Perceptual Machines: Communication, Archiving, and Vision in Post-War American Design

Abstract

This article examines historical transformations in the relationship between the image, time, and knowledge after the war. One site to investigate these changes in representation is at the locus of science, design, film and architecture in the works of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes for the Center for Advanced Visual Study at MIT and in the interests of science education. In these works, including many science education and pedagogy films, the nature of the image, the materiality of vision, and the relationship between documentation and communication were being aggressively rethought. All these projects were deeply invested in the emergent terms of cybernetics and electronic media. Ontology, documentation, and representation were seemingly replaced by discourses of communication, performance, and modularity; the world as interface for the mediation of ongoing, lively communicative exchanges. The work of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes provides evidence of a more global reformulation of the work of the document, the relationship between abstraction and materiality, and among science, aesthetics, and visuality.

The Electronic Vesalius: Embodying Anatomy Atlases

“…Interactive displays do not uncritically operationalize the logic of control but rather participate in the historically evolving discourses and media technologies of "objectivity," as Orit Halpern has shown: "Objectivity was redefined in terms of the production of algorithms, methods, and processes that facilitate interaction based upon the assumption of an infinitude of stored information" [7]. This radical informationalization redefined objectivity toward affective subjectivation and away from the strategies of epistemological standardization documented in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison's study of scientific atlases' aesthetics of observerless observation, or "knowledge that bears no trace of the knower" [8].…”

Mid-Century Visions, Programmed Affinities: The Enduring Challenges of Image Classification

“…This example reveals the currency of the discourse of affinities at that time, to grantmakers, businessmen, and librarians alike. In the post-war period, studies of perception and visual language, and their impact on design, were in wide circulation (see Halpern, 2012; Turner, 2013). Kepes’s (1944: 13) Language of Vision insisted, ‘Visual communication is universal and international; it knows no limits of tongue, vocabulary, or grammar, and it can be perceived by the illiterate as well as by the literate.’ Along with Kepes and Arnheim, Buckminster Fuller, and others were drawing connections to the similarity of recurring forms across art, science, and design, and a shared belief that pleasing forms reveal efficient function.…”

Ecologías urbanas desde el Center for Advanced Visual Studies del MIT (György Kepes, 1967)

“…Con la fundación del Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) en el Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts (MIT) en 1967, el profesor György Kepes (1906Kepes ( -2001 impulsó un espacio en el que los anhelos creativos de sus integrantes disfrutaban del apoyo de especialistas en ciencia y tecnología para adquirir destrezas y herramientas operativas para el diseño del medio. A lo largo de su carrera, Kepes defendió la correspondencia entre la visión artística y el conocimiento científico (Halpern, 2013), en particular, que el arte y la ciencia podían operar como campos complementarios que ofrecían una solución integrada a los problemas medioambientales de la ciudad de entonces. Los trabajos que realizó ejemplifican esa visión comprometida con los desafíos sociales y urbanos desde una concepción plural, poética y científica al mismo tiempo.…”