Talia Bess Shabtay (Author)
Feldman, Hannah (Advisor)
Northwestern University
Feldman, Hannah
Physical Details: 309
Language: English
This dissertation is about breaking points. The forms and practices examined in what follows point to the ways in which art and visual culture in the mid-twentieth century United States could put pressure on technology—could, indeed, point to technology’s breaking points where it ceases to account for the fullness of the physical, social, psychological, or physiological scaffolds of lived experience. Such forms and practices are of special significance in the contemporary moment, when seeing itself has come to signify both an embodied human act and an algorithmic code. Each of the projects analyzed help to locate limits: limits of technology’s capacity to record, to encode, or to model the world we live in. In the process, they shed light on the cracks and crevices where human sensibility and imagination was, and still is, needed. A dissertation about breaking points is also fundamentally about the kinds of creative problem solving and innovation common to artistic and scientific practices. The project brings together a compendium of American artists, designers, engineers, and scientists who devised new techniques and technologies for seeing, thinking, and learning in the years between the birth of television and the emergence of modern electronic computing. They did so in the wake of World War II and the early Cold War, a time of massive government, academic, and industrial investment in techniques and technologies for knowing and a sharp increase in specialization. The practitioners I engage include artists such as Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, and Charles and Ray Eames, the engineer Jan Rajchman, a host of historians and critics ranging from science historian I. Bernard Cohen to the novelist and former chemist Charles Percy (C. P.) Snow, and mathematicians, from the nineteenth-century geometer Felix Klein to Claude Shannon and Alan Turing, foundational figures of computer science. In their efforts to enhance the human sensorium through technologies, they sought to overturn disciplinary boundaries and enable a mass populace to access knowledge through perception retooled for the techno cultural future they imagined.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Book
Peter John Brownlee;
(2018)
The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America
Article
Sigrid Leyssen;
(2021)
Remaking “Michotte”: Reusing and Remaking Moving Images in the History of Perception Research
Chapter
Neal, Valerie;
(2013)
Bringing Spaceflight Down to Earth: Astronauts and The IMAX Experience®
Chapter
Dupré, Sven;
(2013)
The Return of the Species: Jesuit Responses to Kepler's New Theory of Images
Book
Alexis L. Boylan;
(2020)
Visual Culture
Book
A. Joan Saab;
(2020)
Objects of Vision: Making Sense of What We See
Book
Mannoni, Laurent;
Nekes, Werner;
Warner, Marina;
(2004)
Eyes, Lies and Illusions: The Art of Deception
Book
Sarah Lewis;
(2024)
The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America
Book
Michael Rossi;
(2019)
The Republic of Color: Science, Perception, and the Making of Modern America
Article
Pesic, Peter;
(2013)
Helmholtz, Riemann, and the Sirens: Sound, Color, and the “Problem of Space”
Thesis
Rossi, Michael Paul;
(2011)
The Rules of Perception: American Color Science, 1831--1931
Article
Erich Weidenhammer;
(2015)
August Kirschmann and the Material Culture of Colour in Toronto’s Early Psychological Laboratory
Thesis
Andrew B. Ross;
(2017)
A Natural History of the Eye: Shared Vision in Early American Natural History, 1784-1839
Thesis
Schiavo, Laura;
(2003)
“A Collection of Endless Extent and Beauty”: Stereographs, Vision, Taste and the American Middle Class, 1850--1880
Book
Shawn Michelle Smith;
(2020)
Photographic Returns: Racial Justice and the Time of Photography
Book
Vanessa Meikle Schulman;
(2015)
Work sights: The visual culture of industry in nineteenth-century America
Article
Wright, Aaron Sidney;
(2013)
The Origins of Penrose Diagrams in Physics, Art, and the Psychology of Perception, 1958--62
Article
Brauckmann, Sabine;
(2011)
Cultures of Seeing Embryos and Cells in 3-Dimensions and Flatness
Book
Leja, Michael;
(2004)
Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp
Chapter
Ihde, Don;
(2008)
Art Precedes Science: or Did the Camera Obscura Invent Modern Science?
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Physics in Perspective
Scientia Canadensis: Journal of the History of Canadian Science, Technology, and Medicine
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Be the first to comment!