The Image as Method

Understanding how image-making can become a heuristic that integrates seeing and doing and that thereby recognizes observation to be not merely passive experience but rather to involve active engagement and intervention – this will constitute the focus of our inquiries in this final phase of the project. While we have considered all kinds of media in the past five years, from manuscript illuminations to printed images reproduced from wood blocks and copper plates, in this phase of the project we will focus especially on the practices rather than the products of visualization. In particular, our continuing study of late medieval and early modern images has prompted us to examine drawing as an incredibly powerful means of stimulating and refining practices of observation, regardless of whether those practices are more artistic or scientific in nature. Drawing, in contrast to wood cutting or copper plate engraving, is an act that requires minimal tools and can be done (almost) everywhere. It thus is characterized by an immediacy that other early modern image-making techniques lack. We will compare the drawing practices in the early modern period with more modern imaging practices to understand better the way in which images are a method of scientific investigation.

 

Current Projects

Nina Caviezel, M.A. BFH: Mirroring, Filtering, Framing. Practices of Visualization of the James Webb Space Telescope

Alexandre Claude, M.A.: Beyond Shelves and Paper: Stones Investigations in the Late Renaissance

Daniel Santiago Sáenz, M.Phil: “quitar la raíz de tan mala memoria”: Polygraphic Dynamics of Education and Colonization in New Spain, 1521–1600

Former Group Members

Odile Manon Lehnen, MPhil: Celestial Machines: Caroline Herschel, Astronomical Notebooks and the Material Culture of Predigital Communication Systems

Jennifer Marine, M.A.: Registering the Invisible in Fin-de-Siècle Europe