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From Euclid’s Elements, diagram accompanying the proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. No manuscript of the Elements from Euclid’s hand, much less his time (the 3rd century BCE) survives to this day; the earliest manuscripts upon which modern editions are based were compiled in the 4th and 9th centuries of the common era. It’s astonishing to think that the diagrams of Euclid’s Elements were handed down by the agency of more than a millennium of scribal labor before the advent of sophisticated printing techniques; the version above appears in a manuscript of 13th-century Persian mathematician Nasrudeen al-Din al-Tusi. —image via Tim Carmody/@tcarmody
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The seventeenth-century polymath Athanasius Kircher doesn’t fit the modern mold of the scientist. A subversive, eclectic dabbler, Kircher is seen today as an avatar of the arts more than the sciences, a precursor to Jorge Luis Borges and a postmodernist avant la lettre. And yet for Kircher as for Leonardo, these magisteria still overlapped. This image (1679) illustrates his argument concerning the impossibility of the Biblical Tower of Babel, a powerful early example of the exposure of sacred topics to scientific thought. —image via Tom Nealon (@pazzobooks)
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Maybe we can think of fossilization as an instance of “found” scientific imagery?Certainly, the fossils of Archaeopteryx, a late-Jurassic protobird. Fossil evidence for Archaeopteryx was first discovered in the form of a single fossil feather in Germany in 1860; the image above, the so-called Berlin Archaeopteryx unearthed in about 1875, is the most complete. —image via Debbie Chacra/@debcha
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Vesalius, 1555. —image via Jeremy Dibbell/@JBD1
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Moth found trapped between points at Relay # 70, Panel F, of the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator while it was being tested at Harvard University, 9 September 1947.
OK, this is not the most beautiful collage ever seen. But this bug, found in the computer room at Harvard by technicians searching around for what was wrong with the damn machine *this time, was extracted from the computations that caused its death and taped to a piece of graph paper, carefully labelled and preserved. It was not the first bug to invade a computer, the glowing tubes of which used to attract them with some regularity. But it was the first bug literally documented by becoming part of the document. And it went on to become not only part of the the document, but part of the documentation: we de-bug things, first computers, and now all sorts of things, as our technological metaphors seem to swarm everywhere and get into everything. Not unlike, well, bugs.
(posted by Peggy Nelson/@otolythe)
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Diffraction photograph of the B form of DNA, Rosalind Franklin, May 1952
Sometimes the images are a record of an event or thing, absent in the image, which must then be inferred by the most reasonable explanation. And since “the most reasonable explanation” is a qualitative category, there are sometimes several possible entities that a trail might infer. The trail here infers a double helix structure for DNA, not only the most reasonable explanation of the pattern displayed, but the most reasonable inference for the internal patterns of living things on earth. And yes, Rosalind Franklin knew what she had found, she wasn’t blindly recording weird images for others to interpret. The only reason she did not receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine with Crick, Watson and Wilkins in 1962 is that she died of cancer a few years after this photo was taken (at only age 37), and Nobels aren’t awarded to the deceased.
(posted by Peggy Nelson/@otolythe)
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Here’s one to consider: Gran Fury’s celebrated graphic, Silence = Death. Surely one of the most important political images in recent memory, but also a shrewd use of visual language to create the momentum needed for large-scale AIDS research. In contrast to the protest posters typical of the 70s and early 80s that employed populist, folk-art techniques for their message (think stencils, sketchy marks), this image campaign took on the exact gestures of slick advertising to great effect. Richard Meyer has a chapter on all the campaign images in But Is It Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism (Ed., Felshin). In an interview with one of the collective’s members: “It looked like a corporate logo, like some institution was speaking to me. It’s the appropriation of the voice of authority. Like a trick.” This image became the icon of the movement that unified and galvanized activists and transformed cultural fear into action—action that ultimately gave us the funding for research and treatments we have now. (post by Sara Hendren/@ablerism)
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Leonardo da Vinci, Study of water falling into still water, c. 1508-9.
I first saw this image, or a reproduction of it, in an exhibit that paired it with an actual faucet of water, pouring into a pool. The idea was that by looking at the water and the da Vinci side-by-side, you could try to see what he saw. Yeah, pretty much not one line. What I saw was “water,” and the homogeneity of the symbol blurred all the details into one. But Leonardo was able to visually isolate forces, and translate them into lines of motion, despite speed and transparency. If we could inject the water with threads of dye and freeze-frame it rushing through, we could slow it down enough to see what he saw at speed. It’s amazing that there’s all that detail and differentiation in rushing water. And it’s even more amazing that he, or *anyone, could actually see it.
(posted by Peggy Nelson/@otolythe)
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Mushroom cloud from first atomic test, Trinity Site, New Mexico, July 16, 1945.
That wonder comes from knowledge as well as mystery is central to the impact of this image, that of the first atomic bomb explosion (and the one that most resembles the fungi that gave the resulting cloud its name). We dissected forces much smaller than ourselves to barely control a force much larger. But comprehension does not necessarily entail domestication. Nature is not our pet.
(posted by Peggy Nelson/@otolythe)
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Jellyfish, Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen Der Natur, 1874.
It was a very long time after photography was invented that it became precise enough for scientific observation, especially at scale. The magnification, the lighting, the length of exposure all needed to play a lengthy and complex game of catch-up before they could be of much use in describing the structures of diatoms, for example. Ernst Haeckel, who felt a calling toward both art and science, spent hours at his microscopes, translating tiny and sometimes amorphous details into pen and ink, and sometimes color. These jellyfish were not that tiny, but the sheer delight and exuberance with which they are depicted by Haeckel’s pen, without sacrificing accuracy, meld the best of both worlds.
(posted by Peggy Nelson/@otolythe)
