Faculty Work

Drew Armstrong

Diderot, d’Alembert and the Encyclopédie (1751)

The “Tree of Knowledge” [Système figuré des connaissances humaines] appeared in the first volume of the Encyclopédie, ou, Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751), a titanic publishing enterprise produced between 1751 and 1772 and masterminded by Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (1717-1783).  The point of the diagram was to demonstrate that all knowledge [Entendement] is the product of sense experience and the workings of three mental faculties – Memory, Reason, and Imagination.

The “Tree of Knowledge” encapsulated in a single image the main goals of the Encyclopédie: to reconfigure the entirety of human knowledge as the basis for future progress in all fields of inquiry.  Citing precursors such as Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton, Diderot and d’Alembert based their encyclopedia on empirical and mathematical knowledge, rather than the authority of sources such as Ancient texts or the Bible.  An array of contemporary specialists was tapped to write over 70,000 articles on topics ranging from abstract principles of justice to the intricacies of watch-making.

The first folio edition of the Encyclopédie was a luxury product consisting of 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates illustrating an array of sciences, technologies, and arts.  The 2,885 engraved plates added substantially to the cost and time of production, but the editors justified the inclusion of this material to better explain complicated processes and unfamiliar things to a curious readership.  The Encyclopédie was thus something of a museum of visual specimens as well as an alphabetical dictionary of terms and ideas.

The ambition of the Encyclopédie was to change the way people thought.  The audacity of this project is brought into focus when considered in relation to the very limited nature of formal education available in eighteenth-century Europe.  Universities were accessible only to a privileged elite and their curricula – inherited from the Middle Ages – remained devoted largely to the study of ancient Greek and Latin authors, law, medicine and, most important, theology.  The Encyclopédie, by contrast, reached a European-wide audience.  By 1789, it is estimated that 24,000 complete sets in various formats and editions had been printed, more than half of which were distributed outside France.

The Plates of the Encyclopédie

The plates of the Encyclopédie often represent stages in complex technical processes by juxtaposing images of different types.  Vignettes representing human figures engaged in various activities are supplemented by large-scale renderings depicting tools and their proper manipulation.  Thus, in the plates that represent “Engraving” [Gravure], the process of transferring drawings to copper plates is illustrated in step-by-step fashion in a perspective view of an engraver’s studio, while the chisel-like tools used in this process are shown with cross-sections through their blades to better illustrate their forms.  Numbers adjacent to different parts of the image link each element into articles in the text.

Other visual techniques employed in the Encyclopédie include table-like arrays of specimens grouped to facilitate visual comparisons.  Such, for example, is the strategy used in the plate from the Supplément (1777) illustrating the stages in the development of a frog, which breaks down the process of gestation to clarify transformation and mutation over time.  Two plates (1768) illustrating different systems of botanical classification – the one developed by the French scholar Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708), the other by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) – are especially striking, permitting the reader to compare two competing systems at a moment when neither had been universally adopted by botanists.  Through these images, the Encyclopédie contributed to discussions about the principles of disciplines and disseminated up-to-date ideas formulate by prominent specialists.

The Encyclopédie was not merely conceived as a repository of information, but as an instrument for making new knowledge; as such, its product was ambiguous and open-ended, dependent on the reader making serendipitous juxtapositions.  In the course of the eighteenth century, a number of subsequent editions of the Encyclopédie were published, notably the smaller quarto edition exhibited here alongside the first folio edition. Published between 1777 and 1779 in Geneva, the quarto edition consisted of 36 text volumes and only three volumes of illustrations.  By this stage, the new publishers regarded the illustrations as cumbersome and largely unnecessary, explaining that while the Encyclopédie had contributed to “accelerating the progress of reason,” the cost of the original edition was an impediment to maximizing its benefits to humanity.

Annika Johnson

Kahn, The Life of Man (1923-1931)

The title of Fritz Kahn’s five-volume series – The Life of Man: A Popular Anatomy, Biology, Physiology and Developmental History of Man – reveals his ambition to synthesize new scientific knowledge into texts and images designed for a broad, non-specialist audience.  Kahn imagined the human body as a microcosm of both the universe and of the modern world: atoms, cells, and proteins performed their duties within a complex system of mechanical parts like workers in a great modern city.
 
A team of illustrators working under Kahn’s supervision produced the illustrations for The Life of Man, but establishing a uniform graphic language – something that preoccupied Kahn’s contemporary Otto Neurath – was not a goal.  Images for The Life of Man were appropriated from a variety of sources and no effort was made to create a homogeneous graphic style.  The diversity of image types – including microscopic photography, graphs, physiognomic illustrations, and three-dimensional photographs (complete with 3D glasses!) – expressed Kahn’s belief that different scientific concepts demanded different and sometimes multiple methods of visualization.
 
Comparative images dominated Kahn’s approach to scientific visualization. Such images emphasized process over realistic graphic renderings of discrete anatomical parts.  Kahn tackled the challenge of representing biological processes by transforming the body into a complex of machine-like organs assembled from gears, levers, conveyor belts and pulleys.  Unlike the plates of the Encyclopédie, which broke down processes into discrete stages and favored a “true-to-life” mode of representation, Kahn’s images encourage the reader to reconstruct the internal processes of the body by imagining the living organism to function like a well-designed machine.
 
The Life of Man established standards according to which the reader could measure progress and difference.  Numerous illustrations of bodies deemed abnormal or dysfunctional served to reinforce a norm.  Kahn’s definition of “normal” and his constructions of race and gender were based on long-standing visual traditions that will be encountered in other parts of this exhibition.  Physiognomic illustrations (strikingly similar to those developed in the eighteenth century by Johann Kaspar Lavater) are not completely at odds with Kahn’s mechanic illustrations: both types of image impose a standardized view of a normal body – often white and European.

Kahn, Man as Industrial Palace (1931)

To Fritz Kahn (1888-1968), the diffusion of scientific knowledge and its practical applications required compelling visualizations that transformed complex ideas into terms accessible to a modern consumer public.  Man as Industrial Palace (Der Mensch als Industriepalast), the image for which Kahn is best known, first appeared in 1931 in the final volume of Kahn’s series The Life of Man.  Created for a non-specialist audience, the image was intended to hang in the modern home or classroom.
 
Man as Industrial Palace graphically illustrates Kahn’s goal to define the workings of the human body “in light of modern science.”  The living body as it acts, works, thinks, and dreams is reconfigured according to the author-entrepreneur’s vision for a modern science and pedagogy that demanded a new approach to scientific illustration.  Rejecting the anatomist’s cadaver, Kahn’s illustration of the inner workings of the human body drew from the mechanical world of automobiles, cameras, and telephones that surrounded his middle-class readership.
 
The deconstructed bodies illustrated in the Encyclopédie may have contained much visual information about their subjects, but they revealed little about the function of bodily systems.  Kahn built up the body for his readers, beginning with the atom and ending with the senses, each component of which functions as part of a fully integrated mechanic system.
 
Kahn’s mechanic analogies are fraught with ambiguities: do they educate readers about their own bodies, or about the production and use of consumer goods that position their bodies in modernity?  Man as Industrial Palace presents a body of scientific knowledge that was also a microcosm of German society during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933).  Kahn’s hierarchical arrangement of the head and torso mirrored departments in a modern factory.  Men in suits debate in the centers of reasoning and decision-making, while women operate the switchboards of the nervous system.   Below, in the abdomen, uniformed laborers sort starches from fats in the guts of the body.  The educated, consumerist audience for such images more likely profited from the industrial complex than labored in its factories. For further images, please visit Der Mensch als Industriepalast: http://www.fritz-kahn.com/gallery/man-as-industrial-palace/.

Drew Armstrong 

The images from Cellarius and Hubble diverge from one another in regard to relations they may suggest between microcosm and macrocosm.  Certainly, in beholding Hubble images, and then considering them in relation to work such as Berenice Abbott’s photography, one might seek out parallels between patterns of order as they exist at the largest scale (images of nebulae) and patterns of order as they exist at the smallest scale (images of ripple tanks).

The search for such patterns may in fact underwrite the most venturesome kinds of scientific inquiry today.  Yet, as an explicit subject of commentary, these parallels often lie beyond the workaday concerns of contemporary scientists, and it falls to artists, such as the famous artist-architect Le Corbusier whose work appears on the opposite wall, to scrutinize them closely.  Not so when Cellarius worked.  As Johannes Janssonius (1588-1664) remarked, Cellarius’s work was part of a “general description of the entire world, namely Heaven and Earth,” that avowedly sought to “discover the Harmoniam Macrocosmicam, the concordance and harmony of the Great World,” one that required terrestrial phenomena to “correspond… correctly to the heavenly bodies in a given proportion and comparison.”

PHYSICS

Abbott and the MIT Physical Science Study Committee

Colleen O’Reilly

In 1958, Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) was hired by the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) at MIT to work on the development of a new physics textbook for American high school students.  In the wake of the launch of Sputnik and anxieties about the global competitiveness of American science and technology, the National Science Foundation offered funding to the PSSC and other organizations who wanted to revitalize science education so that more young people would pursue scientific professions.

Abbott, who had been working on science as a subject of photography since 1939, endeavored to make high quality images for the PSSC that clearly explained laws of motion, wave behavior, magnetism and other phenomena. For Abbott, this required the active intervention and creative imposition of an artist, traits that people sometimes imagine lie outside the realm of scientific images.

Like many scientific images, Abbott’s photographs visualize principles that have no essential visual form.  She represents abstract concepts as concrete visual events.  As much as Abbott may reveal or penetrate nature, she also actively generates visual forms.  The apparently straightforward images belie the complexity of the processes by which they were made, which included the orchestration of lights, the deployment of mechanical devices, experiments with equipment, and the coordination of a team of people.  These methods were designed to result in images that would answer to her artistic, pedagogical agenda.

Physics was published in 1960, and Abbott was subsequently pushed out of the project, in spite of the success of her photographs and the extent to which they were used.  She expressed deep disappointment with how the reproductions looked in the textbook, but always said that the work she did at MIT was some of the most exciting of her career.  Abbott continued to work with these images, which were circulated in the early 1960s by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service as an exhibit entitled “The Image of Physics”, and continued to be published in science journals, art magazines, and books for general audiences.  They also were and continue to be shown in museums as art objects.

Berenice Abbott
American, 1898-1991

Documenting Science, ed. by Ron Kurtz
Published by Steidl, Göttingen, 2012

To me photography is a means, perhaps the best means of our age - of widening knowledge of our world. Photography is a method of education, for acquainting people of all ages and conditions with the turth about life today."

-Berenice Abbott, "Statement in Regard to Photography Today," unpublished text, 1964
On loan from Frick Fine Arts Library, University of Pittsburgh

ASTRONOMY

NASA Hubble Space Telescope Images

Cellarius, Harmonia Macrocosmica (1708)

Astronomical images have undergone enormous changes over the past few centuries.  Such pictures present a coherent set of issues, as they strive to picture celestial objects, provide visual supports for human knowledge of them, pack information into images, and make manifest patterns of order.

What Hubble space photographs show are not things a human observer can ever perceive, even when the observer looks through a telescope.  Hubble space telescopic images present us with data that only emerge, as data, from the particular artifices that bring them into being: above all, compositing photographs taken at different moments in time, and coloring them in accordance with protocols that theoretical knowledge dictates.  This fact does not imply that Hubble photographs are unreliable, but simply means we cannot view the information they offer as possessing straightforward counterparts in observation.

Plate 6 of Harmonia Macrocosmica by Andreas Cellarius (c. 1596-1665) pictures the world system of the sixteenth-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601); In Brahe’s schema, the planets revolve around the sun, but the sun and moon revolve around an unmoving earth.

As is the case with most of the images in Cellarius’s monumental work, his depiction of Brahe’s system shows us something that itself can never be seen, the network of trajectories that celestial bodies follow.  At the same time, the system in question rests entirely on visual data, information available to human observers that they subsequently integrate into an account of the heavens.  Brahe, in fact, belonged to the last generation of astronomers who worked entirely with the naked eye.  Cellarius has taken some liberty in updating Brahe’s system, including the four moons of Jupiter that Galileo had only discovered after Brahe’s death, with the aid of a telescope.

Both the Cellarius images and the Hubble photographs are not themselves agents of investigation—neither the Cellarius images nor the Hubble “outreach” photographs aim to establish things we do not already know, but strive to communicate pre-existing knowledge to non-specialist audiences.