front cover of Atmospheric Things
Atmospheric Things
On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment
Derek P. McCormack
Duke University Press, 2018
In Atmospheric Things Derek P. McCormack explores how atmospheres are imagined, understood, and experienced through experiments with a deceptively simple object: the balloon. Since the invention of balloon flight in the late eighteenth century, balloons have drawn crowds at fairs and expositions, inspired the visions of artists and writers, and driven technological development from meteorology to military surveillance. By foregrounding the distinctive properties of the balloon, McCormack reveals its remarkable capacity to disclose the affective and meteorological dimensions of atmospheres. Drawing together different senses of the object, the elements, and experience, McCormack uses the balloon to show how practices and technologies of envelopment allow atmospheres to be generated, made meaningful, and modified. He traces the alluring entanglement of envelopment in artistic, political, and technological projects, from the 2009 Pixar movie Up and Andy Warhol’s 1966 installation Silver Clouds to the use of propaganda balloons during the Cold War and Google's experiments with delivering internet access with stratospheric balloons. In so doing, McCormack offers new ways to conceive of, sense, and value the atmospheres in which life is immersed.
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Documenting the World
Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record
Edited by Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Imagine the twentieth century without photography and film. Its history would be absent of images that define historical moments and generations: the death camps of Auschwitz, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Apollo lunar landing. It would be a history, in other words, of just artists’ renderings and the spoken and written word. To inhabitants of the twenty-first century, deeply immersed in visual culture, such a history seems insubstantial, imprecise, and even, perhaps, unscientific.

Documenting the World is about the material and social life of photographs and film made in the scientific quest to document the world. Drawing on scholars from the fields of art history, visual anthropology, and science and technology studies, the chapters in this book explore how this documentation—from the initial recording of images, to their acquisition and storage, to their circulation—has altered our lives, our ways of knowing, our social and economic relationships, and even our surroundings. Far beyond mere illustration, photography and film have become an integral, transformative part of the world they seek to show us.
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Introduction to Sensors for Ranging and Imaging
Graham Brooker
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, 2009
This is a comprehensive textbook and reference that provides a solid background in active sensing technology. Beginning with a historical overview and an introductory section on signal generation, filtering and modulation, it follows with a section on radiometry (infrared and microwave) as a background to the active sensing process. The core of the book is concerned with active sensing, starting with the basics of time-of-flight sensors (operational principles, components), and goes through the derivation of the radar range equation, and the detection of echo signals, both fundamental to the understanding of radar, sonar and lidar imaging. Several chapters cover signal propagation of both electromagnetic and acoustic energy, target characteristics, stealth and clutter. The remainder of the book involves the basics of the range measurement process, active imaging with an emphasis on noise and linear frequency modulation techniques, Doppler processing, and target tracking.
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Operational Images
From the Visual to the Invisual
Jussi Parikka
University of Minnesota Press, 2023

An in-depth look into the transformation of visual culture and digital aesthetics

 

First introduced by the German filmmaker Harun Farocki, the term operational images defines the expanding field of machine vision. In this study, media theorist Jussi Parikka develops Farocki’s initial concept by considering the extent to which operational images have pervaded today’s visual culture, outlining how data technologies continue to develop and disrupt our understanding of images beyond representation.

Charting the ways that operational images have been employed throughout a variety of fields and historical epochs, Parikka details their many roles as technologies of analysis, capture, measurement, diagramming, laboring, (machine) learning, identification, tracking, and destruction. He demonstrates how, though inextricable from issues of power and control, operational images extend their reach far beyond militaristic and colonial violence and into the realms of artificial intelligence, data, and numerous aspects of art, media, and everyday visual culture.

Serving as an extensive guide to a key concept in contemporary art, design, and media theory, Operational Images explores the implications of machine vision and the limits of human agency. Through a wealth of case studies highlighting the areas where imagery and data intersect, this book gives us unprecedented insight into the ever-evolving world of posthuman visuality.

Cover alt text: Satellite photo on which white title words appear in yellow boxes. Yellow lines connect the boxes.

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front cover of Photography and Science
Photography and Science
Kelley Wilder
Reaktion Books, 2009
How do we know what an amoeba looks like? How can doctors see the details of our skeletons and internal organs? What enables us to see an exploding star in another galaxy? All of these things are made possible through the innovations of photography. Kelley Wilder now provides a primer on the remarkably fruitful applications of photography to science, as she explores the multiple facets of this complex relationship.

Kelley Wilder draws upon her extensive background in alternative process photography, museum practice, art history, and history of science to produce a wide-ranging and illuminating investigation into the intersection of photography and science. Photography and Science describes how photography first established its legitimacy through its close association with key scientific ideas and practices, such as objectivity, observation, archiving, and experimentation. Wilder then charts how photography returned the favor by serving as a powerful influence in various scientific disciplines, such as biology and astronomy.  The book digs into the controversial debates over photography’s “success” in the sciences, its use in practical fields such as medical imaging and x-raying, and the complicated relationship between scientific theory and art practice.

Augmenting this fascinating study are eighty photographs of scientific subjects and experiments, many of which are published here for the first time. A thought-provoking, broad-based examination, Photography and Science will be an essential addition to the bookshelves of scientists, photographers, and art historians alike.
 
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Race and Photography
Racial Photography as Scientific Evidence, 1876-1980
Amos Morris-Reich
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Race and Photography studies the changing function of photography from the 1870s to the 1940s within the field of the “science of race,” what many today consider the paradigm of pseudo-science. Amos Morris-Reich looks at the ways photography enabled not just new forms of documentation but new forms of perception. Foregoing the political lens through which we usually look back at race science, he holds it up instead within the light of the history of science, using it to explore how science is defined; how evidence is produced, used, and interpreted; and how science shapes the imagination and vice versa.
           
Exploring the development of racial photography wherever it took place, including countries like France and England, Morris-Reich pays special attention to the German and Jewish contexts of scientific racism. Through careful reconstruction of individual cases, conceptual genealogies, and patterns of practice, he compares the intended roles of photography with its actual use in scientific argumentation. He examines the diverse ways it was used to establish racial ideologies—as illustrations of types, statistical data, or as self-evident record of racial signs. Altogether, Morris-Reich visits this troubling history to outline important truths about the roles of visual argumentation, imagination, perception, aesthetics, epistemology, and ideology within scientific study.  
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front cover of The Visual Elements—Photography
The Visual Elements—Photography
A Handbook for Communicating Science and Engineering
Felice C. Frankel
University of Chicago Press, 2023
For novice or pro, primary investigator or postdoc, the essentials for photographing science and technology for journals, grant applications, and public understanding.
 
Award-winning photographer Felice C. Frankel, whose work has graced the covers of Science, Nature,and Scientific American, among other publications, offers a quick guide for scientists and engineers who want to communicate—and better understand—their research by creating compelling photographs. Like all the books in the Visual Elements series, this short guide uses engaging examples to train researchers to learn visual communication. Distilling her celebrated books and courses to the essentials, Frankel shows scientists and engineers the importance of thinking visually. When she creates stunning images of scientific phenomena, she is not only interested in helping researchers to convey understanding to others in their research community or to gain media attention, but also in making these experts themselves “look longer” to understand more fully. Ideal for researchers who want a foothold for presenting and preparing their work for conferences, journal publications, and funding agencies, the book explains four tools that all readers can use—a phone, a camera, a scanner, and a microscope—and then offers important advice on composition and image manipulation ethics. The Visual Elements—Photography is an essential element in any scientist’s, engineer’s, or photographer’s library.
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