Beyond the Image Machine: A History of Visual Technologies 9781472545503, 9780826462725, 9780826462732

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For Nina Fu whose drawings reinvent the world — each a microhistory.

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Introduction

Touch is the most intimate of all the senses, the most erotic and carnal. To touch something, or someone, to delicately run fingers or tongue over the surfaces of a living body, to kiss someone, is to radically subvert, destabilize, and collapse the distance, the space, between bodies and "things." The erotic or carnal powers of touch are not limited to a simple implosion or short-circuiting of the gap between people, or between people and things; nor do these powers lie in the ability of touch to anesthetize distance through a carnal play of surfaces. Touch evaporates limits by confusing the boundaries of the body, and it precipitates possibilities by stimulating and rousing the other senses. Hence touch can seduce and conspire with taste to transform the tongue into an ecstatic zone of sensual pleasure. Or it can trick sight in such a way as to transform it into a magical channel of erotic pleasures. Beyond its intimate and seductive powers, but also perhaps because of them, the sense of touch can link domains of knowledge, practices, and technologies. One might say that touch can not only create the possibilities of knowledge through its sensory logic, but it can also transform the object of knowledge itself. This is especially true when one considers the body and its sensory apparatus in relation to technologies of transportation and communication. Applied science and technology have fundamentally transformed the context in which the body functions by creating new sensory environments and sense ratios (McLuhan 1964). New ways of seeing, new smells, tastes, new sounds and acoustic atmospheres, new materials, new tactile surfaces and environments have been created by and in relation to various articulated and disarticulated "machine ensembles" (Schivelbusch 1979) beginning with the railway system, photography, telegraphy, the telephone, the automobile, aircraft, and most recently,

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computer- and closed circuit-based imaging systems. By recomposing the sensory landscape in which the body functions, these various machine ensembles, often the distant products of the hand and thus of a range of tactilities, have redefined the limits of the body's sense organs and the boundaries of its exterior and interior spaces. Witness one of Barthes' more poignant comments on photography: "A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed" (Barthes 1984:81). Or consider Nicolas Negroponte's less poetic, but equally resonant observation concerning the ancient route of the human body's interaction with computer-based imaging systems: "The dark horse in graphical input is the human finger" (Negroponte 1995:131). While Barthes' comments point to a synesthesia of the senses and to the existence of a virtual sensory ecology rooted in a spectral and communal body whose presence can be mapped in terms of a given media landscape, Negroponte's observation identifies the fingers of the hand as the primary interface and medium for information transmission with the computing universe. These realizations can lead to the more speculative and singular proposition that the hand and the eye conspire to close a circuit between an organism's inner world and its outer environment, with the objective of broadening the ecological reach of a cybernetically modeled "mind" (Bateson 1972c). Academic and artistic research has been increasingly concentrated over the last few years on scientific and technological advances and the new environments and sensory possibilities they have created. A key focus in this area has been on new biotechnologies, and computer-based imaging technologies such as virtual reality, where researchers have focused on questions related to the human organism's genetic- and digitally-mediated transformation. Indeed, new technology and the status of the posthuman seems to have superseded gender and race as the primary focus and leading edge of cultural studies and contemporary art practice. Beyond the Image Machine proposes a different, transcultural approach to the human organism's scientific- and technology-based metamorphosis. Beyond the Image Machine is composed of a series of sensory-based, site specific histories of media and media-induced experience. These histories are presented in the form of case studies that deal with such topics as

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the interactions between old and new media thresholds and the materialization of vision (Chapter 1); an historian's contact with unprecedented scientific discoveries at the turn of the twentieth century and his attempts to comprehend their implications (Chapter 2); a major nineteenth-century project to build computing engines that only fully exist on paper (Chapter 4); and various facets of a uchronic project for linking past, present, and future imaging systems and representational "events" in the service of a twenty-first century imagination (Chapters 5, 6, 7). The particular threshold, contact, discovery, incomplete project or uchronic venture is explored in relationship to a mode of protocybernetic communication that might exist between a human organism and an o o idea or ideas treated as a field of possibilities ensconced in graphic form or through instruments whose end products are graphic in form. The objective of Beyond the Image Machine is not to provide an exhaustive historical overview which, by the nature of the phenomenon under investigation, is impossible, but rather to present a suite of studies that support a disarticulated and deviant view of the relationship between archaic and new representations, imaging technologies and mediainduced experience. Each example has been chosen because of the unusual way that past, present, and future references are articulated in a free and speculative, but no less rigorous, attempt to apprehend and elucidate the impact or status of "new" machines, technologies and/or scientific instruments and phenomena at any given point in time. Examples of such an unusual conjunction of past and present references include the mixture of traditional oil painting, the factory system, steam locomotives, motion picture technology and visions of the posthuman in Chapter 1; Henry Adams' use of the Virgin as a measure of the historical impact of radium and X-rays on his consciousness in Chapter 2; the author's engagement, in the framework of a "first" contact experience, with a primary historical artifact the first photograph from nature — in Chapter 3; or an exploration of the uchronic dimensions of Charles Babbage's incomplete project to build automatic calculating engines in the nineteenth century (Chapter 4). The last three chapters in the book present more specialized and speculative interpretations of the approaches and questions raised in earlier chapters. Chapter 5 explores the relationship between the camera lucida and virtual reality's head-mounted display system in order to

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propose an alternate model of the virtual; Chapter 6 explores the relationship between an initial visual proposition for the British Museum's 1856 circular Reading Room and the perambulatory presence of a hypothetical protocybernetic first Reader in its two-dimensional space in order to raise questions concerning the form and nature of the trans human. Finally, Chapter 7 promotes an art of the protocybernetic based on the articulation of archaic, modern and ultramodern imaging systems and their products across space, time, and history. The book argues through its choice of subjects and through its unusual forms of analysis and multifaceted presentations for an "omnidirectional" and "democratic" approach to the question of new technologies and media-induced experience. Moreover, it is in virtue of its objectives, its elements and their mode of presentation, and even of its problematic correlates that Beyond the Image Machine points to the existence of another kind of history of scientific and technical imaging systems. This history, impregnated by other forms of knowledge and other technologies of the senses,' is dedicated to the contingent and the o o ephemeral: to the sensual effects produced by threshold phenomena, or to the invisible consequences of threshold events registered as distant shocks experienced by historically charged imaginations. Rejecting the possibility of absolute forms of knowledge, the book argues that this history could begin anywhere, at the site of any scientific representation or at the site of any technological or scientific object able to pierce the membrane of habitual perception and thus challenge the imaginative powers in the name of the infinite. The book proposes, as such, a deviant and even disruptive metahistory of science and technology that can serve as an alternative springboard for the imagination. Beyond the Image Machine argues that this history and its methodologies could provide local answers to fundamental questions about the "representability" of the supersensual, its impact on a history of the senses, and its relationship to the arts of scientific, technical, and historical representation. It argues that they could provide answers, for instance, to the following kinds of questions: What are the kinds of relationships that exist at any given scientific or technological site between the conceivable and inconceivable, the known and unknown, as defined by the impact of new technologies on the human senses and consciousness? How does the o imagination deploy itself in the terra incognita of new technological or

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scientific experiences? How does it generate maps of these new worlds, and according to what new kinds of aesthetic parameters are these worlds to be represented and experienced? How is consciousness rearticulated and the human imagination reimaged as a consequence of these activities? This book draws its basic methodology from two sources. The first is CV Henry Adams' transhistorical approach to the historico-cognitive impact of new scientific phenomena at the beginning of the twentieth century. This source provides the frame of reference for the book as a whole and an initial reference for the poetics it advocates. Adams's approach and its significance are discussed in the book's second chapter which examines the American historian's attempts, in his essay "The Dynamo and the Virgin," to come to grips with the intellectual and historical impact of new forms of radiation such as radium and X-rays in 1900. This chapter discusses the essay's relationship to a poetics that begins with scientific representation. Of particular interest, in this connection, is the essay's ambiguous status of process and product inasmuch as it can be understood to function as an unusual kind of imaging system and a peculiar form of scientific representation. Finally, the chapter raises the issue of a scientific representation's relationship to cybernetic forms of sentience and proposes that they be engaged in terms of intercultural contact. The second methodological source is a theory of transcultural space and intercultural contact. In an earlier book, Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings, I detailed a theory of transcultural space that was based on the analysis of the spatial and sensory dynamics of intercultural first contact events. Written accounts of early cross-cultural contact contain evidence of the transitory formation of peculiar spatial zones generated between opposing cultures (Tomas 1996a:9—38). These zones are often triggered at cultural margins or borders, especially in contested geographical spaces, through the actions of human bodies and medium of material artifacts. Ships, boats, canoes, guns, clothes, and bits of metal played important roles, for example, in defining the physical, perceptual, and psychological relationships between human bodies in situations of first or initial contact between representatives of opposing cultures. Their roles were connected to the way they were deployed against or were projected into alien territories (ships,

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beaches, other people's [is]lands, etc.), and the way both elements and territory were ejected from their respective cultural frames. Unfolding events, whose points of reference were previously located in terms of these frames, were literally dislocated and a stage was set for the triggering of semantic shifts in habitual frames of cultural reference. As oo o a consequence, they acquired a sense of strangeness when viewed from the perspective of either culture. It is this strangeness that frequently set the psychological tone for the humor and violence that are two of the principal characteristics of these intercultural zones. Under such conditions, these objects functioned as agents for the infusion of the unreal, the unknown, into the real and the known. It is this infusion that created fractures in perceptual histories, situations of momentary atemporality, and conditions of defamiliarization in relation to habitual modes of apprehending cultural artifacts and the human body. In that they.existed as spatial zones between cultures, I chose to name them transcultural spaces. A transcultural space is a liminal zone of human activity. But in contrast to a conventional anthropological understanding of liminality as existing within the context of a ritually demarcated geographic space and time and thus outside of an everyday frame of reference, a transcultural space's peculiar location between cultures suggests that it is not directly connected to either culture in the conventional sense of, for example, marking a crucial stage in the transformation between them. Nor is it systematically connected with a process of "acculturation" when taken in the conventional sense of "assimilation" and "absorption," for its main principles are (perceptual) transience, (accultural) excess, and (representational) dislocation and multiplicity. General principles of transience, dislocation, multiplicity and excess govern the surfeit of surfaces, representations, and counterrepresentations in whose field transcultural objects and events are not assimilative but additive, not within a culture, but simultaneously across and between cultures. Although such artifacts can exist in excess of their former functions as o decontexualized elements in momentary suspension in a transcultural space of their own making, it is clear that the freedom they have achieved is precarious, since they remain differentially situated in relation to their respective frames of reference. Habitual points of view are

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powerful magnets that can draw wayward products of human activity back into the safe haven of primary cultural, economic, or political functions. However, as I demonstrated in Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings, the production of a transcultural space is not necessarily limited to contact between cultures in precolonial situations. Any contested space, or terra incognita, any situation in which communication is absent or destabilized and a fissure is produced in a culture, is a fertile ground for the generation of a transcultural space between opposing groups of people or individuals. This applies not only "horizontally" across differentially articulated spaces and times, it also applies "vertically" between different historically layered spaces and times. Beyond the Image Machine extends the idea of intercultural contact to the domains of science and technology, and in particular to scientific and technical imaging systems, their representations, and depictions of scientific and technical subjects in the history of art, photography, and cinema. As I argue throughout this book, it can also apply to the use of new and old instruments of scientific inquiry and visualization, to new and old non-scientific imaging technologies, as well as to pandisciplinary technologies such as the computer, that have been resurrected and/or transposed into new imaging contexts. Briefly, Beyond the Image Machine suggests that cognitive perturbations in habitual frames of reference that are triggered by one's contact with the unknown in intercultural first OO contact situations can also be produced in the case of one's interaction with new scientific phenomena and images that are "new" in the sense that they are the product of the most recent technologies of visualization. But the core of the book argues that they could also be triggered in O OO the case of one's interaction with instruments, imaging systems, or even technical sketches that are no longer in use or that have fallen out of o favor since these artifacts were once and are again new,' in the sense that o they are eccentrically and strangely repositioned in space, time, and history in a way that allows them to produce innovative experiences, information, and models of the world. The book argues, for example, that new cybernetic configurations or patterns of mind or intelligence can be associated with these unusual spaces. Because they do not represent an evolutionary stage beyond the human, because they are highly contingent in nature, and because they are intimately related to transcultural J

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spaces, I have categorized them under the label of the transhuman as

opposed to the posthuman. Imagine a world, for example, that was governed by the quixotic dynamics of intercultural contact and where the "other" presented itself in the guise of new phenomena (Chapter 2); a highly unusual artifact (Chapter 3); instrument (Chapter 5); or an unfamiliar image, sketch, doodle or unusual series of graphic marks (Chapter 6); whose "alien" intelligence was encrypted in the form of an instrument (Chapter 5); or instrumental complex or laboratory (Chapter 7). Imagine a world where one could travel by way of these artifacts, instruments, and/or images into parallel futures (Chapter 7). In each of these cases the instruments and images are subject to rules of transcultural defamiliarization and its effects on habitual modes of apprehending cultural artifacts and human bodies. The value of imaging technologies, especially today, is often geared to their newness, which is in turn coupled to the idea of progress. This approach to the history of imaging technologies can easily feed off concepts of progress and technological superiority that are rooted in such insidious dualisms as new/old; modern/premodern; advanced/ antiquated; civilized/primitive; or complex/simple. Beyond the Image Machine proposes a contrary view of the culture and history of science, technology, and their imaging systems. It argues that we should actually be thinking of, and working towards, a highly modulated world where the cultures of science and technology that articulate our existence and bodily transformations will be conceived as a dimensionally complex ideational matrix stretchingO from past to future. It argues that we can 1 O travel in any direction throughout this matrix and engage with its j o Co encrypted forms of intelligence. From a methodological viewpoint, the instability of a transcultural space provides a powerful means of destabilizing existing configurations of knowledge and historical frames of perceptual reference, including those associated with hybrid third spaces and evolutionary models of the posthuman. It is on the basis of this potential that the book applies this alternative model to the material world that we live in and, moreover, follows its consequences through to a different and richer kind of postmodern world, where the distinctions between "archaic" and "ultramodern" technologies, human and posthuman, have been rearticulated. O

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The idea of "intercultural contact zones" and an exploration of the "indeterminate" grounds of scientific and artistic representations are linked to the idea that transcultural spaces can also be generated in the cases of instruments, and that these spaces can open the way to a world where people, imaging systems and images can enter into a strange transcultural, transhistorical, and transhuman communication. This communication and these configurations are the subjects of Beyond the Image Machine. A number of chapters were originally published or presented elsewhere and have been revised for this book. An earlier version of Chapter 1 was presented under the title "Touch at a threshold of vision: an art in suspended animation" at the 1996 UAAC/AAUC conference, McGill University, Montreal. Chapter 2 was first published in 1996 under the title "Echoes of touch and the temptations of scientific representations" in Public, 13. It has been slightly revised for inclusion in this book. I have also used elements of my introduction to this issue, which I guest edited, for this book's opening introductory paragraphs because of their pertinence in this case. Chapter 3 was originally published in 1999 under the title "The incubator" in France Choiniere (ed.) Deviant Practices, Montreal: Dazibao. It has been moderately revised for the present publication. Chapter 4 was first published in 2002 under the title "On the imagination's horizon line: uchronic histories, protocybernetic contact, and Charles Babbage's calculatingo engines" in Bruce Clarke and Linda o o Henderson (eds), From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art, and Literature, Stanford: Stanford University Press. It has been slightly revised for the present publication. However, the references to the London Science Museum's Babbage display date to 1996. They have not been updated, with the exception of Figure 12 which corrects an error in the original publication, because it would have destroyed the chapter's specific temporal dynamic. An earlier version of Chapter 5 was presented under the title "The sensory envelope of information events o generated between archaic and new imaging techo o nologies" at the Uncommon Senses conference, Concordia University, Montreal, in April 2000. An earlier version of Chapter 6 was originally presented under the title "Mental systems, technicity, and the identity of images in the age of cybernetics" at the conference La Nouvelle Sphere Intermediatique III: Pratiques Mediatiques de la Manipulation

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Identitaire, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, March 2001. An earlier version of Chapter 7 was published in 2003 under the title "Vers un nouveau laboratoire des sens et modele de 1'interface humainmachine" in Louise Poissant (ed.), Interfaces et sensorialite, Sainte-Etienne: Publications de 1'Universite de Sainte-Etienne & Sainte-Foy: Presses de 1'Universite du Quebec. Finally, portions of this book were written under the auspice of The Claudia De Hueck Fellowship in Art and Science, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. References to websites are accurate as to March 2004. I would like to thank Dazibao, Centre de photographies actuelles, Montreal, Public Access, Toronto, and Stanford University Press for permission to republish original articles and the following persons for inviting me to conferences and panels or to participate in writing projects in relation to this book's contents: Olivier Asselin, France Choiniere, Bruce Clarke, Jim Drobnick, Christine Ross, Johanne Lamoureux, Linda Henderson, Louise Poissant, and Richard Shiff. I would also like to thank Beverly A. Bull, Assistant Archivist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Archives, for tracing the photographs of Sunderland's head-mounted display. Finally, I would like to thank Chris Gray, Gary Hall and Tristan Palmer for supporting the book proposal in the first place, and Hywel Evans and the editorial team of John Cox, James Croft, and Veronica Miller for guiding it through to completion. The book could not have materialized without the support, patience, and humor of Michele Theriault and Nina Fu.

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Pictures of the New and the Materialization oj Vision Jrom the Age of Discovery to the Era oj the Posthuman Hans Holbein the Younger produced a remarkable painting in 1533. Within forty years of the discovery of the New World, Holbein managed to articulate in an unprecedented fashion the power/knowledge equation that underlay Columbus's pioneering voyage and, in particular, the Magellan expedition's intrepid circumnavigation of the globe in 1519— 1522. Holbein's The Ambassadors links symbols of life and death, political and religious power, wealth and influence, scientific and Ogeometrical O 1 ' instruments, and the discovery of the new world, with different (scientific and metaphysical) concepts of space and time at the dawn of modernity. Its inventory of instruments, goods and symbols are organized according to categories of knowledge and understanding (science/ religion), systems of cosmic classification (earth/heaven, below/above, the living and the dead), contrasts between natural and manufactured goods, luxury and functional materials, and distinctions between systerns of perspective. This inventory is also associated with methods of archiving knowledge and belief and the means for their dissemination (books, globes, and, ultimately, the painting itself). However, The Ambassadors is not only a sumptuous inventory of symbols, objects, and concepts. It is exceptional because of the method that it uses to portray its pictorial elements in relation to systems of representation and types of media spaces at a moment in history when the earth was subject to a major expansion in perspective because of the recent voyages of discovery. Holbein has chosen, specifically, to juxtapose the painting's dominant system of pictorial organization and its content with another, antithetical system of perspective. The painter's pictorial strategy is ambitious in this regard. For he presents the 7

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Figure 1 Hans Holbein the Younger, Jean de Dinteville, and Georges de Selve ("The Ambassadors"), 1533. Oil on oak, 81^ X 82j in. National Gallery of London. © National Gallery, London.

spectator with a sumptuous and virtuoso visual encounter as one is drawn into the painting's richly textured trompe 1'ceil space only to be torn between incompatible pictorial experiences when one realizes that there is a strange distorted form that occupies an area of its lower surface, as if the painter's brush had slipped over wet paint. Once one concludes that the distorted form "smeared diagonally across the perspectival floor" (Kemp 1990:209) is an anamorphic projection, one realizes that Holbein has managed, in a singular manner,' to combine o ' o and oppose antithetical spaces and metaphysical domains on one surface. Although the painting is deeply rooted in the advanced pictorial

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conventions of its time through its manipulation of vanitas symbolism and its symbolic orchestration of scientific and musical instruments, etc. (Baltrusaitis 1977:91-114; Foister et al. 1997:30-^-3, 55-57), the successful coupling of different spaces and categories of representation propels the pictorial experience beyond the range of conventional oil painting. Its comparative method of combining alternate and, moreover, incompatible models of vision to specialized and often abstract visioning technologies functions on the basis of a transparent interface between the literal and symbolic worlds associated with dominant and deviant perspective systems, scientific and geometric instruments (that were primarily used to extend the powers of logocentric vision over the celestial and terrestrial worlds), and related objects (such as books and celestial and terrestrial globes) that were capable of efficiently consolidating, archiving, and transporting information, models, and propositions concerning the nature of the world. But the painting's powers of documentation and symbolic synthesis also extend to the world of luxury goods and the emblems of power that were associated with that world and the science, technology, and knowledge upon which it was founded. There are few paintings or, indeed, few visual works in any format that share The Ambassadors's cultural ambitions and its reflexive type of ethnographic range. The ones that do, and that deal specifically in one way or another with the industrial, technical, or scientific infrastructures of modernity, like Joseph Wright of Derby's Arkwright's Cotton Mills, by night (c. 1782—83), Turner's Rain, Steam, Speed — The Great Western Railway (1844), Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Rene Magritte's Time Transfixed (1938), or Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), are characterized by an intense,' reflexive visual engagement with the J o o cultural, logical, and symbolic possibilities of their medium. It is this engagement which reveals a medium's innovative and flexible potentialities, even if they are not necessarily the newest or most advanced of their time. These cultural artifacts can stage, like Holbein's painting, strange and often contradictory spatial and/or representational junctions that function, I will suggest in the following pages, as the archives of alternate models of vision as well as haptic operators for its potential transformation. The Ambassadors's anamorphic skull is a good example of this type of

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haptic operator. The skull's operational peculiarity, in the context of the painting's visual universe, resides in its powers of sensory amplification. Its presence in a refined trompe 1'oeil representational field whose transparency is guaranteed by an array of virtuoso depictions of tactile surfaces like silk, velvet, fur, marble, ivory, brass, wood, etc. disturbs the eyes' uninhibited movement through the painting's opaque surface and into an illusionary world that seems to exist beyond its material boundaries. In doing so, it tends to "thicken" perception, to give it a certain weight, the weight of the paint conceived as a resistant material, so that an act of looking at the painting is transformed from an uninhibited process of optical penetration to a tentative process of haptic exploration that, depending on one's viewpoint (in front of or to the painting's side), is confined in between systems of representation. To bring the skull into focus is, of course, to project the painting's primary representational system into a virtual anamorphic space. This movement between apparently antithetical systems of representation, or the tension of a potential movement that is encoded in the distorted representations, allows one to measure each perspective system's optical coherence against the other system's oblique, incoherent presence. Since both cannot be in focus at the same time, the movement between systems and their associated spectatorial positions stresses the painting's surface and it is this stress which gives one the measure of a subtle haptically articulated process of perception insofar as one's eyes slowly "feel" their way across the front of Holbein's painting as if haunted by the constant threat of being absorbed by the slippery and perverted (in)coherence of the skull's oblique anamorphic surface.

Glowing rectangles, sieves for vision: Arkwright's Cotton Mills, by night (c. 1782-1783) There is another exceptional painting that occupies a different but no less interesting position in modernity's pictorial history. Joseph Wright of Derby's painting of Arkwright's Cotton Mills, by night is unusual in the way that it depicts new architectural structures as revolutionary imaging systems.2 In doing so, it presents a model of how a given content can transform an established medium into a discrete threshold of perception

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that is positioned at a conspicuous historical juncture. Wright's painting stages a precise threshold of historical transformation in the relationship between traditional forms of labor and the natural environment at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. As this rpainting o suggests, oo ' new industrial work spaces, like Richard Arkwright's cotton mills at Cromford, Derbyshire, would destroy the natural spatio-temporal and sensory envelopes of traditional forms of labor by creating new highly mechanized artificial environments. These environments, represented by the distant geometric regularity of the factory's glowing windows in

Wright's painting, would dissolve the distinction between day and night, and the seasons of the year. In presenting a distinct juncture between pictorial elements and zones, the painting points to the precise perceptual transformation instituted by new manufacturing processes,

which it represents in the glowing transparent geometric interface between the candle-lighted interior and dark moonlit exterior of o Arkwright's famous factory. In the painting's foreground, a horse and wagon, accompanied by a weary figure, move in the encroaching darkness of night towards a bridge whose oblique, contorted form is the result of an awkward lateral foreshortening in perspective. This scene is contrasted with the strange, distant, perpetually glowing artificial illumination of Arkwright's mills that are wedged into the natural landscape like a strange and monstrous artifact. But the painting does more than simply depict a startling visual juncture, it suggests through this juxtaposition, that the colonization of the darkness by the factory-based cultures of new manufacturing processes would similarly bind human bodies to the new work places by extending the arena in which the laboring body could operate. The regiment of glowing windows that are wedged into the natural landscape in walls of brick suggest that it was through an expansion in the eye's operating environment that the body itself could be enslaved under the sign of an automatic machine-based economy. The new geometry of light painting o that transfixes the encroachingo darkness in Wright's o r o stands as a clear and rather brutal testimonial to the body's ultimate sensory transformation in the context of new automatic systems of manufacture. Andrew Ure captured the magnitude of this transformation in the definition of automatic that he presented in his celebrated A Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures, and Mines:

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In our spacious factory apartments the benignant power of steam summons around him his myriads of willing menials, and assigns to each the regulated task, substituting, for painful muscular effort upon their part, the energies of his own gigantic arm, and demanding, in return, only attention and dexterity to correct such little aberrations as casually occur in his workmanship. Under his auspices, and in obedience to Arkwright's polity, magnificent edifices, surpassing far in number, value, usefulness, and ingenuity of construction, the boasted monuments of Asiatic, Egyptian, and Roman despotism, have, within the short period of fifty years, risen up in this kingdom, to show to what extent capital, industry, and science, may augment the resources of a state, while they meliorate the condition of its citizens. Such is the automatic system, replete with prodigies in mechanics and political economy, which promises, in its future growth, to become the great minister of civilisation to the terraqueous globe, enabling this country, as its heart, to diffuse, along with its commerce, the life-blood of knowledge and religion to myriads of people still lying "in the region and shadow of death." (Ure 1839:76-77) The violence of the transformation that Ure celebrated in his dictionary entry had, however, already been fixed in the composition of Wright's painting of Arkwright's Mills. The stark contrast between the o I O O glowing rectangular forms of light and the solitary glow of a window in one of the cottages that occupies the painting's middle ground, the equally stark contrast between the regiment of windows and the solitary figure in the foreground, and the contrast between the bridge's subtly twisted form and the distant and enticingo sources of regulated light sets o o the stage for a sensory bifurcation which takes place under a cloudy moonlit sky. In fact the partially hidden moon is sandwiched between dark clouds above it and almost pure white clouds below it, as if caught between pure steam and the polluted vapors of a powerful coal driven beam engine. o In the center of the painting's dusky atmosphere, the system of glowing rectangles seems to pulsate sensuously as one's eyes are stimulated by the kinetic energy discharged by row upon row of candle-lighted windows that systematically challenge the painting's moonstruck

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nocturnal landscape. The revolutionary power of Arkwright's Cotton Mills, by night does not reside, as in the case of The Ambassadors, in a sophisticated juxtaposition of perspective systems. There is no question of a measure either of a perspective system's optical coherence against another system's oblique shadow or of the movement between these systems and their associated spectatorial positions, with their surprising perceptual consequences. And yet the painting presents a parallel articulation of incompatible perceptual experiences. What is peculiar about this painting is directly represented in the rows of glowing windows and the way that their anomalous regimented presence has changed one's reading of the landscape as well as one's perception of that landscape. The rows of luminous rectangles seem to breach the painting's pictorial space as they run into each other at the boundary of a strange suture that is presented as if it were a short vertically deployed horizon line. This plumb-line not only represents a juncture between buildings, it presents itself as if it were an elongation of the eye's traditional vanishing point — a protracted geometric presence whose boundaries are architecturally defined. In contrast to the oblique skeletal presence on The Ambassadors's surface, the vertical junction is awkwardly cut into the painting's pictorial space. It occupies the painting's middle O ground,' between the factory's roof,' a distant hill and I O J moonlit clouds above, and the cottages, bridge, figure, and horse and cart below. To the right and left is the natural U-shaped gorge o r o o through o which one views the distant mills. On either side of the architectural fault-line, the little rectangles of light pulsate outwards on the painting's surface, with the result that the illusionary distance between the mills and the material basis of their representational existence is effectively truncated while still registering the vestige of perspectival depth — a depth that is, moreover, clearly reinforced by the fact that the mills are almost defiantly nestled in the landscape. The tiny rectangles of paint massage the eyes, seduce perception, and anesthetize vision. Seduction allows one to unconsciously register what those tiny planes of paint represent: the fragmentation of vision as it passes through the sieve of a massive new kind of automated imaging system — the factory system. Let us not forget Lire's comments in this connection, namely that steam power "assigns to each the regulated task,' substituting, r o o o' for O

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painful muscular effort upon their part, the energies of his own gigantic arm, and demanding, in return, only attention and dexterity to correct such little aberrations as casually occur in his workmanship." In Arkwright's painting there is a similar substitution of muscular effort as one's eyes are channeled from the complex, irregular forms of the landscape, through the regulated rectangular grid whose vertical horizon line surreptitiously plays with the notion of irregularity in its suture of buildings, into the pure light beyond the sieve of windows that mark the plan and spatial threshold for the fragmentation of vision. Like so many workers, one's vision ends up dancing to the same piper's regulatory tune. Turner's Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway (1844) If Wright's painting of Arkwright's Cotton Mills, by night is one of the first paintings to register the mechanical fragmentation of vision in such a bold geometric fashion, then its full pictorial consequences can be experienced a little over sixty years later in Turner's Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway (1844). In this case, as Michel Serres has suggested, Turner seems to have visually exposed the basic forces that animated the Industrial Revolution in advance of scientific description (Serres 1982b). In contrast to Arkwright's Cotton Mills, by night, Serres has argued that paintings such as the Fighting Temeraire (1838) present a new world as if conceived from the inside. They represent, as such, a fundamental reorientation in art's traditional representational field inasmuch as "the perception of the stochastic replaces the art of drawing the form" (Serres 1982b:S8, emphases in the original). Later Serres would add in connection with Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway: For a moment the engine dissolves into the world that resembles it;' it o passes like a scourge of time. Man has constructed a thing-nature. The painter makes one see the entrails of this thing: stochastic bundles, dualism of sources, winking fires, its material entrails, which are the very womb of the world, sun, rain, ice, clouds, and showers. Heaven, sea, earth, and thunder are the interior of a boiler which bakes the material of the world. At random. (1982b:60)

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Serres has argued that these and similar works by Turner (such as the watercolor, An Iron Foundry [1797]) register a mutation in the history of western representation. With these paintings and watercolors "we pass from geometry to matter or from representation to work." With the passage towards "the sources of matter," Serres has gone on to point out, "the painter has broken the stranglehold of copying in the arts" (1982b:62). This break can be detected in the case of one of the principal tools of the copyist's art — perspective — represented in Turner's railway painting by the powerful thrust of the Maidenhead Bridge, one of the engineering feats of the Industrial Revolution. However, the bridge, constructed by Isambard Brunei in 1837—39, is, in contrast to the old stone bridge or the geometrically regular rows of glowing windows in Wright's picture, engulfed in the painting's own mattery surface before it can impose the point of its geometric logic on the painting and through it on the viewer. Instead, the fiery cauldron that liquidates the bridge's perspectival thrust becomes the site of the eye's hap tic disengagement from the world of form and representation. Bathed in a sea of paint, the spectator's eyes are awash in pure mattery color. It is not surprising, therefore, that Turner should be proclaimed, in Serres's estimation, to be a true realist, and a revolutionary one, since he anticipated Carnot in the sense that he can be said to have directly perceived the thermodynamic transformation of matter through the medium of a painted surface (1982b:57). If an 1839 Daguerreotype photograph's beautiful mirrored surface can evoke a Holbeinesque world of perfect representation and sumptuous surfaces, then Turner's locomotive's emergent mattery form brings to mind the first photographs produced by Niepce, the one of a table-top (c. 1824), the other of ordinary rooftops (c. 1826). In these revolutionary images, ordinary things are the armature for a new medium of representation to take a physical form, while that medium seems to act like a new type of amniotic environment for vision. With these images, it is the chemical process itself that seems to be the subject of representation, and the images are there to allow for its existence. Inasmuch as vision begins to immerse itself in a o chemically based protoplasmic medium, Niepce's tenuous images point beyond Turner's mattery stochastic surfaces to the world of experimental science, and to chemistry, an ascending discipline that

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Figure 2 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway, c. 1844. Oil on canvas, 35^ X 48 in. National Gallery of London. © National Gallery, London.

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would dominate a second mid-nineteenth century phase of the Industrial Revolution. In the examples I have mentioned, a new perceptual threshold can be seen to emerge from its medium: crystalline in the case of Holbein's double portrait, mattery in the case of Turner's railway painting, mirrorlike, yet also thinly gelatinous in the case of Niepce's rooftop image. The historical and cultural significance of these works is related to the way O J each threshold maps singular transformations in the history of perception, and the way that each threshold is configured as an interface between particular media, scientific and technical instrumentation, technologies or manufacturing processes, and a medium's materiality. Finally, the significance of each of these works is linked to the way that the sense of sight is rendered palpable as a consequence of the way the threshold is structurally organized — or "composed" — in relation to a given medium's perceptual qualities and its material density. We learn from these and similar works that one must always take note of the specificity of each type of perceptual threshold. New media transform, as Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan and others have suggested,' the ratios between the senses. But each new medium is born o across a palpable threshold of perception — as if that threshold's presence could actually be measured in terms of a characteristic density. Thus, on the one hand, in the early history of each medium, a work can be produced that registers a new space across a subtly modulated representational field (Niepce's rooftops). Or in the case of an existing medium's contact with new technologies, scientific or industrial ideas and processes, a new space is generated through a work that records this contact in the form of a perceptual impact, a material shock that registers the measure of a palpable sense of perceptual engagement (The Ambassadors, Arkwright's Cotton Mills, by night, Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway). On the other hand, this materiality, the singularity of a shock's presence, is the measure of a new medium's or exceptional contact's specificity, before habitual perceptual and further technological developments crystallize its sensory density in the direction of optical clarity (conventional and habitual representations of portraits, factories, railroads, and steam locomotives).

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Perceptual limits and Dziga Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) In 1929, the Russian poetic documentarian, Dziga Vertov, completed a highly unusual film that consciously attempted to fuse perceptual metamorphosis and media analysis in the context of a larger transmutation in the conditions of social and political existence. In Vertov's The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), the language of one medium is exhaustively explored in the interests of a collective social and political transformation in consciousness.5 A correspondence between the human eye and the cinematographic camera punctuates a set of visual operations that systematically and exhaustively explore the cinematographic medium's matrix of formal and aesthetic possibilities. The unique nature of the medium's materiality is constantly foregrounded through montagebased observational and editing strategies that test the physical, spatiotemporal and representational boundaries of machine-based vision. Periodically, the optical experience of perceptual limits produce striking visual effects. These "phi-effects" are produced by the alternate projection of two objects or graphic elements on the same screen (Petric 1987:139).6 In contrast to the conventional photochemical fusion of different images, as in the case of double exposure, which is then optically assimilated by the spectator over a sum of frames per second, the phi-effect is the result of retinal fusion produced by the alternate frame by frame projection of independent images. Because it is stroboscopic in nature and founded on the persistence of vision, the effect is produced in the eye as opposed to being produced before the eyes. This optical phenomenon is cinematographically important because it allows for the physical conservation of the intervals, or the spaces, that exist between distinct, perhaps incongruous, but contiguously arranged images. It is as if the medium's materiality and its frame-based logic is kinesthetically and haptically experienced within the eye's interior, the cinema's double, at the retina's (the screen's) surface. The Man with a Movie Camera is in many ways a remarkable film, not only because of the way that it explores the inner spaces of one of the most powerful and influential of twentieth-century imaging systems, but also because of the way that it constantly and relentlessly tests, a medium's perceptual and representational boundaries. Its cultural ambitions and the ethnographic scope of its reflexive eye match The

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Ambassadors's breadth, subtlety, and reflexivity of vision; Arkwright's Cotton Mills, by night's powerful articulation of new manufacturing processes and unusual perspectives on vision; and Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway's protoscientific materiality. In many ways it is their combined twentieth-century equivalent: in the way that it articulates observational and spatial logics; in its focus on the mechanisms of perception; in its intense engagement with the way its primary sense medium is organized; in its range of ethnographic and social preoccupations,' and its celebration of the colonizingo force of western technology oy and its systems of observation.

Locomotives, antigravity, and Rene Magritte's Time Transfixed (1938) Another remarkable work that shares common characteristics with Holbein's painting and Vertov's film is Rene Magritte's Time Transfixed (1938). Although this work is less complicated and less spectacular in its visual effects than The Man with a Movie Camera, and does not exhibit the same degree of virtuosity in connection with its medium of presentation when compared with The Ambassadors, it is nevertheless as ambitious as both these works in its engagement with the logic and materiality of its medium. Its ambitions and the way that it presents them in terms of the traditional pictorial conventions of its medium place it in the same category as Arkwright's Cotton Mills, by night. In this peculiarly ingenious realistic painting, one's perception is materially and visually suspended in a deceptively clear and ordered bourgeois-based matrix of representation: well kept room with its clean wooden floor, fireplace, mantel clock, pair of candlesticks, large sumptuous mirror. Yet in contrast to The Ambassadors's optical clarity, Magritte's silent and transparent world is characterized by an almost naively illustrative mode of presentation. This naivety is however, compounded and also contradicted by the presence of a floating locomotive. This pictorial element functions like the anamorphic skull in Holbein's painting, in the sense that it perturbs the picture's perspectival space with its anti-gravitational presence. Conventional perspective systems like the ones that govern The Ambassadors's and Time Transfixed's dominant spac habitually ground objects in a Euclidian world that is intuited to be governed by the laws of gravity. But Magritte's floating locomotive

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ruptures this world's gravitational logic. Its anti-gravitational presence seems to levitate vision. In so doing it renders it absolutely weightless, while perception is still paradoxically detained — a subject of the spectator's body and the painting's other objects — by the gravitational influences of a Newtonian world. The almost insignificant sense of mass that is conjured into existence under its influence is a measure of its burden of representation — a burden whose micro-presence is registered by the invisible gravitational pull of a realistic model of the world. It is this micro-presence that transforms perception into a subtle haptic agent in the context of this painting. As a consequence, the illustrative thrust of Magritte's painting is deviated. The locomotive, clock, mirror, etc. are switched into a warped, oddly intangible space that resonates with The Ambassadors's richly defined, yet subtly modulated space, although, of course, it bears no direct relationship to it. The space's incongruity is perhaps captured in the mirror's blank surface,7 when we realize that it should be reflecting o a portion of our space, but it does not, and never will. The Ambassadors plots modernity's knowledge matrix at its dawn and, as such, it stands as a measure of its future progress. Arkwright's Cotton Mills, by night and Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway register its changing configuration under the influence of the Industrial Revolution, while The Man with a Movie Camera and Time Transfixed summarize, each in their own way, the matrix of a modernity that has been nurtured by the inventions and forces that were unleashed by that revolution. We no longer live in the era of New World discovery. Nor are we experiencing the intense effects of the First Industrial Revolution or the revolutionary euphoria of the October Revolution of 1917. Our world is different, yet it is founded on a common attitude towards the social functions, value, and applications of science and technology. We have inherited a belief in the emancipatory powers of science and technology, and we still share in the belief that progress in human tool-making capacities can lead to the conquest of new worlds which are situated beyond the immediate realms of our senses; and we believe, moreover, that these realms embody the most intangible and mysterious of nature's secrets.

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Blade Runner's eyes If one were to search for a work that has the same breadth of cultural ambitions or the same penetrating ethnographic range as The Ambassadors or The Man with a Movie Camera, or if one were to inquire after a work that would function as a model for the exploration of how a culture of imaging systems and a culture of representation might be interfaced at this moment in history, at the dawn of another representational regime, then it seems to me that we would have to turn to Ridley Scott's 1982 postmodern science fiction classic Blade Runner to provide us with the tools to measure the magnitude of the transformations that we are now o subject to. The eye features in Blade Runner as prominently as it does in The Man with a Movie Camera. Indeed, it would seem that it is precisely the nature and consequences of the eye's transformation in the context of advanced imaging systems that is addressed in both films. Moreover, these films are united by their differences as much as by their similarities. If The Man with a Movie Camera is a key to the way vision has been and is transformed through its ultimate mechanization in the shape of the movie camera, then Blade Runner provides a blueprint for the eye's bio-technological transformation. In contrast to The Man with a Movie Camera's cinematographically articulated "rite of passage" between biological and industrialized vision, Scott's film plots a rite of passage between industrialized vision and pure representational simulation.7 Blade Runner also brings to mind The Ambassadors because of an o intangible shadow that traverses its cinematographic space. That shadow is not, as one might expect, connected to a specific image — however distorted, mysterious, and disturbing it might be. It is, on the contrary, associated with a specific nineteenth-century technology — photography — and its intimate connection to human identity and death. Commentators have pointed out that Blade Runner's singularity resides in the complex way that it explores the future of human identity. The film relentlessly pursues the consequences of an equation between the social production of near perfect human simulations, their commodity status as products tailored to specific social functions, and their desires for an authentic human identity as measured by longevity, since they have a built-in life span of only four years. But it goes beyond this

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equation. For it also processes it in relation to the disciplinary and mnemonic functions of advanced and archaic imaging systems. The former operates under the spectre of premature death and the latter through the agency of falsified photographically encoded memory. The film registers the equation's repercussions through cultivated thematic machinations and cinematographic dexterity. One of the equation's principal thematic channels is advanced imaging systems, which also include the Replicants insofar as they are synthetic; they are designed to operate in hostile environments, and have seen, in Roy Batty's words, "things you people wouldn't believe . . ." In its classic international version, the film begins with the most basic yet most deceptive of measures for these imaging systems: a view of Los Angeles (2019) contains two shots of an immense screen-filling human — or posthuman? — eyeball that anamorphically mirrors the city that is set before it.9 The eye's organic status is beyond question at this point in the film and it is precisely its initial position and its possible readjusted, retroactive meaning, once we realize that it might be a Replicant's eye, that point to the film's most important underlying theme: the ambiguity inherent in human and machine vision and its potentially fatal consequences for the film's human and nonhuman protagonists. What, the film asks, is the cinematographic difference between the archaic (organic) and the most advanced (synthetic) eye if the latter is modeled on the former — if it has become its mirror image? What, moreover, are its consequences on how history and memory have been conceived and archived and on their temporal and spatial stability in regard to the intergenerational transmission of ideas pertaining to human identity? The film celebrates the perceptive powers of other advanced imaging technologies such as the Voight-Kampff Machine. It takes note of the biotechnological foundations of posthuman vision and the fact that even if it is based on a human model, it transcends the model by being rooted in superhuman bodies. Roy Batty is the proud, laconic representative of a new posthuman paradigm and its unprecedented visions of reality. He knows the value of what he has seen because he knows of the possibilities that he represents both as model and artifact. "Chew," he ironically points out to the Tyrell Corporation's specialized genetic engineer before he is killed, "if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes." The statement resonates with the enormous eye that threatens to absorb O

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both screen and spectator into the dark terra incognita of its orb at the film's beginning. As spectators we tend to forget that we are already absorbed in the interior darkness of the cinema and that the screen before us is both pupil and retina. Because Blade Runner continuously negotiates between the human and synthetic eye, the human and posthuman, the real and the simulated, visual ambiguity is constantly nurtured to the extent that it seems to be a historical possibility inherent to its medium. In The Man with a Movie Camera, we are privy to the disarticulation of means and ends, medium and content. Its objective is a new, critical, historical vision and consciousness. Blade Runner proposes that we exist in between, trapped in a world of our own images, caught between the eye we are and the eye we have made in our own image. This is the measure of its cinematographic achievement given its Replicant theme, its ultrarealist treatment, and the transitional technological o and biotechnological period in which it was made. If The Man with a Movie Camera is the product of a political, social, and cultural revolution, then Blade Runner is the product of a digital and biotechnological revolu1 O O tion. In either case,' the means might be the same, but the ends are o ' significantly different. Ironically, the measure of human technological achievement is not to be found in Blade Runner's advanced imaging systems, however singular and sophisticated they might be. Nor is it to be found in the refined design parameters of the latest generation of NEXUS 6 Replicants. It is, on the contrary, to be found in the product of a more primitive imaging machine and the principle of the copy upon which it functions. In contrast to the biotechnological model of simulation that the film o explores, this other analogical type of copy is most closely associated with the traditional family-style photographs that appear at key moments in the film. Photographs function in these scenes as the archive for a human identity that has been artificially programmed into the Replicants with the specific objective of duplicating human memories. They serve as the witnesses of continuity and history, and they function as passports for entry into the human family. But they are also presented as signs of the past, loss, and exclusion. Simulation tailors the Replicant's form to a human model. But its functional design parameters are individually configured to posthuman biotechnological physical and mental standards that are determined by 7

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the Replicant's projected role in the exploration and colonization of other planets. The photographs and the built-in fail-safe mechanisms (a four year life span) should guarantee that biotechnology's superhuman work force are minimally acculturated and adequately constrained in the interests of preserving a more primitive organism and, ironically (given the film's focus on new imaging technologies), the archaic technology upon which its identity and the film are based. Here the eye and photograph meet in the shape of the movie camera. It is on the basis of these references that a double, parallel symbolic space is created in the name of a premature death in which the posthuman identity of the Replicants is spotlighted and measured against its human counterpart. There is no need of a skull to double as the shadow of death in this film. The NEXUS 6 Replicants are slave laborers from an Off-world colony that is in a telescopic if not distorted relationship to the world of their human masters; and the measure of this subtle distortion is to be found in the photographs that colonize the film in the name of a vanishing human identity. Identity, memory, the archive, and history are photographically equated at key moments in the film, and it is through this equation that photography becomes essential to the film's constitution of modern technology mediated human identity.10 If simulation and duplicity of the eye are Blade Runner's underlying themes, then they mark the distance, but, paradoxically, also the intimate connections that exist between this film and The Ambassadors. For the painting is the epitome of virtuosity and optical deception because it equates the two and clearly calls its subject matter — the early modern world of human affairs, of knowledge and power — into question in their terms. The skull might deconstruct the painting's culture and pictorial economy in a brutally efficient and spectacularly entertaining manner, but it does so on the basis of its human master's virtuosity and visual sophistication — the power of his vision and the dexterity of his hand. Perhaps there is no historical coincidence to the fact that Roland Barthes' notable meditation on death and the photographic image, Camera Lucida (La Chambre Claire), was published two years before Blade Runner was released. In this last work, Barthes posed a question in connection with the photograph's peculiar cultural status that would, no doubt, have interested, albeit in an ironic register, Zhora, Leon, Pris,

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Roy Batty, Rachael and Deckard (insofar as we are never absolutely free of the suspicion that he too is a Replicant). That question was: "Why mightn't there be, somehow, a new science for each object" (Barthes 1984:8)? Later in the book Barthes raised a similar possibility when he proposed, on the basis of his experience with a photograph which seemed to capture his mother's essence, that an "impossible science of the unique being" might utopically exist (1984:71, emphases in the original). These possibilities would no doubt have interested those artificial beings who were facing programmed death and,' in the meantime ' O O 1 O summary execution because of their unique posthuman experimental statuses and collective transgressive desire for human identity. They would interest such beings because that collective desire was, in a number of cases (Leon, Rachael, and, perhaps, Deckard) specifically, yet artificially focused through the medium of photographic images. The links between human simulation, death, and the unique identity-weaving characteristics of photographic images are not without cultural significance.11 Barthes has argued for a haptically based model of photographic vision when he suggested that one think of photographs as carnal extensions of one's body. In his words: "A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed" (1984:81). If one accepts this model, then each photograph is, in fact, also the generative site of a reflected light that has a specific carnal weight and palpable texture in that it has been molded. Whether one considers this in a literal or metaphorical sense, the result is the same: an artifact is invested with certain symbolic powers that transcend its material form (Barthes 1984:80-81). What Leon, Rachael, and perhaps Deckard realize is that this artifact has become, for one reason or another, indispensable for the constitution of a specific kind of human identity. For others (Roy Batty, Zhora, Pris) this artifact is less significant than what it has vicariously replaced through its means of production: the human eye and, by extension, the advanced imaging systems and synthetic eyes that constantly threaten to unmask them. A photograph is clearly different from the thing (or body) photographed. But what is the difference between an organic and synthetic eye? To fix one's gaze on photographs, as Barthes did in Camera Lucida or as Leon, Deckard and Rachael do in Blade Runner, is to touch, through the '

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petrified medium of light, the other's body. And if one were to touch the body of a mother (Barthes, Rachael) or a father, then, in some profound carnal sense, one is not only touching one's kinsfolk, one is also touching one's own body from a point of view and physical position that exists outside one's own time, space, and history; and the more so if, in the context of the photograph's spatio-temporal frame of reference, one has yet to be born. One notes in this connection, the unexpected, defamiliarizing effect produced by Rachael's "family" photograph as it suddenly shimmers with life under her gaze. One is reminded of an earlier and equally disconcerting example of this type of photographically bracketed interval of cinematographic animation in Chris Marker's classic science fiction photo-roman La Jetee (1962). In this film, composed of still photographs linked together by voice-over narration, it is the leading female character who briefly comes to life midway through the film to gaze at the camera and protagonist, as if momentarily liberated, from the sequence of petrified dystopian and Utopian images, into the actual present. In contrast, one of Blade Runner's most disturbing moments is presented in the fatal confrontation between Roy Batty and Tyrell, head of the Tyrell Corporation and the Replicants' genetic designer. The threat of violence that envelops the encounter with its exchange over the NEXUS 6 Replicant's four year life span, is finally consummated when Batty kills Tyrell (his "father") by gouging his eyes out and breaking his neck. The uncompromising intensity of the confrontation's violent climax is doubly disturbing given the film's underlying ocular themes. Batty's brutally symbolic behaviour serves to remind the viewer of the body's crude capacity to impose its rebellious will on both matter and vision in the name of rprogress's disenchantments and its all too human o posthuman products. The violence of Batty's actions might shock the spectatorial eye. But its symbolic dimensions resonate beyond its immediate viscerality, because the violence is perpetrated by an android who is a cybernetic offspring of the steam engine's governor and Arkwright's factory system. It is therefore of more than passing interest that Barthes should have argued in favor of a History of Looking, and that he should also have insisted on highlighting its links with death at a time when computerbased imaging systems were beginning to appreciably undermine the '

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authenticity of a photographic culture. "For the Photograph is," he notes, "the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity" (Barthes 1984:12). Perhaps there is nothing unusual in the fact that his argument should have been formulated within o a couple of years of a film whose story unfolded in the context of analog photographic prints, digital imaging systems, and human replicants. Nor is it surprising, when viewed from Camera Lucida's perspective, that the film should have explored themes of human identity and resistance to slavery in the context of body/technology transformations, and that these themes should have been explored in an atmosphere of photographically encoded memories, photographic deception, genetic engineering, a return to one's origins, and premature death. If Barthes' metaphor of a photonic umbilical cord draws attention to the haptic links that might exist between photographic images and organic bodies, then Blade Runner transforms these links into a medium of false sense impressions which become the context for the examination of a new model of near-perfect representational simulation. On the one hand, one has the near-perfect Replicants, on the other hand the near-perfect photographic memories, and in between the eye — but whose eye? The eye of a Replicant or the eye of a human being? There is no apparent difference and the machines that are designed to unmask the copy are rapidly becoming ineffective, as the case of Rachael suggests. In the model of simulation that Blade Runner proposes, the eye is coupled to new imaging technologies in order that it might be able to enter into a o o o o microscopic world to unmask simulation on the basis of invisible signatures. The eye becomes a silent, vicarious intruder in a world that begins beyond the warm threshold of the flesh, or perhaps in spite of its organic warmth since the eye is itself under suspicion of being a fraudulent intruder. Barthes' photographic umbilical cord is not only a conduit for identity and life, it is also a channel that leads, like The Ambassadors's anamorphic skull, from the land of the living to the land of the dead. The Replicants are the distant kinsfolk of Arkwright's mill workers. The presence of these biotechnologically-based android workers on earth testifies to the fact that they are forever snared by the cultural logic of a terrestrial world which is in an umbilical relationship to the Offworld colony that they have been designed to operate in. Moreover, their various design parameters and the fact that it is their eyes that are a

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measure of their incongruity and the conduit through which difference is unmasked, testifies to the fact that their being is biologically and representationally twinned and enslaved by another, more nobel eye: the eye of their human masters. But, this film points out, its days are numbered. However, in contrast to Wright's painterly mode of representation in Richard Arkwright's Cotton Mills, by night and its naturalistic mode of representation, Ridley Scott's film proposes that we, the spectators, also look back at the world through simulated eyes: "If only you'd seen what I've seen with your eyes." The comment's ambiguity is pregnant with possibilities. Batty's eyes are indistinguishable from his creator's eyes, an ambiguity that is encouraged from the film's opening view of Los Angeles (2019) and the two shots of an immense eyeball. To whom does this eye belong? We are never sure. Unlike Vertov's screen-filling camera/eye which is a disembodied composite of human eye and movie camera lens, this enormous eye, that also occupies the whole screen, is set in humanlike flesh. Like Vertov's revolutionary cinematographic manifesto, Blade Runner is presented from its opening scene as if it could be only seen through a spectator's eye — or is it a protagonist's eye: or both? Here, the possibilities, although subtle, begin to multiply. Does the eye belong to a wayward spectator? Is it the eye of an intractable Replicant? Does it belong to Deckard, the disenchanted hunter who might also be a Replicant? Or is it a human-like camera/eye — the spectator's illusive double — whose deceptively smooth shell functions like The Ambassadors's planar surface which supports a skull's anamorphic presence. But unlike the spectator who stands before The Ambassadors, we cannot change our position in relation to the film's underlying systems of simulation and the giant spectatorial eye that is presented as reference and frame for an unfoldingo narrative. In contrast,' we are fixed in our seats as spectators in a cinema while we watch the film in which representational ambiguities are created and componded by the lack of obvious differences between the Replicants and their human creators. There is no place in this experience for the kind of critical reflexivity that one finds in The Man with a Movie Camera. Blade Runner's powerful visual experience is molded by a classic Hollywood-based cinematographic narrative, its punctual ultra-realistic references to vision and the human eye, and its

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sophisticated analysis of conventional photographic images (family photographs). At first sight, these photographic images appear to be perfectly normal, just as the bodies of the Replicants are perfectly normal. It is only on the basis of a close analysis that differences begin to appear. But these differences are proposed in the context of that first simulation, the first eye — the one that frames the whole film. Like a Mobus strip, once we enter the film's cultural/cinematographic space we cannot escape its particular logic. In its own way we are brought back to the mystery of the apparatus we are sitting in. But fifty years have passed since someone insistently pointed, again and again, to the apparatus and tried to exhaustively test out its culture and its possibilities in order to suggest others through the panhuman vision of a revolution in the history of western perception. Unlike Vertov's film, Blade Runner does not reflexive ly introduce us to our viewing context. Somehow, almost magically, we find ourselves caught in the grip of a double that stares blankly beyond us, without so much as a blink; and then the story unfolds in classic narrative form . . . Turner's coach drawings and Babbage's railway experiments of 1839

During the course of his travels in Europe in the 1820s, Turner produced drawings from moving coaches (Gage 1972:40—41). These drawing, like others of their kind, can be treated as another type of perceptual threshold. They record in a particularly primitive, yet curiously appropriate, manner microhistories of the body's dislocation from a "natural" environment, an environment conceived, that is, as something that contours the human body's movement through an actual geographical space. As Schivelbusch has pointed out, "preindustrial traffic is mimetic of natural phenomena," while "mechanical power . . . creates its own new spatiality" inasmuch as "motion is no longer dependent on the conditions of natural space" (Schivelbusch 1979:12, 13). In the 1820s Joseph Nicephore Niepce successfully attempted to chemically fix a camera obscura image from nature. On September 27, 1825, the first public railway, the Stockton & Darlington Railway, was opened, although it was only in 1829, with the Rainhill Trials on the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, that the steam locomotive proved to

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Figure 3 Joseph Mallord William Turner, Among the Mountains. (Left) Men Shovelling away Snow for the Carriage — Women and Children ?Hugging, 1819. (Right) Three Sketches. Distant Peak, ?M.Blanc, 1819. Both pencil on paper, 5 X 3g in. Pages from Return from Italy Sketchbook (Finberg CXCII-2a, 3). © Tate, London 2004.

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be an efficacious form of motive power. Thus, in the same decade that witnessed the first photographs and the first manifestations of railway transportation, Turner's coach drawings are the curious, marginal records of a pencil's activity in a highly mobile and unstable, yet mimetically contoured environment. They were not only the archive of a pencil's passage over the surface of a piece of paper, a fragmented landscape-mapped route that is in a dislocated relationship with a carriage's movement over a road, they are also the graphic records of the physical instabilities that could be introduced into the draughtsman's eye/hand circuit when his body was placed in an artificial mobile environment and his eyes were locked on to a passing panorama. A coach drawing's cultural and perceptual conditions of production are therefore extremely complex and defy retrospective analysis. One can only point to some elements of the complex set of parameters that could have determined a graphic line's existence: geography, climate, horse power, velocity, road conditions, type of landscape, and the body's position in the coach. Although simple in form, the drawings are extraordinarily dense from the viewpoints of their information culture. They have emerged through the conjunction of multiple sources of sensory data and a mimetic logic whose roots travel in many different directions, through multiple sensory dimensions, and physical and perceptual conditions. The graphic marks exist, therefore, in these multiple senses beyond the imagination's reach. By 1839 the stage was set for a series of new perceptual relationships with the world. By the end of the year the Daguerreotype photographic process had been publically unveiled to the world. But this year also witnessed another less spectacular but no less revolutionary experiment in the production of images, one that relates to Turner's coach drawings r o ' o but from another radically different viewpoint: that of the geometry of the new railway lines. Between January and March 1839, Charles Babbage conducted a series of unusual experiments on the Great Western Railway. These experiments were designed to record information concerning that vibrations and motions of railway carriages drawn by locomotives at known velocities. The information was divided into the following basic categories, each with its own inscriptive device (a pen): force of traction; vertical shake of the carriage at its midpoint; lateral shake of the carriage at the same point; end shake of the carriage at the

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same point; and three others related to the same actions at one of the carriage's extreme ends. There was also a pen to record information on the back and forth movement of the carriage's wheels against the rails by tracing the curve of the carriage's center point against the plane of the rail. Finally, there was a pen to record the velocity of the carriage through time. This 1pen was attached to a chronometer movement that O was beating by the second. The information could then be used to unravel the mechanical circumstances relatingo to an accident. In contrast to the simplicity of the technical apparatus (a pencil, sketch pad and horse-drawn carriage) in the case of Turner's coach drawings, Babbage's apparatus reflected the complexity of the railway's new technical culture: The inside of the second-class carriage was cleared out and it was o fitted up in the following manner:— Holes were made in its bottom, and through these strong wooden supports were firmly fixed on the framework to which the wheels were attached. On the supports a table was fixed which extended the whole length of the body of the carriage. Large rollers were attached to each end of this table,' on one o o of which was wound a sheet of paper 1,000 feet in length. The rollers, being connected by a chain with the axis of one pair of the wheels of the carriage, were caused to revolve, and the paper to pass along the table, at any desired rate from 3 feet per mile, to 40 feet per mile, for each mile passed over by the carriage. In the middle of the table, and just above the paper, a small platform supported nine pens, which, by means of various mechanical contrivances, were moved transversely across the paper, to and fro, according to the deviations from the mean which the various causes indicated. (Anonymous 1861 — 1862:385) Thus, the multi-channel drawing system could produce an "unerring record of facts, the incorruptible witnesses of the immediate antecedents of any catastrophe" (Babbage 1989, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, in CW 11:248). Babbage's railway experiments are the antithesis of Turner's coach drawings. One type of drawing is tied to a human body, the other to the railway carriage. The difference is significant because the two types point to the existence of two distinct, yet

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related histories of transportation-based representation. While the coach drawings are obscure because their logic is contingent on their site o o o specificity, which escapes concise schematization and structural description, the railway drawings, although complex and highly innovative, are easily categorized within an existing history of scientific and technical representation: one understands the logic and structure of Babbage's apparatus, its function is clear, as is the nature of the phenomenon that is to be examined. This clarity extends to the types of information it produces and records, and their relationship to both the known (railway carriage) and unknown (accident or catastrophe). Artists registered the consequences of new nineteenth-century technological transformations in various ways. But, for the most part, their responses were presented in conventional representational form. It was not until paintings like Turner's Rain, Steam, and Speed — The Great Western Railway that these transformations were registered in a manner that also transformed the medium of representation itself. Later, early twentiethcentury artists, in particular the Futurists and Marcel Duchamp, would attempt to deal with similar kinds of transformations. But these attempts were confined, for the most part, to the creation of stylistic simulations, as in the case of the Futurists, or they were based on the creation of notational and descriptive meta-languages (Duchamp). Of course there were also late nineteenth-century technologies such as chronophotography and cinematography that had influenced the Futurists and Duchamp. But these were also essentially notational/descriptive processes of investigation. Turner's coach drawings point to another solution to the problem of technological representation. The interest of these drawings lies in their disrupted, almost indecipherable, graphite marks, in their capacity to register the violent shocks that would disrupt the draughtsperson's circuit of control and skill. Their interest also lies in their ability to evoke the possibility of another kind of representational history: the history of the sensory effects that resulted from the shocks and deformations of an unfoldingo threshold of vision that was plotted against a coach's movement through space and time, and the passage of a landscape before the draughtsman's eyes. Insofar as a pencil records this threshold's existence on a piece of paper, a history is registered in graphite: the traces of a process of perception that has taken on a material dimension as a consequence of a movement that is routed in the

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passage of a coach along a road. Such drawings represent a history in suspended animation, a history of a touch that exists at a precise threshold of vision — that of a pencil and paper — whose unfolding interface was ogenerated byJ an unusual imaging system: a horse-drawn coach and o o J road. Babbage's machine drawings are their antithesis. They are coherent on the basis of their logic — there are no O gaps in the circuits through O 1 O which they take their form other than those that are created by a final "catastrophe." They point elsewhere and are the subject of another kind of history (Brain 2002; Kahn 2002). The representatives of the former, more unusual kind of history do not figure prominently in conventional histories of art or in the history of western representation in general. Their marginality is possibly due to their secondary, sketchy nature and links to primary or elementary processes of graphic inscription. Or it is perhaps due to their fragmentary and ephemeral natures and to the fact that their logics are intimately rooted in the uniqueness of each imaging system and associated threshold of vision.1 These traces exist in the margins of more o powerful visual thresholds, and more coherent historical statements and propositions like The Ambassadors; Arkwright's Cotton Mills, by night; Rain, Steam, Speed — The Great Western Railway; The Man with a Movie Camera; Time Transfixed; and Blade Runner. Yet these kinds of traces and the imaging systems at their origins represent another viewpoint on the history of western representation. They exist in the shadows of the new technologies we are familiar with: the railway system, photography, cinematography, closed-circuit television, high definition television, digital photography, virtual reality technology, satellite imaging systems,' etc. In the following pages I will examine other kinds of traces and O1 O contacts that take on a material dimension as a consequence of unusual relationships between primary or elementary inscriptive devices such as pencil or pen and novel imaging systems or combinations of systems, and their roles in the production of unusual and/or fragmentary and ephemeral, yet nevertheless highly significant thresholds in the history of representation; and I will examine them in order to discover different models upon which we might develop new parallel kinds of imaging practices.

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CHAPTER 2

The Materialization of Sentience: The Dynamo and the Virgin The year is 1900. Henry Adams contemplates an enormous dynamo in the hall of dynamos at the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris. Responses to the forces that it embodied, to the links that might exist between it and other recently detected "occult, supersensual, [and] irrational" rays such as X-rays or radium, and to the fact that it had become, for Adams, "a symbol of infinity," were recorded in his essay "The Dynamo and the Virgin" (Adams 1927a:383, 380). Although Adams was a historian, the essay eschewed the conventional subjects and methodologies of his profession. The elusive supersensual world of rays and forces that Adams was attempting to understand were so new and revolutionary that they could only be grasped, in his estimation, in an idiosyncratic manner: namely through the measure of their attraction to his mind;7 in other words,' through o a measure of their influence on a particular consciousness.

The question of measurement was intimately related, as Adams was well aware, to the choice of methodology and instrumentation: "Frozen air, or the electric furnace, had some scale of measurement, no doubt, if somebody could invent a thermometer adequate to the purpose; but X-rays had played no part whatever in man's consciousness, and the atom itself had figured only as a fiction of thought" (1927a:381). With the discovery of these new forces "man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old. He had entered a supersensual world, in which he could measure nothing except by chance collisions of movements imperceptible to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his instruments, but perceptible to each other, and so to some known ray at the end of the scale" (1927a:381-382). 7

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The instrument that Adams used in his attempt to measure the imperceptible was archaic, yet extremely sensitive and flexible. Faced with the magnitude of his task, Adams had turned to the tool with which he was most familiar, and that ensured his profession's command over time and space. This instrument was his pen. However, its context of use belied its simplicity and ease of use. For, inasmuch as the movements of the pen were contiguous with the deployment of both methodology and system of measurement, the three were intimately bound together. Fusion was such that an archaic writingo tool was transformed into an instrument as radical as the new rays under study. The pen became, in effect, a delicate instrumentally extended proto-cybernetic probe. "The Dynamo and the Virgin" represents at the levels of its medium, its methods, and even of its complex multidimensional subject, an extended deployment of this fusion's underlying logic; a logic that I will describe as tactilo-ecolographic because of its unusual graphically based tactile ecology. cv Although Adams's idiosyncratic approach, the complex transdisciplinary status of his essay, and the proto-cybernetic nature and tactiloecolographic logic of its probe are the subjects of this chapter, my objectives in examining "The Dynamo and the Virgin" lie elsewhere: in its anthropological possibilities as a site of transcultural thresholds and speculative forms of intercultural activity. And yet, as we shall see, it radically defines what one would expect of such anthropological possibilities. Adams's essay is of special interest from the point of view of redefinition because it can also be treated as a kind of scientific representation and imaging system. This treatment both transforms a conventional definition of transcultural space as a space of intercultural contact, and opens the way to treating other kinds of scientific representations in a similar fashion. "The Dynamo and the Virgin" 's importance as a transcultural site can be briefly summarized in point form. First, the essay is the locality for an unusual exchange, one might even say intercourse,' between old and new o ' o J scientific and technological forces. Second, its site-specificity is enriched because it represents an unconventional fusion of a strange kind of proto-cybernetic instrument and its representational product. Third, the way that it links scientific and so-called occult forces points to new speculative forms of knowledge that exist at the outer boundaries of

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technologically extended senses and imaginations, whether these domains are archaic,' modern,' or ultramodern. This link suggests, moreOO over, that these limits are the breeding ground for strange sentiences and eccentric forms of paranormal narratives, and that these sentiences and narratives take a materialized instrumental form. These, I will argue in the following pages, are the reasons for succumbing to the temptations of scientific images and for (re)creating experimental situations in which a first intercultural contact might be established with the faint echoes of special kinds of sentiences which exist at one with their graphic surfaces. '

Poetics of the supersensual

Because of the "The Dynamo and the Virgin"'s position at the threshold of twentieth-century science and technology, and in virtue of its exceptionally clear definition of the supersensual, it represents an early and in many ways unsurpassed attempt to come to grips with the sensory impacts of new kinds of machines and imaging systems. Beyond this, the essay pinpoints the logic whereby sensory experiences are coupled to a supersensory world of science and technology when it defines the latter as that which exists beyond perception, but not beyond an instrument's tactilographic logic. Adams suggests that the last image is the first image inasmuch as it is OO O O the only image to be registered and that can therefore be seen. But its J o O relationship to what it represents can only be inferred through a complicated rearticulation of the entwined pathways of an instrumentally extruded vision, a vision which is, however, not that of the eye but rather that of a special kind of touch. From this perspective, it predates recent attempts in the sociology of science to analyze the cultural logic of the extended instrumental contexts which determine the chain of events and transformations that create scientific and technological data o in the shape of representations. The speculative richness of Adams's essay resides in its experimental site-specificity, and in the way that it confronts exceptional events as though at the moment of their appearance. In contrast to the traditional work of the historian, or the new ethnographically oriented work of a number of contemporary sociologists of science,4 Adams's approach is based on treating the human body and its consciousness as a kind of

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tactiloscope registering the novel impact of "irrational" or "occult" rays and forces; as though the moment of their discovery had not yet decayed into everyday experience. But his approach goes beyond the registering of these subjective impacts inasmuch as it undertakes the task of providing some measure of their singular historical stature. In this sense his work is close to that of a contemporary artist such as Gary Hill, who transduces desire and instrumentation through the medium of his own o body in an attempt to articulate the possibilities in the perceptual transformations generated by advanced imaging systems. The difference between the two lies in the nature of the historical thresholds each investigates, and the extended instrumental contexts at their disposal: new super sensual rays and forces in the former case, the carnal epistemology of video technology in the latter. A poetics of the supersensual takes shape as Adams attempts to come to grips with the imperceptible and, in many ways, the inconceivable. While the movement of words across the pages of Adams's essay appears to provide a visible measure of the difficult task of measuring the unmeasurable, one must not forget that it too can only function as the last "image" chain;' as though the rpen could o in a Ion? o tactilo-ecolographic o r o record a precognitive — transcultural — strangeness generated by the actual impact of new rays and forces on a consciousness; as though it could register this strangeness as a series of seismological reverberao o o tions, before their decay into a pattern of symbolic resonances, in the pathways of a historically attuned imagination.5 The result of this exercise, with its idiosyncratic methodology and strange correspondences and probings, is a new, historically based, speculative form of writerly activity. Its novelty resides in the way that it allows an observer to register a new threshold for the infinite existo ing in new forms of instrumentally extended scientifically and/or technologically based contexts and in such a way as to be able to resist continuously its final eclipsing embrace. Adams was able to achieve a fine balance between the sensual and supersensual, the finite and infinite because, as he points out, his writing takes shape through the activities of a pen that had become "a sort of blind-man's dog"; that had begun to work "for itself in search of its own "line of force" as it slowly plotted a path along a "knife-edge" between known and unknown rays and forces (Adams 1927a:389, 383). This path proved all

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the more tentative and novel for its having been deployed in advance of the imagination. Adams's efforts in this direction are of singular interest today not only because they illustrate the workings of a male imagination confronted by a sequence of cognitive limits, but also because this drama unfolds at the site of a major scientific and technological threshold in the history of perception. The world was permanently transformed with the discovery of radium and X-rays, and Adams was able because of his position and objectives to bridge the perceptual threshold that these discoveries created. In doing so, he was able to sense the presence of a new and vast supersensual network of invisible rays and forces as they were represented through a range of instrumentally mediated experiences. The magnitude of this historical shift in the economy offerees, and of its subsequent impact on habitual modes of perception, can only be measured against the mysterious and the infinite. The only existing forces able to provide the necessary scale of comparison were, in Adams's estimation,7 to be found in the invisible forces emanating from o certain transcendental thresholds such as the Cross and the figure of the Virgin. He argues, for example, that inasmuch as the new rays "were occult, supersensual, irrational; they were a revelation of mysterious energy like that of the Cross; they were what, in terms of mediaeval science, were called immediate modes of the divine substance" (1927a:383). It is in virtue of its objectives, its elements and their mode of presentation, and even its problematic correlates to the infinite, that "The Dynamo and the Virgin" inaugurates another history of science and technology. This history, impregnated by other forms of knowledge and other technologies of the senses, is dedicated to the contingent and the ephemeral; to the sensual effects produced by threshold phenomena, or to the invisible consequences of supersensual events registered as distant shocks experienced by historically charged imaginations. Rejecting the possibility of absolute forms of knowledge, this history could begin anywhere, at the site of any scientific representation, or at the site of any technological or scientific object able to pierce the membrane of habitual perception and thus challenge the imaginative powers in the name of the infinite.

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Such a history and its methodologies could provide local answers to fundamental questions about the "representability" of the super sensual, its impact on a history of the senses, and its relationship to the arts of historical and scientific representation. It could provide answers, for instance, to such questions as: What are the kinds of relationships that exist at any given scientific or technological site between the conceivable and inconceivable, the known and unknown, as defined by the impact of new technologies on the human senses and consciousness?; How does the imagination deploy itself in the terra incognita of new technological or scientific experiences?; How does it generate maps of these new worlds, and according to what new kinds of aesthetic parameters are these worlds to be represented and experienced?; How is consciousness rearticulated and the human imagination reimaged as a consequence of these activities? But most of all, this history and its methodologies could serve as the basis for an art — a poetics — of the supersensual founded on a doubly extended tactilo-ecolographic practice as it takes shape in the laborious perambulations of a pen-like probe. J

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"The Dynamo and the Virgin" as scientific representation

Scientific representations function, as one commentator has noted, on at least two levels: as didactic devices, and as the record and recognition of a "state of human understanding"; or, more specifically, as a "statement of the state of human awareness" (Ford 1993:2, 75). In addition to their more obvious function of disseminating information, or perhaps because of this function, scientific representations stimulate the imagination. More often than not, they tend to function simultaneously in these two modes according to the needs of their audience, specialists or members of a wider public alike. But scientific representations cannot be simply treated as reflections of understanding and awareness. They "constitute," as Michael Lynch has argued, "the material form of scientific phenomena." Hence, "the procedures for making the object scientifically knowable implicate an independent object," but they also "simultaneously achieve a graphic rendering of the object's materiality," a materiality defined as "sensible, analyzable, measurable, examinable, manipulatable and 'intelligible'" (1985:43, emphases in the original). Lynch proposes, on the basis of this

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argument, that the "question is not, 'How do objective properties correspond to graphic devices for isolating and ordering those properties?'; it is,'How do graphic properties merge with and come to embody the 'natural object'?" And, as he concludes, "The latter question inquires about how science initially determines what is natural on the basis of what its graphic devices disclose" (1985:43, emphasis in the original). According to this view, scientific representations could be considered natural entities inasmuch as they embody their subject's "materiality"; a materiality that is, however, defined almost exclusively in terms of instrumentation. If the existence of scientific representations is a testimony to what can be seen, and what might not have been seen before, then this is because they represent the punctuation marks of an investigative process that has assumed a concrete and highly refined instrumental form. One has only to travel across the thresholds that each instrument creates to emerge in o radically different observational worlds. But one must not forget that these worlds and their contents have been materialized. That is to say, they have been rendered "sensible, analyzable, measurable, examinable, manipulatable and 'intelligible'" because the "unknown" — the terra incognita that an extended instrumental context has materialized through an act of colonization — has been translated into the known, into Knowledge, into a representation. Lynch argues, for example, that "although a psychological subject is necessary to process what an instrument shows, the instrument does not merely extend the sensitivities of sensory perception." On the contrary, an "instrument, and the accompanying project of 'domesticating' or routinizing space and time in accordance with the instrument's use, prepares the way for perception by pre-coding, geometrizing and normalizing the properties of what comes to be perceived." Thus, he concludes, an "active reconstruction of the world is achieved" (1985:59, emphasis in the original). This process produces a particular kind of docile object/image which Lynch has identified, following Michel Foucault, as behaving "in accordance with a programme of normalization" (1985:43). But most scientific representations are also materializations suspended between two absences: the Unknown (of which they are always in some sense the surreptitious representatives) and the Known (which they now embody

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and thus represent). Scientific representations become, as such, the complex products, like Adams's new occult-like X-rays and radium, of an instrumentally re-sited imagination. Under these conditions, it is not hard to imagine that normalization is constantly threatened by deviance and even violence, and that both can serve as alternate springboards for the imagination. o Such is the case when scientific representation functions in other registers. When it is subject to appropriation, misappropriation, or even misrepresentation: "Scientific realities mutate: six-pointed snowflakes become eight-pointed, just as carefully delineated bacteria transpose themselves into species that seem to exist only in text books" (Ford 1993:3). Misrepresentation, plagiarism and, more importantly, graphic degeneration or mutation resulting from reproduction or translation between images and/or media, generate ambiguous or hybrid images which function in fact, if not in spirit, as triggers for the mind and as passageways to distant imaginary places. Other passageways can be invented when an image shifts position in bodies of scientific knowledge, or is transposed and recontextualized from a scientific to an artistic or literary context. Deviance is, in fact, a possibility that is directly built into the cultural logic of scientific representation. As Bruno Latour has pointed out in the case of linear perspective: "Perspective is not interesting because it provides realistic pictures; [. . .] it is interesting because it creates complete hybrids: nature seen as fiction, and fiction seen as nature, with all the elements made so homogeneous in space that it is now possible to reshuffle them like a pack of cards" (1990:29). While Latour is talking specifically about two-dimensional graphic systems that create a high degree of spatio-temporal mobility and allow for reciprocal yet immutable transformations between natural or fictional objects, the common ground of a two-dimensional surface can generate many parallel possibilities. To treat scientific representations in this way is to situate them within a nexus of questions that exists beyond the most obvious sociological questions about their scientific and factual identities, and past the origins of their singular powers of spatial or temporal colonization. In contrast to these other questions, one can ask how scientific representation might function, given its inherent ambiguity, as a stepping stone for the imagination? How could it facilitate an exchange of

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information about the worlds of our senses, their limits, and what lies beyond those limits as defined by different forms of archaic and advanced instrumentation? Where would scientific representation lead us beyond the exchange of information and on the basis of what kind of sensory engagement (of what kind of transformative erotics of the senses) could our consciousnesses be driven across the threshold of visualization mapped by such an image? What would be the status of the void contemplated as we emerge in some sense behind the image, yet linked to it as though by an invisible umbilical cord still nourishing our imagination as it floats in an image's virtual shadow? And, finally, speaking of virtual shadows: of what use are these images today? How can they serve as springboards for the imagination in an age increasingly dominated byJ 1 O O O O J computer-based imaging systems of the calibre of, for example, virtual reality? This problem is especially grave when we consider that the trends Latour identifies as having their origins in the printing press are still operating today, and at an accelerated rate. The possibilities, indeed, the richness of deviance that such questions suggest, exist as possibilities inherent in the logic of the "immutable mobile" (Latour's label for the distinguishing characteristics of certain western representational technologies such as perspective and the printing press, particularly as they pertain to the conditions of intercourse characteristic of two-dimensional surfaces). It is not possible simply to dismiss the movement of an imagination because it has chosen to isolate scientific or similar kinds of representations from their more obvious social contexts of production. Adams' dynamo, although located in a large exposition, can nevertheless function on paper as a powerful spatial operator linking different realities and fictions. I would argue, moreover, that it is through the socio-logic of the decay of the scientific use-value of such representations that they are liberated to the extent that they become able to function as potent interfaces in other kinds of instrumentally extended contexts like, for instance, "The Dynamo and the Virgin." These new contexts can also serve to generate new kinds of materialities. It is in these multiple senses that the movement of the imagination or, in the case of its failure,' of a O tactilo-ecolographic probe, can create potent and as yet unexplored interfaces between the arts and sciences, the two disciplinary groupings that are almost exclusively devoted to exploring the limits of the senses x

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and the imagination from within a given set of technological imperatives. I would like briefly to explore some of these implications in the context of "The Dynamo and the Virgin." But before I return to Adams's essay, I would like to recontextualize Lynch's argument concerning the materiality of scientific representations in order to raise the possibility that they harbor a kind of intelligence: that they are in some sense "alive," and that there is as a result a type of consciousness occupyingo their archival sites. I will suggest, in short,7 that there might be a oo * o different way of knowing, of looking at and engaging with scientific j o' o o o o representations, so that we may make additional sense of their materiality. It is on this basis that I will go on to argue that "The Dynamo and the Virgin" is an unusual type of scientific representation and, moreover, that it can serve, when treated as a re-sited context, as the model for a twenty-first century poetics of the supersensual.

Cybernetics and the sentience of an extended instrumental context In 1948 Norbert Wiener published a groundbreaking book entitled Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. In addition to presenting the outlines of a new interdisciplinary science of communication and control, Wiener's book presents a model of the human organism and the machine system in which both are treated as equal. Wiener's model depends on three insights: the first involves the role of the sense organs in the creation of a new stage in the history of automata; the second concerns the fundamental role of feedback in regulating the behavior of living organisms and machine systems; and the o o o o J ' third offers a new conception of the relationship linking message and organism. o Wiener proposes that one of the basic differences between older forms of automata, such as the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century clockwork automaton, or the nineteenth-century thermodynamic or steam-powered automaton, and the cybernetic automaton, is to be found in the way that the latter is coupled to an external world. Coupling is achieved not only through "their energy flow, their metabolism, but also by a flow of impressions, of incoming messages, and of the actions of outgoing messages." The channels for this exchange are considered,' o o o o moreover, to be "equivalents of the human and animal sense organs"

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(1961:42). Thus, in contrast to earlier forms of automata (which are limited in their ability to communicate and interact with their environment), Wiener's cybernetic automata are able to exchange information with their environments and to assess that information in such a way as to modify future actions on the basis of past performance. Feedback, the name for this adjustment process, provides an even more fundamental wayJ to establish common oground between living organisms and o o new communications machines, since it is by means of continual self-adjustment that entropy in both types of systems can be controlled. Wiener's third insight concerns the relationship between messages and organisms. He proposes that an organism can be treated "as message" and, as a consequence, that one can describe an organism without trying "to specify each molecule in it," without having to "catalogue it bit by bit." Instead, one has only "to answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern: a pattern which is more significant and less probable as the organism becomes, so to speak, more fully an organism" (1954:95). Pattern is, moreover, synonymous with message, and both are coextensive with information. Thus, messages, patterns, organization and information link and regulate the behavior of livingo organisms, o o ' machine systems, and even social systems on the basis of a common cybernetic ecology. For Gregory Bateson, this ecology consists of circuits of "ideas in systems or 'minds' whose boundaries no longer coincide with the skins of the participant individuals" (1972b: 339), and where "idea" is understood as "a difference which makes a difference" or, more simply, as a "unit of information" (1972a:318). The dissolution of the traditional conceptual boundaries between living organisms and machine systems that cybernetics inaugurated over fifty years ago suggest that all systems, including scientific representations' systemic materiality, be treated similarly. Indeed, Wienerian cybernetics provides another way of conceiving the nature of a scientific representation's materiality in its equation of singularity, or the degree of organization (negative entropy), with the image of an island of life in a dying world. According to this analogy, a scientific representation is like certain organisms which can "for a time . . . maintain and often even to increase the level of their organization, as a local enclave in the o general o ' stream of increasing entropy, of increasing chaos and de-differentiation" (Wiener 1954:95). When coupled with an organism conceived as a

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pattern or set of messages, the idea of a scientific representation as a kind of intelligent system or as a type of sentience makes cybernetic sense, especially since the more "significant and less probable" (1954:95) the pattern is — the more complex and extended its environment and thus its materiality — the more fully the representation takes on some of the primary characteristics of a living organism. The cybernetic automaton or cybernetic organism (cyborg) is the systemic context of new sentience. But can a scientific representation be considered in similar terms? Latour suggests that "it is not the inscription by itself that should carry the burden of explaining the power of science; it is the inscription as the fine edge and the final stage of a whole process of mobilization . . . " (1990:40, emphases in the original). Cyberneticians would concur with this model. But they would also make the point that one must treat an inscription as a pattern or message whose level of organization corresponds to a level of sentience, since it is not just energy flows, impressions,' incomingO and outgoing messages that count as sentience,' but also O O O the movement of ideas in systems functioning as extended "minds." In this sense, scientific representations are the mnemonic sites, or archives, of sentience. Terror, or the echoes oj a blind man's stick

"Where does the blind man's self begin?" Gregory Bateson asks,' "At the O O J tip of the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some point halfway up the stick?" (1972a:318). Does his mental system begin "at the handle of the stick?", at the limits of his "skin?", "halfway up the stick?", or "at the tip of the stick?" (1972c:459). Clearly, such questions are absurd. Conventional visual boundaries, including those of the human body, must be replaced by fluid and contingent operational boundaries. Conventional boundaries dissolve, if one begins to think in these O terms, and paradoxes such as those arising from the figurative slippages in Adams's attempts to treat his pen as an autonomous semi-intelligent agent are explained. Far from being accidental, these slippages must be treated as structural features of a systemic approach to the writer's art. Why? Because the writer's pen, like the blind man's stick or his dog, is (as Adams correctly intuits) much more than a simple extension of the writer. 7

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Had Adams, like Bateson, access to a cybernetic model, then he would, no doubt, have been able to grasp the full force of the transformation that he senses as his pen, coupled to a hand and interfaced with paper, is placed in the service of a blind inquiry into the history of forces and the infinite. For it is clear that only on the basis of this type of cybernetic coupling is the measure of historical effect able to extend through this circuit, like a distant echo. Moreover, it can only do so because of this circuit's particular tactile-ecolographic logic. "The Dynamo and the Virgin" stands, in addition to its hybridity, in addition to its poetics, and in addition to its sensitivity and power as imaging system and instrument of analysis, as the materialization of an extended tactilo-ecolographic process of "visualization." In the end, what is important, as Lynch points out, is that "the 'real' object is the representation in hand [. . .] and not the invisible phenomenon or abstract relationship 'out there.' "8 Rather than the phantom traces of a super sensual world, strings of words combine to give shape to a desire and quest for comprehension of an invisible, supersensual experience. But, as Adams realizes, the visible can never, by definition, give form to the invisible. At the end of the essay we are no closer to seeing the forces which lie beyond our vision than we are at its beginning; we are only privy to a distant measure of their impact on our imagination; to subtle reverberations amplified like the mournful cry of a sound forever caught between the essay's opening and concludingo lines. But it is also clear that this is only half the story. There is also an opposite movement as the "mind" expands onto paper and well beyond the threshold of words, sentences and paragraphs. It is this double movement, and specifically the measure of its displacement, which Adams strives to summarize in his methodological metalogue on a writer's art, that has evolved in such a way that it actually becomes able to confront the unwritable. The essay's newness, its novelty as an unprecedented type of representation, resides in its poetic art; in the way that it manages to materialize an experience (as opposed to an "invisible phenomenon out there") in the context of a strange imaging system; and in the way that the process of materialization takes the form of a precise, calibrated movement of the pen. A special feature of this type of representation is therefore found in O

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this movement, in the fact that it preserves the contortions of a consciousness beginning to lose its sense of self, just as it traces the history of its conservation. For the pen registers this consciousness' transformation as it fuses with an analogical instrument and,' through this,' with an o o extended context of "occult" and "irrational" rays and forces. "The Dynamo and the Virgin" represents a different kind of scientific representation not because the pen provides the means of shortcircuiting these rays, forces, and the infinite into existence. This would simply lead to a collapse into stereotypes and to the making of an easy and simple correspondence between the dynamo and the Virgin. The essay's novelty resides, on the contrary, in what it does not do, in the fact that it does not represent the unrepresentable (radium and X-rays could not after all be directly seen, not even after the invention of C.T.R. Wilson's cloud chamber in 1911, since only traces, afterimages, were conjured up in its supersaturated atmosphere). "The Dynamo and the Virgin" strives, instead, to recreate the experience of experiencing a faint yet profound perturbation, a distant yet threatening fissure, in a habitual frame of perceptual reference. Adams captures the magnitude of this disturbance with the words: "Radium denied its God" (1927a:381). The essay's methodological rigor resides in the provision of an extended measure of this disturbance, as though its reverberations could be transformed through a strange experiment into a representation. This rigor is nonetheless temporarily undercut by a simple graphic negation ("Radium denied its God") marking the site of a bridge that manages, momentarily, actually to span the abyss between incompatible forms of history before collapsing under the weight of its own stereotype. From this perspective, and contrary to Lynch's view, scientific representations are never completely docile: they always threaten the imagination with the terror of the unknown, the void of the infinite that they mask and cannot know. This is the single truth hidden in "The Dynamo and the Virgin," a truth echoed in the movement of a pen, and the contortions of a consciousness beginning to lose its sense of self. This is o o the truth preserved as that consciousness protects itself against an absolute loss of identity by fusing with other elements to form a new, highly sensitive, type of measuring instrument. Perhaps what is important in the end, and what makes Adams's essay

stick —> contact —> sound —> ear —> movement of the body —> hand —> b) stick —> contact —> sound —> ear —> movement of the body —> hand —> stick —> c) contact —> etc. d) sound —> etc.

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e) ear —> etc. f) movement of the body —> etc. g) hand —> etc. cv and so on ...

The logic features interpenetrating, overlapping and transducive sensory thresholds and dimensions. Mind and intelligence are synonymous with a context-specific ecologically extended "mental system" that is bound together in movement through space and time by the circulation of ideas/information/messages and vice versa. But a different set of senso ory parameters, a different environmental context, a different goal or set of goals would produce a different "mental system" or configuration

of "mind" that operates through a different ratio and economy of senses. The cybernetics of extended mental systems and ideas

We have already been introduced in Chapters 2 and 7 to Norbert Wiener's argument: "Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization" (Wiener 1954:21). Inversely, the physical pattern and organization of objects are messages, albeit complex three-dimensional ones. These messages contain information about the organization and archiving of ideas based on their mode of processing, organizational patterns, and method of display in concrete three-dimensional form. The more unusual and/or archaic the object, the stranger is its pattern of ideas,' the more unusual and distinct its message. o Scientific and technical artifacts are the archives of unusual and often extraordinary patterns of ideas or information because of their experimental roles and their relationship to succeeding models of reality. Since the organic and non-organic are cybernetically reconceived as extended mental systems, a human organism's interaction with these objects can mimic the actions of Bateson's blind man. But the exercise will take place in a more unfamiliar environment, on the basis of other ratios of the senses, and it will be governed by a different, experimental, set of objectives whose logic is initially one of dislocation, incoherence and "optically inconsistent spaces." This is also true of scientific and/or engineering drawings.

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First, let us imagine that these drawings are the products of a linked, yet often interrupted and sometimes recontextualized movement of an interface: an experimental scientist (or engineer) uses a pencil (to pick the simplest and most convenient of drawing tools) to trace the outlines of an idea, of an experimental apparatus, technical object or machine, on a piece of paper. The obscure sensuality of a perambulating point of contact — the meetingo of two technologies cast in terms of an erotics of o touch — is the interface where "mind" becomes tangible in the idea's o form in the sense that there would be no ecology of mind without the OJ idea and vice versa. This process continues on and across other pieces of paper as this or other pencils engage with or are disengaged from the task of manipulating and transforming the idea according to graphite transforms of difference. At each stage in its development (and transformation), the idea is at once an interface between a kind of blind man's stick (the pencil) and a specific environment (a piece of paper). At each stage, the difference between graphite mark (metallic grey) and paper (white) becomes the representation of this mind's presence in the world and its activity. But it is much more because difference is also its condition of possibility in the sense that this interface brings the mental system into being. The emerging line is therefore a two-dimensional register of the dynamics of a mental system's possibility of existence as it differentially takes place across a single or a series of sheets of paper according to a tactilo-ecolographic logic. Eventually, the idea could be translated into the fixed pattern of an object that would no doubt be composed of elements embodying other ideas (whose outlines have already been integrated in the initial idea as in Edison's December 3rd, 1877 sketches). This object could, in its turn, generate another idea or series of ideas that could be manipulated and transformed, and so on ... How would the idea of a "mind" be conceived if it were treated as the unfolding of a graphite trace across space and through time? Moreover, if difference is simply a relational phenomenon as we have seen in Chapter 6, how does a graphite trace's unfolding across space and time relate to the sequence of differences that plot the itinerary of an idea since they cannot be "located in time or in space" (Bateson 1979:109) and yet they are not just represented by the trace, they exist there in the contrast between the paper and graphite marks? We tend to initially process a sketch like Edison's as a totality and then we

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break it down into individual sketches and bodies of handwriting. We might subsequently isolate the individual sketches in terms of elements related to the phonograph, cylinder, disk, and tape, stylus, waxed paper, tinfoil, paper tape, etc., as Jenkins does. We must not forget, however, that the piece of paper supports a series of lines that had precise entry and exit points of initial and final contact and that what happened between these points are local manifestations of differences, ideas — of, in other words, "mind." Where would this idea begin on a piece of paper and where would it end? Would it begin, as I have suggested, with an initial point of contact? Or would it actually emerge at the stage where a mental system becomes reflexively conscious of itself as idea in motion? How does this relate to the (explanatory) objectives and (interpretive) strategies that might govern the system? What kind of instrument could be developed that would be capable of reading and retroactively translating the spatial and temporal deployment of this kind of idea? And, finally, what about the instrument's culture of ideas — how do they relate to the ideas already archived on a piece of paper? This set of questions can serve as a backdrop to a further series of questions about the boundaries of a new technology. First, there is the compounded question of its ideational, sensual, or erotic limits as opposed to its material limits. Indeed, where are its boundaries to be drawn if one treats its physical frontier as one kind of limit and perhaps not the most significant one? If one accepts that patterns and circuits of messages are another wayJ of delimitingo a technology's form,' and that o oy this form is a latent representation of "mind" and, moreover, that its actual manifestation will depend on one's explanatory objectives and interpretive strategies, then there is the question of the kind of complex sensory world that is generated by the transforming idea of a mind and its various representations as they unfold in space and time, from two to three dimensions, and from three to four dimensions. Note that the idea's fluid shape is also a function of a range of contacts that bring into being the circuits of messages, mental systems, and fixed patterns of ideas that represent its transformation into an experimental apparatus or "machine," depending on its chosen operating environment. Where are the limits of a draughtsperson or draughtspersons to the drawn in relation to these circuits, systems, and patterns? Finally, are there other

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vistas to be discovered that might reveal unforeseen peculiarities that are concealed in the obscure confines of a technology's extended ideational network should one choose the route of incoherence and of "optically inconsistent space"? The process of drawing out the idea — of working and reworking it — is also a breeding ground for inconspicuous sounds, the ephemeral sonic images produced by the friction of contact between inscriptive or "input" devices (in the case of a computer) and archival media. What are the first sounds of the physical representation of a "mind" as it begins to take shape i through o the form of an idea? Can the emerging o o traces of this idea be mirrored as a cascade of sonic debris? What form would a history of the "ideas" of mind take if it were registered in terms of sounds: o transforms of difference in another sensory register? What kind of reproductive apparatus would be needed to transform the resulting ephemeral sonic images that are registered in the pressure and texture of a line (or a series of lines) into tangible and reproducible acoustic signifiers? How would it relate to Edison's three sketches of December 3rd, 1877? How would they relate to the proposition that the sounds of an inscriptive process — their "grains" — could also become the archive for an alternative representation of a mental system or "mind" taking its shape through the form of an idea in another sensory dimension? Like the software programs and two-dimensional pictures that they produce, there is a correspondence of identity but a disjunction in the form of the information through which this identity is encoded. What other ways are there of conceiving of new technologies which might lie beyond this o o o J parallel sonic world, but are nevertheless linked to the meeting of a pencil-like probe and piece of paper, or other similar devices and surfaces? Finally, there is another series of questions about the status of scientific and technical drawings that can be raised in relation to a o tactilo-ecologmphic logic as presented in Chapter 2. Can scientific and engineering drawings be (re)enaaaed on the basis of the ideas that they O O O