Abstract
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison’s Objectivity offers new opportunities to reconcile philosophical and historical accounts of visual practices in science. A key argument in their work is that the concept of objectivity – once considered as the privileged and almost exclusive domain of philosophical investigation – has a history, which deserves careful consideration by philosophers and historians alike.
I build on Daston and Galison’s narrative and extend it to the complex relationship between scientists and visual artists. I claim that artists participated in the history of objectivity by offering powerful challenges to the modes and methods of visualization and representation pursued by scientists at crucial times in the history of science. Through a selection of case studies ranging from eighteenth century anatomy, nineteenth and twentieth century photography and contemporary artist in residence programmes, I explore the extent and impact of the conversations and controversies between artists and scientists around “accurate representation”, and their epistemological import on what constitutes scientific objectivity.
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For a reconstruction of Albinus’ diopters system see Huisman 1992, pp. 6 and ff.
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The only exception to these accounts is Kiefer (1991).
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I am grateful to the Wesleyan University Library for allowing me to examine two original photogravures from Camera Work of The Terminal (Wesleyan Library A/N 1991.30.56) and Two Towers (Wesleyan Library A/N 1981.9.1).
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I discuss Stieglitz’s ideas about form and structure with reference to his 1907 work, The Steerage, in Ambrosio (forthcoming).
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In a well known 2008 Wired Magazine article, for instance, Chris Anderson prophesized “the end of theories” as a result of the data deluge: “The new availability of huge amounts of data, along with the statistical tools to crunch these numbers, offers a whole new way of understanding the world. Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all”. Anderson (2008), available at http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory (Last accessed 18/04/2012). For a recent perspective on the philosophical issues surrounding data-driven science, especially in biology and the biomedical sciences see Leonelli (2012).
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Ambrosio, C. (2014). Objectivity and Visual Practices in Science and Art. In: Galavotti, M., Dieks, D., Gonzalez, W., Hartmann, S., Uebel, T., Weber, M. (eds) New Directions in the Philosophy of Science. The Philosophy of Science in a European Perspective, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04382-1_24
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