Visual Studies Today: Visual Culture and Convergence in the Digital Age

Cental European University | Budapest July 22 - July 25, 2003

Instructors: Dr. Lisa Cartwright and Dr. Brian Goldfarb

Wednesday, July 23: Body and Technology

I. Representational technologies of visual classification

Instructor: Dr. Lisa cartwright

Required reading:

• Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39, 1986, 3-64
• Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, "The Case of Race Classification and Reclassification under Apartheid," Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000, 195-225
• Evelynn M. Hammonds, "New Technologies of Race," Processed Lives: Gender and Technology in Everyday Life, ed. Jennifer Terry and Melodie Calvert, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, 107-121.
• Lisa Cartwright, "A Cultural Anatomy of the Visible Human Project," The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender and Science, ed. Paula A. Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, and Constance Penley, New York University Press, 1998, 21-43.

Questions:

II. Creative tools and practice in art and science

Instructor: Dr. Lisa Cartwright

Required readings:

• Bruno Latour, "How to be Iconophilic in Art, Science, and Religion?" Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, New York and London: Routledge, 1998, 418-440.
• Donna J. Haraway, "Mice into Wormholes: A Comment on the Nature of No Nature," Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies, ed. Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit, Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1997, 208-243.

Questions:

• Consider Latour's claim that constructivism weakens truth claims in science, whereas increased mediation and interpretation enhances the pleasure of art. He finds the concept of persons (which he takes as art's subject) useful to science studies. Is his category of immutable mobiles useful to the theorist of art?
• OncoMouse is a patented genetically altered mouse that undergoes carcinogenesis for laboratory use. oncoMouse is Haraway's example of living organisms as raw material for the creative redesign of nature. How is the world-building enterprise described by Haraway shared across art and scientific realms of imagination and industry? Compare artistic and digital images of subjectivity to OncoMouse's representation of humanity.

Links/Resources

• Francis Galton
  • on fingerprints
  • Facial composites
  • sciences of detection
• Lennart Nilsson,
  • cover of LIFE, April 30, 1965 18-week Fetus
  • Fetal development