Unruly Objects – Material Entanglements in the Arts and Sciences (original) (raw)
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Centaurus, 2019
Collections, botanical gardens, and museums are key places for natural history. As multi-coded spaces of knowledge, they fulfil many different functions. Their focus and their meanings have changed over time. Having originated from convent gardens and curiosity cabinets, they first became prominent in the 16th and 17th centuries within a variety of politically infused circumstances-courts, scholarly culture, patronage, trade, and colonialism. 1 The gradual separation between natural and cultural objects, which became visible by the late 18th century, transformed the landscape of collections. By the 19th century, many of them had become public museums that welcomed both professional scientists and an increasingly widening spectrum of the general public. Objects and specimens from different parts of the world were assembled in collections and museums, facilitating comparison, synopsis, and the dissemination of knowledge. Each collection has its own unique history. However, collections should also be analysed in terms of configurations that were essential to all of them-the interrelation between the collector, the object, and the viewers. Over the past 20 years, historical interest in physical spaces dedicated to the accumulation of scientific objects-specimens, visual images created to capture and analyse nature, research instruments, and living creatures, such as wild and exotic animals and plants-has grown rapidly. Collections, botanical gardens, natural history cabinets, and museums have attracted new attention, now associated with the making of knowledge rather than with more traditional stories about academic luminaries making important acquisitions for the benefit of science. 2 Paula Findlen has provided an important stimulus to such work by arguing that natural history and collections situated at the princely courts of Renaissance Italy were essential for understanding the world that dramatically expanded in the 16th century as a result of voyages of discovery and the printing press. Collections not only provided a means of controlling the influx of new objects and information, they helped to ease the tension between the authority of ancient texts and the new experiences opening up for Europe. 3 With a focus on materiality and cultural dimensions, collections become interesting not only because they can be used to illustrate a scientific argument, but also because they provide a means for scholars to reconstruct the very process of knowledge production. Collections are no longer seen as immutable entities, but rather as things and their meanings in flux. These historiographical changes include a wide range of perspectives, such as the political, social, cultural, and administrative as well as that of economic 1
Un-Natural Histories: The Specimen as Site of Knowledge Production in Contemporary Art
Leonardo
One of the primary functions of museums is the preservation and deployment of knowledge as articulated through collected artifacts. In the case of natural history museums, these collections consist largely of preserved specimens that, despite being natural in origin, all share the marks of the human hand as a result of the processes of preservation and display. Such processes engender a fusion of nature and culture: the transformation of nature into objects of material culture. Given the challenges that arise from shifting definitions of what constitutes a natural history specimen in an age when life is being redefined and reconfigured, and living matter is treated as a mutable and expressive substance, I question how our perception of the "order of life" has been impacted by recent developments in genetic manipulation, tissue engineering, and DNA taxonomy. I extend the discussion of the impact of the human hand on natural objects to include the practices of contemporary artists whose practices borrow heavily from museum technologies, such as taxidermy, wet preservation, field research, scientific illustration, and bioartists whose practices use biotechnology to investigate the shifting relationship between living organisms and taxonomy. I ask how the work of artists who are addressing these classificatory shifts can illuminate how we understand such changes. How can the work of artists using biotechnology be positioned in relation to artists who use more traditional practices to address similar issues? How is the discipline of the natural history museum implicated in these practices? I focus on the hierarchical nature of knowledge in art and science, the changing use of language in classification, systems of preservation and display, and mutations and hybrid organisms, to suggest that natural history as a discipline, can be viewed as a mediating factor between the museum, on the one hand, and both scientific and art practices on the other. The specimen therefore functions as a site of knowledge production that merges both the museological impulses of preservation and conservation with the scientific/laboratory-based impulses of experimentation and alteration.
The Material Turn in the History of Life Science
Literature Compass, 2016
The "material turn" or the history of things has become a prominent focus in the history of life science of the long eighteenth century. The reassessment of eighteenth-century science since the 1990s has given particular prominence to medicine and the life sciences. Eighteenth-century anatomists and naturalists studied, collected, imitated, and represented many kinds of natural things, from the human body to trees. This article considers a variety of new approaches to material culture, museums, and collecting among historians of science since 2000, focusing on natural history and anatomy. The historiography of objects invokes a sensory history of seeing and touching, and a global history of movement across time, place, and culture. In 1737 the Italian natural philosopher Francesco Algarotti wrote, "let the century of things at last rise among us." 1 If the eighteenth century was the century of things, scientific things figured prominently among them. These things were made or found, or some combination of the two; they talked or were silent (Daston, Things That Talk; Dupré and Lüthy); they traveled from place to place and around the world, or stubbornly remained local (Parrish; Raj; Findlen; Smith and Findlen; Cook, Matters; Sloan; Bleichmar and Mancall; Martin and Bleichmar; Schiebinger and Swan; Jorink and Ramakers); they were avidly traded and collected (MacGregor, Curiosity; Sloan; Schnapper); they were displayed in private and more and more in public (Sloan; Walker; Beretta). They, and their making, formed the basis of empirical knowledge of the world (Smith and Schmidt; Smith, Meyers, and Cook; Stalnaker). The encyclopedia, that quintessential eighteenth-century genre, was after all mainly a list of things (Stalnaker; Margócsy, "Encyclopedia"). Artists represented things, and these representations themselves were things (Bleichmar, Visible Empire; Margócsy, Commercial Visions). This essay looks at eighteenth-century things through the lens of the history of the life sciences as it has been written since the turn of the present century. "Things" or "objects," especially moving objects, have become a buzzword in the history of science, particularly among historians of early modern science. Some scholars have drawn a distinction between a thing as subject to contingency and an object as resistant to contingency and concerned mainly with perception. Bruno Latour, for example, drew a distinction between "thick" things and "thin" objects. But as I show below, historians of science have generally not made these distinctions, and I will use these terms interchangeably in this essay. 2 The turn toward things stems in part from frustrations with an older style of history of science as intellectual history, based on ideas and texts, which increasingly has seemed inadequate to explain an early modern history that has become increasingly de-centered from Europe. In her introduction to the edited volume Early Modern Things, Paula Findlen asserts that "the history of material culture is one of the most productive areas in which to develop intersecting narratives of the past, some of them local and comparative, others cross-cultural, transnational, and global."(6) 3 Such objects are not static. There have been at least a dozen conferences, articles, and volumes over the past decade with some variation of the term "objects in motion" in the title. Thirty
Noyes, Ruth (ed.): Reassessing Epistemic Images in the Early Modern World, 2023
This chapter surveys early modern scientific instruments adorned with images. These images per se have no relevance for the instruments' use. To date, such "instrumental imagery" and its contexts have only sporadically been analyzed. This paper presents methods aiming at a systematic analysis of this visual material to inquire after its role in the various contexts of the adorned instruments (genesis, function, use) and importance for crafting histories of success and relevance within the emerging fijield of the sciences. The iconography points to quite a few signifijicant topics: statements of specifijic positions in theoretical debates; mediation and illustration of knowledge, in particular by picturing the usability of the instruments; or the role of instruments as patronage artefacts.
Program and Book of Abstracts, 2020
By the close of the nineteenth century, the great Scottish physician Patrick Manson had already retired from his days of imperial service and was building his school of tropical medicine in the imperial metropolis of London. While he bemoaned that his age and infirmity kept him from taking up a 'pathological pilgrimage' to colonial spaces, he was able to rely on an extensive network of collaborators in the field to source the clinical material he needed for his research.1 Ever meticulous, Manson kept detailed registers of the over 300 slides he received from around the empire at the turn of the twentieth century, often including original letters from informants. This paper will consider the geographies embedded in Manson's mobile networks of slides. I will suggest that the scientific material surrounding Manson's collection of pathological slides can be used to reanimate the experience of being a tropical medicine research subject at the turn of the twentieth century. Tracing the slides' journeys from collection in the field to Manson's laboratory(s), I will consider issues of race and power in the ways that slides were collected and interpreted. Pathological material was often taken forcefully from indigenous peoples while Europeans were all too willing to part with samples of their blood to protect themselves and their families from the dangerous tropical climate. Preserved in these fragile glass preparations, tropical diseases themselves became objects of desire for researchers like Manson.
On the Aesthetics of Scientific Objects. Three Case Studies
History of Scientific Objects", who conceived this complex, challenging and insightful experience. We are most thankful to Hannah Lotte Lund, program coordinator, for the care and energy she put into the myriad details that this project entailed. We are greatly indebted to the hosts, researchers, lecturers, museum curators and speakers who led us through the complex maze of collections and institutions we visited. We would also like to express special appreciation to those individuals who we met again in Berlin a year later and who chaired the sessions of the Wandering Seminar's Workshop. They followed us from beginning to end of our wandering onto the academic consequences of what had been a Of Wandering, Objects and Observers 6 provocative and innovative adventure; Lorraine Daston, Michael Hagner, Anke te Heesen,
Photo-Objects. On the Materiality of Photographs and Photo Archives in the Humanities and Sciences
2019
Edited by Julia Bärnighausen, Costanza Caraffa, Stefanie Klamm, Franka Schneider, and Petra Wodtke Photographs are not simply images but also historically shaped three-dimensional objects. They hold a physical presence, bear traces of handling and use, and circulate in social, political and institutional networks. Beyond their visual content, they are increasingly acknowledged as material "actors," not only indexically representing the objects they depict, but also playing a crucial role in the processes of knowledge-making within scientific practices. This has a historical dimension: most scientific disciplines rapidly adopted photography as an important research tool. Thereby, the various material qualities of photographs afforded certain types of uses in those disciplines. Specialized photo archives were founded as interfaces of technology and science and as laboratories for scientific thought. This book highlights some recent approaches to photo-objects and photo archives as parts of a dynamic and material system of knowledge. Taking photographic materiality as its premise, it analyzes the epistemological potential of analog and digital photographs and photo archives in the humanities and sciences. Issues range from the circulation and distribution of photographs, the construction of disciplinary methods through the handling and use of photographs, the formation and transformation of a canon by photography and respective hierarchies of value, to the arrangement, classification and working processes in photo archives and other institutions. With papers by Zeynep Çelik, Idil Çetin, Lorraine Daston, Elizabeth Edwards, Haidy Geismar, Lena Holbein, Pip Laurenson, Maria Männig, Anaïs Mauuarin, Suryanandini Narain, Omar W. Nasim, Christopher Pinney, Christina Riggs, Joan M. Schwartz, Katharina Sykora, Petra Trnková, Kelley Wilder Read online: http://mprl-series.mpg.de/studies/12/index.html Download PDF: http://mprl-series.mpg.de/media/studies/12/studies12.pdf Order print copy: http://www.book-on-demand.de/shop/15803 Edition Open Access 2019 Max Planck Research Library for the History and Development of Knowledge. Studies 12 ISBN 978-¬3-¬945561-¬39-¬3 e-¬ISBN [PDF] 978¬-3¬-945561¬-40-¬9 e¬-ISBN [EPUB] 978¬-3-¬945561¬-41-¬6
Designing Natural Things: How Images Make Meaning in History of Science
Designing Natural Things: How Images Make Meaning in History of Science, 2023
Designing Natural Things: How Images Make Meaning in History of Science How do you capture the essence of a history about monstrous squids and the shipmates who ate them, and poisonous manchineel trees? Using text to set the scene is one thing. Taking seriously the visual record left in the wake of these histories and using those elements to create something new is another. Since founding the Natural Things research group at Stanford University in 2015, we have been wrestling with the connection between design work and natural history. When it comes to premodern sources, European natural histories are some of the most lavishly illustrated texts found in the scientific oeuvre. Authors and artists often worked together to create images that would allow readers to identify plants, animals, and minerals for themselves. Our musings slipped into a question: How did premodern scholars of nature think through images, and how could we echo that process in a way intelligible to today’s readers? https://4sonline.org/news\_manager.php?page=32001