of the aristocratic classes. The artist-patron relationship made room for a less personalized interaction, and for the true commodification of art to the benefit of all those customers who lacked either the social self-assuredness or knowledge required to approach an artist or sculptor. The public space of the emporium or warehouse fostered an interaction with objects that up to that point had been occurred in private or semiprivate spaces. Artefacts were put on a par with fashionable clothing and thus made available to all those people, Italian as well as foreigners, who had little experience of art buying.

Focussing particularly on sculpture, the paper will look both at the nature of the market targeted by the Micali, and at the way in which the visitors to their emporium were affected by its visual presentation. Examples (the Tripoli Column, Annapolis; the sculpture at Kilruddery House, co. Wicklow) will also be discussed of works provided on commission but originating in a visit to the warehouse by the patrons.

Photography and Psychoanalytic Knowledge
Pia Sivenius, M.Soc.Sc.
Research Coordinator,University of Art and Design Helsinki
email: pia.sivenius@uiah.fi

My paper analyses the work of the internationally known Finnish photographer Marjaana Kella, with particular emphasis on her exhibition "Hypnosis". My purpose is to show that contemporary photographic art has an important connection to psychoanalytic theory.

As a field of art, photography is new. However, it has been linked with science ever since it was invented. As early as the 19th century, photography became - by the side of the natural sciences - an important part of the budding human sciences, including psychoanalysis. Freud's teacher Jean-Martin Charcot had thousands of pictures taken of hysterical people in the photographic laboratory he founded in the hospital of Salpêtrière. Charcot was a visualist who believed in what symptoms, gestures and postures can tell and registered what he saw in his theatre of living pathology.
(Slides of these old pictures of hysterics and persons in hypnosis. If there is time, I will also show some slides and discuss briefly the work called Interim by artist Mary Kelly, in which she interprets Charcot's attitudes passionnelles.)

Freud participated in Charcot's lectures and became at first interested in hypnosis as a therapy. But Freud was more interested in what is not seen or is only seen as holes. He began to study the psychic topography under the surface of the skin, where a visual study of the members of the body is unable to penetrate. He calls the unconscious "the other scene". It is a scene on which things are often left unrepresented.

Photography has a strange power to speak about that which remains unspoken or unacknowledged. The concepts of "fantasme" and gaze developed by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan include not only the world of the imaginary but also the structural basis of its reconstruction. The gaze which is always outside seems to guarantee that there is more to see than what I see: the invisible returns from the world back to the subject, thus opening a state of visibility. In a photograph, we may be able to see how visibility becomes visible. (Slides of Kella's work.)

Marjaana Kella's photographs of people in hypnosis bring out the conditions of visibility. These pictures do not register, as Charcot claimed the pictures he took of his patients did, but one can see oneself seeing and hear hearing in them. Loss of control, relaxation, a vague recollection and involuntary movements seem to imply a flaw or deficiency of some kind. But in fact they bring forth the structure of desire as well as various unreal objects, such as daydreams, phantasies, melancholy or shadows. In so doing the camera's eye acts as a special kind of memory and changes the nature of observed fact

(Marjaana Kella's CV and photographs from the series Reversed http://www.galerie-poller.com/ > program)

Anonymising the Patient: Clinical Photography in the late Nineteenth-Century
Paula Summerly
Doctoral Student, Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Glasgow,
email: 9809416S@student.gla.ac.uk

"As regards the taking of photographs representing diseased conditions, or natural deformities, it is evident that the first duty of a photographer is to ascertain precisely what points it is most important to represent, and secondly to consider how far it is necessary to retain a tolerably accurate relation between that and other parts. [W]here abdominal tumours are shown, the face is especially thrown out of focus … outline is important, all artistic ideas must give way, and the back-ground be so black as to ensure a rigid line of light."
Henry Wright, 'Address on the Medical Uses of Photography', The Photographic Journal, (1867)

During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, technical advances in photography and printing led to dissemination of clinical photographs into an increasing number of contexts, they included hospital ward journals, pathological reports, teaching collections, medical periodicals and textbooks. Patients were photographed in professional portrait studios, or, by physicians and surgeons within the context of the hospital. Professionals and amateurs alike could consult contemporary medical and photographic periodicals for advice on how to photograph patients. Just what the accepted clinical conventions were at any given time however, was open to the individual photographer's interpretation. Nevertheless, if there was a standard, it was perhaps exemplified by either whole body or cropped shots, taken before and after treatment. The sitter was often photographed while semi-naked, either standing or sitting in front of a backdrop. Props, such as blankets, tables and chairs were sometimes used to introduce an artistic element into the overall composition. The patient's face was however, omnipresent in late nineteenth-century clinical photography. Not only did the face convey specific pathological information, but it also allowed the viewer to see the disease within the context of the individual. The sitter's facial expression could imbue the clinical image with an emotive content. Thus, many clinical photographs were a synthesis of the clinical convention and contemporary portrait.

Anonymisation was in part, a consequence of the dissemination of the clinical photograph. The eyes were perceived by many as the key to patient recognition. As a result, medical men devised and utilised a number of techniques, such as the 'black box', to conceal the sitter's eyes. Anonymisation also became part of the composition process, when patients were photographed wearing a blindfold for instance.

This paper will begin with an illustrated overview of the methods used to anonymise clinical photographs that featured in a selection of late nineteenth-century medical periodicals and textbooks. Obscuring methods, such as the 'black box', will be contrasted with those used to draw the viewer's attention to a particular detail in an image. For example, 'mapping' was a method employed to demarcate areas of pathological interest that had been identified through auscultation and percussion. Such details were often difficult to photograph, and were therefore clarified through the drawing of a line, circle or cross for example, either on the patient's body, or on the print. Using contemporary contextual sources I shall explore the motives behind the seemingly selective practice of anonymisation, and the importance of the patient's age, status, gender and disease in the decision making process. Many of the symbols used to anonymise and highlight late nineteenth-century clinical photographs are still utilised in modern medical texts. Anonymity and confidentiality are integral to modern clinical photography, what impact will these issues have on the future of patient-image centred research?

Rustling Leaves and Blimp-shots: CGI, Lumières, and perception after photography
Dr. Damian Sutton
Department of Historical and Critical Studies, Glasgow School of Art
email: d.sutton@gsa.ac.uk

This philosophical paper takes the tenets of photographic realism, as demonstrated by recent computer generated imagery (CGI) in mainstream cinema, and connects them to the development of these tenets in the period of early and pre-cinema and photography history. The paper first draws on recent enquiries by Lev Manovich, Scott McQuire and others to demonstrate how current use of CGI in the arts - particularly in the creation of believable historical worlds - relies heavily on a 'rhetoric' of the photographing camera that CGI technology has otherwise left behind. Films such as Gladiator and Road to Perdition, for example, make nostalgic or cultural reference to the indexical recording of chemical photography (in the replication of recognisable camera viewpoints such as the 'blimp-shot', or camera defects such as unwanted reflections).

However, at the root of this camera-reality is the acceptance, during its early popular history, of the camera itself as an instrument that revealed reality infallibly. The Lumière Cinématographe, as will be demonstrated, represented a quantum leap in its depiction of movement and time, but one that was also accessible as a science to the public at large. The popular dissemination of the Cinématographe's inner workings and subsequent 'reconstitution' of reality has lent an authority to a general 'cinematic' perception of time and space which persists today. This easy adoption of the photographic and cinematographic metaphor for perception is visible in the work of Henri Bergson, who 1896 described memory as a "kind of photographic view of things", and in 1907 described consciousness as a "kind of cinematograph inside us". This common metaphor, developed in more recent writing such as Gilles Deleuze's on Bergson and Cinema, suggests that Bergson's early interest in the Cinématographe offers an important view of cinema up to and including any 'post' cinematic form which adopts the vocabulary of the camera.

This paper revisits Bergson's work through Deleuze and places the Cinématographe's image of time and space in the context of pre-cinematic (and now post-cinematic) forms. The paper will put forward the idea that the adherence of contemporary digital cinema to the paradigms of the photographing camera is in fact evidence of an underlying modern 'cinematic' perception of time and space that bears the technological imprint of the early cinematic and photographic forms which revealed and went on to model that perception.

A view inside the skin: Microscopy and the illustration of diseased skin
Mieneke te Hennepe,
PhD Candidate, Department of History, Universiteit Maastricht
email: M.Tehennepe@HISTORY.unimaas.nl

This paper concerns the microscopic study of the diseased skin in the first half of the nineteenth century. The skin is a fascinating object, since it represents the edge of anatomical research. Although the micro world of skin tissue was already visualised after the invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century, it was only in the first half of the nineteenth century that the skin, together with the rest of the body, became the subject of a broad microscopical investigatory tradition.

The use of the microscope as a research tool in the 1830's presented a new impetus for investigation in biology and medicine. Both the healthy and the diseased skin were looked at in a new way within the emerging fields of physiology and histopathology. New microscopical knowledge of functions and processes placed within the skin was put forward. With the help of the microscope, the skin itself was laid open. By visually penetrating the skin, the microscope was involved in the shaping of the skin as a functional organ.

In this paper, I intend to show that the illustrations of the diseased skin played an important part in the construction and reception of microscopically mediated knowledge of the diseased skin. As such, the microscopical illustrations seemed to function as visual (re)constructions of the investigative process with the microscope. Furthermore, these illustrations were involved in the expression, communication and dissemination of new knowledge about the skin and its diseases.
The paper discusses several illustrations of diseased skin among which are the illustrations from Die Hautkrankheiten durch anatomische Untersuchungen erläutert (1848) by G. Simon, a student of Johannes Müller. I focus in particular on the pictorial representation of microscopical knowledge of the skin, such as the depicting sequences and the style of illustration.

Standards (A Salute to the 20th Century)
Luis Valdovino
Associate Professor of Art, University of Colorado, Boulder
Email: Luis.Valdovino@colorado.edu

Standards (A Salute to the 20th Century) is a video presentation and discussion of the experimental video work Standards. Standards, made in collaboration with Dan Boord, is a travelogue of portions of the USA, Europe and Latin America that mixes the concept of standards with facts and fiction to explore the state of our culture at the end of the 20th Century.

Within Standards we encounter Paellas in Spain, a pot of chili in Kremmling, Colorado, Papas Fritas (French fries) and Wal-Marts everywhere. A hog calling contest in Ohio, guided tours of the first atomic bomb test site, the International UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico, a wedding in Argentina, and inter-net rumors of blood sucking animals which seem to be terrorizing Mexico and Puerto Rico are all a part of this trip down memory lane and across the friendly skies.

It is the end of a road trip and Standards is there looking for the next award winning rest area. This is the century which brought us the parking meter, television dinners and enough plutonium to annihilate every living creature on earth. So how does it feel to be a part of all of this? Standards is there to offer its condolences to road weary travelers that somewhere around the corner there is a bigger pumpkin pie to be found and another festival to be enjoyed.

Put a grid around the world, standardize consumption, then establish a global economy of experience: instructions for the new
Millenium. The unregulated Standards puts the grid on the griddle and watches it sizzle. Unified consumption as expressed through super-size fries and other cohorts of cholesterol is viewed the world over, then debunked in favor of regional idiosyncrasy.

Like an alien abduction, though one not covered in the section on Roswell, this gasping mock-doc unravels and is replaced by curious anecdotes of Americana. As we see, the atomic clock at the National Institute of Standards may be synchronizing the world, but between the beats weirdness still reigns.

Standards is completely unpredictable, it is weird grab bag of impressionistic travelogue, observation and home-spun philosophy. Standards unfolds into subtly constructed personal views of places, people and time. It documents the travels of the intrepid filmmakers to famous and not so famous tourists destinations such as Los Alamos, Greenwich, Roswell and other far flung locales.

Interwoven with the sometimes enhanced and poetic imagery are simply told facts of the locations themselves. Standards explores the inherent inter-relationship between visual culture and tourism and becomes itself the strangest holiday slide-show you will ever see. In its presentation, Standards offers a mixture of subjective, local and global perspectives, amounting to audiovisual cultural studies in condensed form.

LabWork: artistic in-sights in medical and microbiological visualisation technologies
Dr. Miriam van Rijsingen
Institute for Art History, University of Amsterdam
email: m.van.rijsingen@hum.uva.nl

Visual artists are rapidly learning to understand and use medical visualisation technologies in order to explore the invisible insides of the human body. Their research is not only inspired by mere fascination for otherwise invisible body-scapes, but also by their interest in the development of visualisation technologies (as such), and the impact of new technologies on perception - especially on the perception of the body. Or as Canadian artist Louise Wilson says, "I am interested in the perceptual, social and transformative aspects of science and technology". Her touch-screen installation Possessed is a fine example of her work, based on laboratory research (using MRS en MRI-technology) in which she herself was physically involved. Some artists got themselves trained to work with pipettes, chemicals, (high-tech) microscopes, and specialised computer programmes to produce work on cells, bacteria, and viruses. As for example Helen Chadwick did. In step with the (spectacular) developments in medical and microbiological research, artists are now probing the molecular biology laboratories, especially those in which experiments and research is being done on genetics. With this development new issues are at stake concerning the visual, embodiment, and perception. Underneath these issues the question of an encounter and understanding between art and science takes a new turn.

In this paper I will focus on artworks that are products of labwork, involving complex (visualisation) technologies. Two strands of theory will guide my analyses in order to explore these new issues. First I will follow Amelia Jones's proposal of a "techno-phenomenology" and the way in which Katherine Hayles develops a new theory of perception and embodiment in the era of information technology. Especially her idea of the body as "flickering signifier", and her exploration of the relationship between data & flesh, code & organs, digits & matter as complex transformations and feedbackloops. According to Hayles it is necessary (in the era of informatics) to understand the feedback- and feedforwardloops between production, signification, consumption, bodily experience and representation. Second I will follow Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Ian Hacking and Evelyn Fox Keller in their ideas about the experiments in the laboratories for Molecular Biology and the 'problem' or function of representation in the (material) labwork. Experimental Molecular Biology has opened new 'spaces of representation' of living organisms. As a result, new ideas about reading/seeing are being developed. It is understandable that Rheinberger presses for a joint "conceptualisation" (Begrifflichkeit) between scientists and artists. Not as a set of concepts (Grundbegriffe) but as a problematisation of representation itself.

These are challenging ideas (and challenging working spaces) for visual artists. I will explore these ideas further with several different examples of visualised DNA.

The Magic of the Magic Lantern
Koen Vermeir
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University
email: kjv21@cam.ac.uk

The magic lantern is a kind of crossroads where different cultural spheres converge. As an optical instrument, it embodies the intersection of mathematical, physical and technical "sciences"; it shows the interaction between educated, popular and courtly cultures; and it had a place in collections, demonstration lectures and texts. It is, furthermore, an excellent case to study the interaction between text, image and the different modes of displaying. In the secondary literature, the magical qualities of the lantern are unmarked or taken for granted. The magic lantern is either taken as an ancestral device of the motion pictures (Cook 1996, Mannoni 2000) or as a curiosum provoking wonder (Findlen 1990). I will argue that there was "magic" involved in the magic lantern in a nontrivial way. Different aspects of magic will come to the fore in this paper, but I will focus specifically on the lantern's capacity to produce "illusions" and to show the invisible. I will explore the different notions of "illusion", at work in the seventeenth century, and furthermore, concentrating on the work of Kircher and Vallemont (and with attention to their particular contexts), I will argue that one of these notions bears upon a particularly Baroque type of scientific demonstration, which I will call "analogical demonstration". The magic lantern (together with e.g. anamorphoses) visualised the invisible. I will show that the magic lantern, in its creation of illusionary images, embodied a counter model for the way of "objectivity and truthfulness" which science eventually claimed to take. This is further illustrated by the sudden shift in the use and social status of the magic lantern, which occurred in the early eighteenth century, and which was caused by the rise of this new "objective" or "scientific" view. Finally, I will draw more general conclusions about how prevailing cultures of illusion, tricks, entertainment and "mass" media are intimately connected with concurrent notions of truth and knowledge. Truth and illusion are two sides of the same coin, i.e. they are inseparably intertwined.

PICTURING THE MOON: HEVELIUS' AND RICCIOLI'S VISUAL DEBATE
Janet Vertesi
S&TS, Cornell University
email: jav38@cornell.edu

This paper will focus on the selenographic images produced in the mid-seventeenth century by two lunar cartographers whose lunar mapping projects competed for widespread acceptance: the private Danzig astronomer, Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687) and the Italian Jesuit, Giambattista Riccioli (1598-1671). Although Hevelius' Selenographia (1647) was applauded for its many detailed, self-engraved pictures of the moon, his cartography and proposed nomenclature were supplanted by that offered in Riccioli's Almagestum Novum (1651), whose maps still form the basis of our current lunar nomenclature in spite of his simplistic pictures and propounded Earth-centred cosmology. While this paradox cannot be explained in full through a pictorial analysis, previous work has not considered the role of images within this dispute further than a superficial examination of accuracy or political appeal. Here, scholars have neglected one of the keys to understanding this historical debate, its outcome and ramifications. Further, as these images played a primary role in their books, overriding any textual claims, scholars have also neglected to examine a debate that took place almost entirely in a visual sphere.

Confronting the question of why Hevelius' lunar nomenclature was eventually supplanted by that of Riccioli, this paper will compare and analyse three types of images common to both Hevelius' Selenographia and Riccioli's Almagestum: images of the moon in plena facies, cartographies with original nomenclature, and frontispieces. Central to this analysis is an analytical tool offered by Svetlana Alpers in The Art of Describing (1983): the categories of narrative and descriptive art. The use of Alpers' dichotomy provides a new perspective on an old debate, not only focusing the viewer on the images themselves as conveyers of knowledge about the world, but also highlighting Hevelius' and Riccioli's fundamentally contrasting concepts of representation, seeing and understanding, and naming. Through this analytical lens, the most interesting contrast between Riccioli's and Hevelius' maps is not due to their differing assumptions about what the moon is and where it belongs in cosmography, but is rather due to their differing assumptions about what representation is, and how the visual medium can generate knowledge about the represented object.

This paper will directly challenge the assumption that the visual medium always necessarily played a secondary role as an illustration of text in pre-electronic cultures. Scholars might only now be turning their attention from the literary to an appreciation of the role of the visual, but this does not preclude the existence and power of past visual cultures in which images functioned in their own right as critical sources of information, vehicles of persuasion or contributions to contemporary debates about visuality. Further, as telescopes and drawings were both relatively new to astronomy (formerly a purely mathematical venture), a focus on Hevelius' and Riccioli's visual debate explores the tensions evoked by new technologies of vision, cultures of perception and ideas of experience in their changing field; while both astronomers grappled with questions about how to generate experiential knowledge visually and what kinds of knowledge or experience images should provide, the successes and failures of their competing mapping projects ultimately shaped the early course of the visual culture of astronomical imaging.

The origins of rhythm in visual aesthetics
Joseph Wachelder
Department of History, Universiteit Maastricht
email: Jo.Wachelder@HISTORY.unimaas.nl

It is well-known, from classic authors as Benjamin, Simmel and Kracauer that the 'modern' visual experience, as experienced in the metropolis and in the film, is characterized by rhythm. In the twentieth century rhythm has become a core concept in visual aesthetics. We describe and judge works of art according to the rhythm they display. We have become so accustomed to the concept of rhythm, that its 'modernity' is easily overlooked. Whereas a lot has been written about rhythm and the new modern visual experience, the emergence of rhythm as a concept (and practice) in visual aesthetics has so far been neglected. This paper deals with the origins of rhythm in visual aesthetics, in two different contexts, late nineteenth century Germany and France.

In Germany the concept of rhythm emerged in the context of art history and art theory. Scholars as Heinrich Wölfflin, Wilhelm Pinder and August Schmarsow ran up against rhythm in their strive to base a theory of visual aesthetics in the fast developing discipline of psychology. There they found useful insights in theories and experiments by Wilhelm Wundt and Friedrich Theodor Vischer. In France our genealogy leads as well to the end of 1880's, but here to the neo-impressionists and their connection to Charles Henry. Charles Henry was a prolific French intellectual who had tight relationships with the emerging symbolist movement around Felix Féneon, in the 1890's. Henry aimed at a psycho-physiological aesthetics for which he looked (among others) to the French experimental physiological tradition of E.J. Marey.

A comparative analysis of the French and German contexts where the concept of rhythm emerged, shows interesting differences, but also striking similarities. At both sides of the Rhine intellectuals were striving after a psycho-physiologic aesthetics. Both the French and the Germans tried to ground the experience of art in the experience of embodiment (Fried 2002). Next to that the experience of time in visual experience appears to be crucial. In search for common ancestors for the French and German endeavor, we end up with the emerging research into afterimages (Crary 1990), and its relation to the color theory of M.E Chevreul (Wachelder 2001)

Moving Images, Film Libraries, and the Cosmopolitan Home -- 16mm in the 1920s.
Haidee Wasson
McKnight Landgrant Professor, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota
email: wasson999@hotmail.com

It is only a matter of time before film libraries will be a part of every modern home. The proper place to keep your films is in the bookshelves together with your books. -W. Sterling Sutfin (1927)

Discourses surrounding the spread of 16mm films throughout the interwar period were flavored with strains of technological utopianism, evident amongst educators, industry spokespeople, and amateurs alike. Such enthusiasm underpinned a range of discussions, including film's potential as an educational tool and an art, as a new mode of civic engagement, as a self-designed mobile entertainment, and as an integral element of everyday life. Many of these ideas coalesced around the idea of the Film Library, embodying the possibility of ready access to an expanding, comprehensive, distant, and visible world: a living encyclopedia. The actual films that filled this idealized Film Library were often predictably linked to middleclass concerns about appropriate content, moral propriety, and worldly knowledge, as well as to the ideals of seeing more and learning more in a modern and progressive way. This, of course, implied not only the ostensible wonders of moving images but also the sanction of very particular institutions: the consumerism of bourgeois domestic life, the edifying displays of the museum, or the educational and moral authority of universities and schools.

This paper will focus specifically on the ways in which the home was figured within these general trends, conceived and shaped by industry discourses in the 1920s and 1930s seeking to fortify a specialized and thinking sub-strain of film culture. Film furniture, artisan screens, home delivery, educational services, and home news services were among the many offerings available to the eager (and affluent) home viewers throughout this period. Perhaps most important was the way in which such discourses and practices sought to articulate films with projects connecting the home instantaneously to world events and to imbuing the home with access not just to the suddenly near and global present, but to the faraway past (like radio before it and television soon to follow). Moreover, films were sold not just as projected images for an evening's entertainment but as
stylish domestic objects that should be saved, stored, ordered, and accessed as daily points of reference to the world beyond the home, providing an important pre-history to contemporary discourses surrounding home video and DVD. This paper, then, will survey the services that addressed themselves explicitly to the 1920s home, including a consideration of the short-lived 'Film of the Month Club' as well as other home film library services. It will consider the implications of the home film library not just for the emergent idea of specialized and micro-film audiences, but also for a material and institutional analysis of film
culture during this period.

Turntablism
Ted Wayland
Department of English, University of Washington, Seattle
email: tsw@u.washington.edu

Today’s “scratch” DJs, who use vinyl records and turntables to create complex collages using recorded music and the noise of the needle and the groove, are heirs to a fascination with the record that was also expressed in 1920s and 30s Germany. Theodor Adorno, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and the musicians Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch explored the potential for music based on the medium of the gramophone record. These thinkers were interested in the graphic properties of the grooves of the record, particularly Adorno and Moholoy-Nagy, who envisioned music composed in a “groove-script alphabet,” turning the gramophone into a musical instrument (rather than a reproducer of pre-recorded sound).

Scratch musicians, by contrast, are more interested in the kinaesthetic dimension of turntable music, or “turntablism.” The roots of their music are in performance, and it is impossible to appreciate the sound of scratch music without understanding its mechanics. The movement of the hand on the disc and the manipulation of the turntable’s fader are crucial to the production of this music, as are visual cues on the records themselves—the bold lines that indicate the tracks on the record’s surface, as well as markers placed on the record to provide an orientation for the DJ. Scratch music is never removed from the visual, and its alliance in hip-hop culture with breakdancing and graffiti art is not incidental. Grounded in live performance, scratch music now has major competitions in which DJs bring out an arsenal of techniques that bring together the roles of DJ and breakdancer.

The turntable was resurrected by hip-hop DJs as an instrument just as the vinyl record was in danger of obsolescence. The compact disc and digital recording threatened vinyl records by virtue of their audio fidelity and liminal visual presence. The CD is hidden from view in a vague black box while it plays. The elimination of the sound machine’s visual presence has been a driving force in the music industry, from the furniture cabinets enclosing the gramophone in Adorno’s time to the unobtrusive CD players and hidden surround-sound speakers of today. Turntablists offer up an alternative, which is radical in the era of digital recording: they put an archaic machine on display and revel in the properties of its medium. The surface noise painstakingly eliminated in digital recording becomes music for the turntablists, who exploit the friction of needle on vinyl in their search for new electric sounds. The turntablists also incorporate the act of playing records into their performance, manipulating the fader and discs with incredible dexterity, turning the rhythm of their movements into a sound that blasts from the loudspeakers. While the music industry frets over the decline of the material medium of recorded music, with MP3s coming to define the sound commodity of the future, scratch musicians dust off forgotten classics for breakbeats (the unit of their music) on aging vinyl.

This paper will explore fascinations with the vinyl record, from Moholy-Nagy to contemporary hip-hop, with an emphasis on the visual elements of the record and the visual presence of the record player. Using film clips of live DJs, I will argue that today’s scratch musicians perform music that contradicts the logic of fidelity and invisibility that underlies the music industry’s hundred-year history, updating Adorno and Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the graphic qualities of the gramophone record.

Cybervisuality and Architecture
Joanna Weddell
Glasgow
email: j.s.weddell@dial.pipex.com

The concern of this paper will be to examine the architect's engagement with the new media, now central to architectural production. Much of the emerging rhetoric around the 'IT Revolution in Architecture' contains echoes from the early years of the last century, emotively recalling the radical manifesto of modernism. Libeskind identifies a 'Palladio complex', placing the Albertian tools of plan/section/elevation in direct opposition to digital architecture; in contrast, this paper would hope to examine the mutuality of such cultural formations.

Drawing on the work of Robin Evans, for example, the sectional cut of the mason, or stereotomy, may be read as the basis for many of the techniques of virtual architecture. Whilst contemporary architectural writers are eager to emphasize cyber architecture's adoption of digitizing from the scanners of medical science, fundamentally these operate much as the system of points used by classical sculptors such as Canova to reproduce their work. The importance of graphics as a site of political activity for architects may create anxieties centred on the dis/continuity of tradition. Crucially, cyber architecture could be read as resisting definition as scientific symbolic form and raise questions about the subjectivities of both architect and patron.

The paper will examine the built and unbuilt work of Libeskind himself, as well as that of Gehry, to show that virtual architecture may be subjected to more sustained analysis as a hybrid concept, presenting the viewer with fragmented, multilayered formats in which its own history is simultaneously inscribed and erased.

On the pictorial origins of modern biology: Pictorial instructions and developmental thinking
Janina Wellmann
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
email: janina.wellmann@web.de

The modern life sciences have a fundamental visual appeal. Electron microscopy or genetic sequencing, time-lapse cinematography or x-rays are only a few among the wide range of visual practices constituting the modern biomedical imagery. In particular, there is one form of pictorial representation that has become a universal tool throughout biological representation: the pictorial sequence, i.e. the depiction of a process through a series of distinct pictures, each differing only slightly from the picture immediately following it.

The era around 1800 is usually considered as pivotal for the history of biology. It was around this time that the centuries-old belief in preformation was abandoned in favour of an epigenetic theory of individual development, which formed the basis for the modern science of embryology. While this story is relatively well-studied, hardly any attention has been given to the role pictures and visualisation techniques played in this context. I will claim in my paper that it was exactly in this period that the pictorial sequence entered the life sciences as a new visual convention. But where did this iconographic technique come from? And what role did it play in the establishment of the new epigenetic theory of development?

As I will argue, the use of this new visual technique was not merely a secondary phenomenon, accompanying a theoretical shift. Much more, around 1800 the pictorial sequence was an already well-established technique, albeit used in a completely different context, namely that of the pictorial instruction of bodily movement (or posture) in printed manuals.

In the first part of my paper, I will give a brief sketch of the largely unstudied iconographic genre of pictorial instructions. In particular, I focus on instructions to the noble and martial arts (the use of weaponry, fencing or dancing manuals). In a second step, I will analyse some prominent examples of epigenetic picture series, including the embryological treatise of Christian H. Pander (1817) and Johann D. Herold's seminal work on insect metamorphosis (1815). I will show how the same pictorial logic of depicting bodily movement through a sequence was also used for the explanation of animal development. Moreover, I will suggest that the establishment of epigenetic thinking around this time was largely dependent on this newly employed iconography. Indeed, I will argue that this kind of analysis may shed new light on our understanding of the origins of biology in this era. Usually, it is claimed that the establishment of modern biology relied on a new notion of development, which was part of a larger paradigm change, often described as 'temporalisation' or 'dynamisation' of nature. According to my analysis, however, this shift had an essentially visual component: a well-established iconographic technique, originally developed for the depiction of bodily pose was employed for the depiction of physiological processes.

Ocularcentrism, Inscription & the Figure of the Computer in Cognitive Theories of Language
Chris Werry
Assistant Professor, Rhetoric & Writing Studies, San Diego State University
email: cwerry@mail.sdsu.edu

"Inner mechanisms and inner processes appear to be computational systems, mentally representative and, in some unknown manner, physically instantiated. But that again is highly reminiscent of something that took place in the seventeenth century - in particular, Descartes' theory of vision, which was a crucial breakthrough and developed a kind of representational, computational theory of mind." (Chomsky, describing how the "cognitive revolution" of the 20th century was prefigured by the "Cartesian Revolution" of the seventeenth century.)

My paper examines the ocularcentric rhetoric of two prominent cognitive theories of language, Chomskyan and cognitive linguistics . The paper investigates the constitutive role played by references to vision, optics, space and form, and considers the rhetorical work they are used to carry out. I argue that Chomskyan and cognitive linguistics assume that language exists primarily as something visible, that it can be represented in terms of comparisons with various forms of visual phenomenon, and that linguistic analysis can be understood as a kind of visual perception. I argue that the visualism of cognitive theories of language can be traced in part to their emphasis on linguistic knowledge, to the particular way this knowledge is represented, but also to the influence of technologies of inscription. Writing, and the classificatory spaces written form make possible, strongly influence cognitive theories of language. Chomskyan and cognitive linguistics are committed to thinking about language in terms of its diagrammatic arrangement, as a graphic object that can be plotted in visual space. My paper shows how the structure, units and divisibility of language are represented primarily in terms of what Taylor calls the 'grapheme space.' The paper explores the role of scriptural models and metaphors in the visualism of cognitive theories, and proposes that while cognitive theories define writing as secondary, supplementary, and external to language, they remain highly dependent on a purified "internal" model of writing. This internal model is based in large part on computational metaphors and analogies. For example, Chomsky proposes that in its purest form language is algorithmic, recursive, digital and representational, characterized by efficiency and non-redundancy. The rules of operation are uniform, invariant, and universal, acting on units that are discrete and hierarchically organized. Chomskyan linguistics thus embodies many of the fundamental characteristics of the traditional, rule-governed Von Neuman model of computing (as opposed to the parallel distributed processing/connectionist models championed by competing cognitive theories). I discuss how computational models shape representations of what is central to linguistic inquiry and what is peripheral; what is "visible" and "invisible" within cognitive approaches, and what the nature and limits of linguistic inquiry are. I show how the computational metaphorics drawn on by Chomskyan and cognitive linguistics lead to a series of blindspots and limitations in their representation of language and mind. I argue that while cognitive theories of language may seem novel and cutting edge, they follow a trajectory that stretches all the way back to Plato. Like Plato they assume that true knowledge entails 'seeing that which is well ordered and ever unchangeable'. This transcendent vision is directed away from the sensible, material world, and towards a vision of the eternal and ideal represented as a form of inscription.

Screen Differences by Design: Rendering Liveness, Presence, and Lived Space through the Internet, Webcams, and Television
Dr. Michele White
Wellesley College
email: mwhite@wellesley.edu

In this presentation, I consider how television and Internet representations produce similar narratives about liveness, presence, intimacy and render spatial entrances and a continuation of the spectator's lived space. I focus on the visual strategies that accompany women's "lifecams" or "homecams." These sites can be understood through critical writings about technology and television by Rhonda J Berenstein, Jonathan Crary, Jane Feuer, James Friedman, and Robert Stam. Relating the visual webcam rhetoric to television can contextualize these Internet settings, indicate how they operate, and demonstrate that the Internet is related to other popular media.

Internet sites as well as popular and academic writings often differentiate between computers and television screens in order to produce a different experience. For instance, Jennifer Ringley tries to separate these forms by titling her Jennicam site "life, online" and noting that "'Seven strangers picked to live in a house' paid for by MTV is not real life." Such attempts to distinguish are notable. Relating webcam sites to television can offer an important critical resistance to the ideas that "the Net is a home for people," as Esther Dyson argues, and a material space. Otherwise, the Internet and webcam sites are made to seem live, real, and available through such visual renderings as web-based greeting cards that mourn the "death" of a favored system, flash sequences that depict webcam operators leaving the screen, and the constant movement of animated sequences, banners, and scrolling text.

Depictions of fishbowls, binoculars, and keyholes are employed to make it seem like webcams provide an empowered gaze, voyeuristic position, and an entrance into women's personal environments. However, such constant delivery failures as broken links, malfunctioning java, scrambled pictures, and images that stop in the middle of downloading make this liveness unconvincing. Spectators are encouraged to demand that operators prove their position in front of the camera because of the promised visual presence. When such conflicts and technological failures are made visible, it becomes more apparent that webcams and other Internet settings do not deliver real bodies and environments. Other possibilities for designing, visually rendering, speaking, and writing are needed because these acts produce the Internet and our knowledge of the screen.

Seeing the Negative
Miss Kelley Wilder
Assistant Editor of The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, University of Glasgow
email: K.Wilder@foxtalbot.arts.gla.ac.uk

The fact that photographic chemistry more naturally created a negative image than a positive one has changed the course of photographic history quite radically. Samuel Morse claimed that it was the single factor in discouraging further work on the subject, and Nicéphore Niépce turned towards methods of photographically engraved plates and optically reversed polished plates - these led directly to the discovery of the daguerreotype. Of all the inventors that experimented with silver nitrate, only William Henry Fox Talbot found them quite beautiful. He even expressed his preference for the negative image over the positives for some subjects.

I propose a lecture on the subject of the photographically negative, and the perception of negative photographic representation in the nineteenth century. Using written materials from the correspondence of Niépce, Talbot, John Frederick William Herschel and others, I will examine the often negative attitudes towards negative imaging and discuss how those attitudes changed the course of the invention of photography.

Learning How to Read: Print, physiognomy, and recognition at the end of the Renaissance
Dr. Bronwen Wilson
Assistant Professor, Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University
email: bronwen.wilson@staff.mcgill.ca

At end of the sixteenth century, the human face became visible in ways never seen before. Printed portraits, portrait-books, and physiognomy tracts made images widely accessible in which the face and shoulders of the sitter were the focus, reflecting those parts of the viewer's own body that cannot be seen without a mirror. Renaissance humanists revitalized ancient theories concerning facial features and personality, and portrait-books and physiognomy treatises were clearly a response to these beliefs. In turn, as this paper argues, the format and visual conventions deployed by these publications developed the cognitive skills of viewers to be able to discriminate between faces. In so doing, print also altered the ways in which identities accrued to individuals.

The legibility of the human face was a preoccupation of Giovanni Bonifacio who promoted gesture as a universal language in his extraordinary L'Arte de'Cenni. As evidence that "all the nations of the world" can agree, he cites the uses of gestures in paintings, asserting their transparency with confidence for Asians and Africans alike. "The concepts of our souls can be expressed in four ways", he explains, with "signs/gestures, speech, writing, and symbols" but only the former can translate dialects and foreign languages. Bonifacio fragments the face and body into a linguistic system, in which the eye, for example, is considered in fifty-eight sections of the book.

Giovanni Battista della Porta, the famous advocate of the science of physiognomy, postulated a "Doctrine of Signatures," in which the study of plants, chiromancy (palm reading), physiognomy, and body parts were propagated as signs of character. Size, shape, and lines visible on the exterior, through their resemblance to other phenomena, were deemed to reveal the truth of the interior. Readers were instructed to survey the faces of individuals as if maps, to compare the faces of humans with animals and plants. His project was inspired by the growing epistemological superiority of optics, visual experience, and the conviction that phenomena could be not only descriptive but also explicative. Following the usual array of Arabic, Aristotelian, and other antique sources, Della Porta divided the face and body into parts to explain their meanings, but these syntactical units are then reassembled and the meaning of the whole interpreted using his 'syllogistic' method, a method that claims to distill the essence of the individual from a list of character traits. More than the content of these treatises-with their blend of ancient proverbs and modern maxims-it is the organization of these texts and their didactic strategies, their illustrations, tables and indices, that are revealing.

Della Porta's illustrations bring forward a new cognitive role for the image as he aimed to demonstrate what the differences between faces elucidated about individuals. The repeated juxtaposition of human faces with animal heads prompts the reader to discriminate between faces. Thus if Della Porta's theories were bound to the Renaissance world of resemblances, where he is situated by Foucault, the mode and technology of representation initiates those processes of discrimination in the viewer that Foucault assigned to the Classical age. Broken down into its constituent parts and then reassembled, the face is transformed into discourse.

Visual Presentations as Feature in Information Technology Consulting
Elaine K. Yakura
Michigan State University
email: yakura@msu.edu

Visual presentations have become a ubiquitous feature of organizational life. For example, when information technology consultants give presentations for their clients, it is accompanied invariably by a "visual" component consisting of text and images that are projected onto a screen or a wall. This paper focuses on the use of these visuals-a taken-for-granted feature of presentations in conference rooms as well as classrooms.

The visuals in these presentations can carry important connotations that generalize across settings. In particular, charts, diagrams and other abstract representations create an aura of scientific legitimacy that extends to the consultants and their work. The ability of graphical images to convey legitimacy has been investigated by Lynch (1991; p. 2), who notes that in a wide variety of different disciplines, the use of graphical or visual displays within texts is a common representational device.

Unlike scientists who use these visuals to represent objects or events that are believed to have an independent, objective reality, consultants sometimes use visuals to present systems or processes that have no reality because they have not yet been implemented. At times, consulting visuals provide an example of what Lynch (1991, p.6) describes as "pictures of nothing:" "[l]ike many diagrams in theory texts, the figure is an assemblage of words, geometric shapes, and vectors." Lynch (1991, p. 11) argues that such figures create an "impression of rationality": "[pictures] mobilize formal elements to exhibit and authorize a certain impression of rationality within a textual economy for consolidating literary territories." He (p. 18) goes on to argue that these modes of representation act as "emblems of a scientific authority." Bounding the figures of the presentation within the white space of the visual presentation frames, the consultants similarly can create and sustain an image of a successful outcome, and call up an impression of reality and legitimacy.

The effectiveness of symbols in carrying meaning also depends on the sophistication of the audience. Henderson (1995, p. 212) argues that embedded codes in a visual representation can be read on different levels by different viewers. Bucciarelli (1994) notes that engineers also use graphical visuals, such as flow diagrams and other kind of charts are replete with embedded codes that communicate important details to informed viewers. Suchman (1988) has also documented whiteboard practices of systems designers that rely heavily on graphical representations for communication. In a broad sense, information technology consultants share some of the same communicative challenges. This paper begins to explore some of these challenges, and proposes a framework for their analysis.

Bucciarelli, L. L. 1994. Designing Engineers, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Henderson, K. 1995. "The Visual Culture of Engineers," in The Cultures of Computing, S. L. Star (ed.), Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Lynch, M. 1991. "Pictures of Nothing? Visual Construals in Social Theory," Sociological Theory (9:1), pp. 1-19.
Suchman, L. "Representing Practice in Cognitive Science," Human Studies (11), 1988, pp. 305-325.

Visualizing Englishness through the Taiwanese Camera's Eye
Joyce Hsiu-yen Yeh
PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University
email: joyceyeh50@hotmail.com

This paper is part of an investigation of the travel performing act of a set of young Taiwanese people, focusing particularly on their daily intercultural experiences in England. Drawing on fieldwork in Cambridge and London and post-tour interviews in Taiwan, I consider these experiences ethnographically, considering travel between cultures in terms of performance, identity, otherness and representation.

This paper uses photography as a site from which to interrogate the connections between cultural knowledge and tourist visual consumption and representation. It focuses on photography as performance of the touristic act and seeks to examine the visual consumption of Englishness-as-Otherness through Taiwanese study tourists' photographic gaze and the images they reproduce. My purpose is to examine how photography intersects with and helps to shape the tourist's "ways of seeing" (Berger 1972). I am concerned with their representation of these visual encounters, as well as with the relations between self and others in the moment of taking the picture. What actually is the young Taiwanese tourist gaze of Englishness? Why is it important for tourists to travel with a camera and to take pictures? What are the functions of a camera in tourism practices? And what are the functions of the tourists' photographs after their tours?

The functions of tourist cameras as well as holiday snapshots have rarely been explored and examined in terms of the role of visual consumption and technologies in informing and shaping cultural knowledge within the tourism context. By using photography as a site to examine tourist experiences, the paper considers photography as not only a reflection and representation of specific cultural notions but also an embodied practice of sociability. Using tourists' photographs and stories allows us to understand and enrich the interpretation of data and they give deeper research insights into non-Western views of how English-as-Otherness is visualized, consumed, collected and performed.

The visual mapping of Antarctica as a place in time; from the geological sublime to ‘real time’
Kathryn Yusoff
The Surrey Institute of Art & Design; Royal Holloway, University of London
email: k_yusoff@hotmail.com

Antarctica is repeatedly imaged and imagined at the spatial and temporal margins of modernity, as the first and last place in a global ordering, a landscape materially and temporally a phantasm of the furthest point. It’s geographically distant landscape and its temporal location in contemporary Antarctic art practice conspire to produce Antarctica as remote, while new
visual technologies, such as web cams in Antarctic stations, appear to bring it into a different temporal register. While art practice repeatedly appears to flatten globalising images and fantasises its opposition, real time images enclose Antarctica into a global network of visualisation, however the distorting replacement of real time by its double presents an equally complex landscape. Both visualisations engage in an act of temporal displacement from industrialised society, creating predominantly disembodied and ahistorical topographies, before and beyond modernity.

This paper will explore the cultural and ideological context that the spatialization of ‘near’ and ‘far’ temporalities construct, addressing the concerns and implications of imaged spaces through an examination of Antarctic art practice (and other emergent popular visualising technologies operational in Antarctica) and its attendant genealogy of images. Research from the artist and writers program in New Zealand, Australia and the US, and the institutional structures that support and
animate this production, will elucidate this argument. I want to locate art practice and the US proposal for a high optical cable to send ‘real time’ images to the northern hemisphere (by the creation of a Antarctic road from the US base at the continental margin to South Pole station in the interior), within a strategic visual culture that conspires to produce Antarctica as an idealised space in the imagination. A myth of timeless spatiality that is expanded through the visual culture of commercial, national, scientific and poetic registers, masking the contemporary Antarctic frontiers of southern ocean resource depletion, bioprospecting, territorial expansion and tourism.

Central to the paper is to attend to the environmental ramifications of sustained visualisation of Antarctica as a place ‘out-of-time’, and how this temporal metaphor provides a spatial distance from the effects of industrialised society. I will argue that the insistence on conflating historical mythologies of Antarctica with contemporary inhabitations of the continent effect a mastery of geopolitical imperatives through visualisation.

New Media and Representation in Space: Creating the Image of the Cyborg
Yannis Zavoleas
MArch, University of California, Los Angleles, School of Architecture.
MS Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Comparative Media Studies. Researcher Games-to-Teach, MIT/Microsoft
email: yannisz@mit.edu

In my paper "New Media and Representation in Space: Creating the Images of the Cyborg," I am searching how new media suggest new forms of representation between the self and its surroundings. The self adapts to the urban environment by selecting information and found in it. The new media reinforce a special kind of adaptation process: the self's representational images are products of its organic relation with the outer space. Donna Haraway sees in this new relation between the self and its outer space the organic relation between the cyborg and cyberspace. With series of interconnections and dependencies, the cyborg and cyberspace become constituent parts of the urban milieu, consisting of an inseparable entity. Roger Caillois finds an analogy between the adaptation process of the civilized man into the city and that of the living organisms into the natural environment. Caillois observes that the primary goal of this process in nature is not a need for survival, as one would think, but the transference of aesthetic values of nature for the main purpose of fascination.

In relation to nature, in the new urban setting adaptation happens as a special kind of aesthetic transference of social values of the cyberspace onto the cyborg. Adaptation may be viewed as the process of veiling the human body with aesthetic representations of these social values. This forms a sequence of representational layers of the cyborg. The first layer of representation is the skin. Next to the skin is the dress. Clothing creates the representational image of the body. Clothing has the task to represent the body as an organism that is very much alive, as well as aesthetic values that reflect ideologies of the outer space. Moving away from clothing towards space, the next outer layer of representation is the wall. The wall is also the primary element of spatial definition. With the use of the new media technologies, the wall may be seen as the "screen interface" that dresses space. With this premise, I am searching how a new conceptualization of the wall in a way that it redefines itself by incorporating the new media capabilities, may shape the contemporary urban environment and its relation with us.

Journalism and the Voice of the Visual
Barbie Zelizer
Raymond Williams Professor of Communication, Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania
email: bzelizer@asc.upenn.edu

How has photography shaped the public knowledge that journalism provides its publics about events in the real world? This paper examines the ways in which photographic images have instantiated themselves in Western journalism, both in its coverage of events as they happen and in the recycled knowledge that journalism provides in helping publics to remember events over time.

Extending from a distinction made long ago by Ernest Lessing, where he demonstrated that painting differed from poetry because it could provide a memorable moment of engagement by freezing action in the middle of its sequencing, this paper examines what happens when photographs of this kind intrude into journalism. Tracing the utilization of one particular kind of photograph - photographs of individuals about to die - the paper shows how images of people facing their impending death have been imported from artistic representations of the crucifixion and other memorable deaths (among them Socrates and General Wolfe) to depict a wide range of contested and complicated news events in the public sphere. The durability of such images in news has been twofold, in that they have been forwarded as powerful depictions of news events at the time such events occur and maintained as the events' iconic representations over time. From the assassinations of U.S. presidents, the Holocaust, and Vietnam to the Intifada and September 11, the about-to-die moment has surfaced repeatedly in Western journalism, becoming one of the favored visual tropes by which journalists depict war, assassination, atrocity, and geo-political strife.

Yet what happens to the geo-political realities that the images of journalism are charted with depicting? This paper argues that the intrusion of the about-to-die image in journalism illustrates a dimension of visual representation, here called the "voice" of the visual, which extends the photograph's twinned force of referential and symbolic power. Playing to what Roland Barthes called an image's third meaning, the voice of the visual offers a space in which hypothesis, imagination, and conditionality work both against the photograph's referential force and its symbolic meaning. In so doing, it positions photographs in an oppositional space to that of journalism, whereby photos like the about-to-die image undermine news value by laundering, simplifying, softening, and rendering contingent complicated events in the public sphere. Equally important, voice allows for the striking of visual associations and parallels across events that are not necessarily alike, blurring the publics' critical capacity to understand what is most singular about the difficult events surrounding them. This should give us pause, in that it renders contingent a domain of visual knowledge that is critical in the maintenance of a vitalized citizenry.