Objectivity and Representative Practices across Artistic and Scientific Visualization

Abstract

s (2007) work on scientific atlases has opened new lines of inquiry into the relations between objectivity and visual practices in science. Implicit in their narrative, and in need of further investigation, are some suggestions on how historical reflections on visual practices in science incorporate its evolving relation with the visual arts. In this chapter I chart the story of how artists participated in the practices of observation that Daston and Galison (2007:19ff) compellingly define as "collective empiricism". In doing this, I use their narrative as a point of departure to narrate a story that is deeply intertwined with that of scientific objectivity, and which has remained so far pretty much untold. My aim is to show that the history of scientific objectivity has constantly crossed paths with the history of artistic visualisation, from which it has received some powerful challenges. Drawing on three case-studies from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, I argue that, by challenging the current canons of correct and accurate forms of visualisation and representation, artists played a crucial role in shaping the history of objectivitymainly by vocalizing their objections to it.My concern in this chapter is twofold, and it ultimately aims to reconcile historical and epistemological accounts of visual practices in science and in the visual arts. At a basic level, my aim is to add new interpretative layers to images that are too often taken for granted and classified strictly as "scientific" or "artistic". Looking at the history of how certain artistic and scientific representations came to be the way they are reveals that scientific visualisation is imbued with aesthetic commitments, and that artistic visualisation constantly capitalizes onand responds toscientific and technological innovation. But in charting this history, my concern is primarily an epistemological one. Complicating the story of what count as accurate representations

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“…A context of graphing time provides a unifying theme for the corpus in Aigner et al 9 The history of tree-based visualizations in Lima 14 covers historical depth and breadth (with the earliest dated c. 2250 BCE) which supports a classification of such visualizations. Others take a different approach to discussions of historical context including: scientific objectivity in visualization and artistic visualization on case studies dating from the 18th century, 15 histories of visual communication encompassing a wider variety of visual mediums than typical visualization examples including symbolic pictures, written languages, illustrations and photography, 16 statues, sculptures, paintings, theater, and symbols. 17 Selected visualizations in history appear commonly as they are described in multiple sources, for example, the Fever Chart of Carl August Wunderlich 9,18,19 among others, contributing to the popularity of such visualization examples.…”

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