Co-Published with the University of Chicago Press
In science and technology, the images used to depict ideas, data, and reactions can be as striking and explosive as the concepts and processes they embody—both works of art and generative forces in their own right. Drawing on a close dialogue between the histories of art, science, and technology, The Technical Image explores these images not as mere illustrations or examples, but as productive agents and distinctive, multilayered elements of the process of generating knowledge. Using beautifully reproduced visuals, this book not only reveals how scientific images play a constructive role in shaping the findings and insights they illustrate, but also—however mechanical or detached from individual researchers’ choices their appearances may be—how they come to embody the styles of a period, a mindset, a research collective, or a device.
Horst Bredekamp is professor of art history at the Humboldt University of Berlin and a permanent fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin.
Vera Dünkel is a research affiliate with the “Das Technische Bild” research project.
Birgit Schneider is the postdoctoral fellow of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation at the Institute for Arts and Media, University of Potsdam.
Introduction: The Image—A Cultural Technology: A Research Program for a Critical Analysis of Images
Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider
I. Methods
Discourses about Pictures: Considerations on the Particular
Challenges Natural-Scientific Pictures Pose for the Theory of the Picture
Gabriele Werner
Glossary: Comparing Images
A History of Styles of Technical Imagery: Between Description and Interpretation
A Conversation with Horst Bredekamp
Glossary: Iconological Analysis
Beyond the Icons of Knowledge: Artistic Styles and the Art
History of Scientific Imagery
Matthias Bruhn
II. Case Studies
Interacting with Images—Toward a History of the Digital
Image: The Case of Graphical User Interfaces
Margarete Pratschke
Glossary: Digital Images
Pictorial Tradition and Difference—Visual Knowledge in
Acquisition Science: The Case of Scanning Tunneling Microscopy
Jochen Hennig
Glossary: Chains of Representations
Thinking with Models: On the Genesis of James Watson’s
Molecular Biology of the Gene
Reinhard Wendler
Glossary: Arranging Images as Tableaux
Technological Image Series: The Project “Technik im Bild” at
the Deutsches Museum, Munich
Heike Weber
Glossary: Observation Techniques
In the Eye of the Beholder: Emanuel Goldberg’s Apparatuses
at the International Photographic Exhibition Dresden 1909
Franziska Brons
Glossary: Objectivity and Evidence
X-Ray Vision and Shadow Image: On the Specificity of Early
Radiographs and Their Interpretations around 1900
Vera Dünkel
Glossary: Visuality, Visualizing, Imaging
Instrument-Aided Vision and the Imagination: The Migration
of Worms and Dragons in Early Microscopy
Stefan Ditzen
Glossary: Image Noise
Programmed Images: Systems of Notation in Seventeenth- and
Eighteenth-Century Weaving
Birgit Schneider
Glossary: Diagrammatics
Early Modern Images of Musical Automata: On Athanasius
Kircher’s Trompe-l’Oreille Contemplations in the Quirinal Gardens in Rome
Angela Mayer-Deutsch
Glossary Popularizing Science
Drawing and the Contemplation of Nature—Natural History
around 1600: The Case of Aldrovandi’s Images
Angela Fischel
Bibliography
The Authors
Index
Not only is the objectivity of scientific images … challenged, but the accounts here of technical histories, evaluation practices, iconographical traditions, and modes of perception make even clearer the constructive character of the images. For all that such images are expected to be self-evident and to follow rules of repetition and verifiability, like experiments, it is nevertheless—or, even better, therefore—the case that manipulated images often generate better scientific results in the eyes of the scientists… . The volume deserves to be treated as an indispensable research tool.
John Harwood, Oberlin College | author of “The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design”
The Technical Image concretizes the beginnings of a long-term intellectual project of outstanding importance: the interdisciplinary melding of methods from art history, media studies, and the history of science to produce a new body of scholarly literature on imagery generated in the contexts of ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ scientific research. The illustrations are excellent, the translations are very good indeed, and the glossary will be invaluable to undergraduate and graduate students alike as they begin to navigate the rich interdisciplinary literature now emerging on the interactions between the history of art and the history of science and technology. The pointed and even controversial texts in this volume will serve in the Anglophone academy as a point of departure for a renewed debate in numerous fields that is already well under way in the German-speaking context.
Omar W. Nasim, University of Kent | author of “Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century”
By way of direct and empirical engagement with materials and forms that make up an image, general issues emerge that go into informing and shaping the study of technical images. Among the most important of these general issues is the notion of style. As an art-historical category, style thus reemerges in the context of technical images. This book does an excellent job of not only expanding the study of the image in the history and sociology of science more toward art history’s veritable and long engagement with the image; but also conversely, it succeeds in explaining what art history takes to be an image. Visually exciting, interesting, and engaging.
