Visualizing & Representing Nature: An Understory

VISUALIZING & REPRESENTING NATURE

An Understory

Emma Helene Moriconi

VISUALIZING & REPRESENTING NATURE

An Understory

NABA Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milano

Second Level Accademic Diploma in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies

Emma Helene Moriconi

Advisor Luca Trevisani

Matriculation Number 2093AV

Academic Year 2020 – 2021

Visualizing and Representing

Nature: An Understory

I am fascinated with peeling back layers and discovering what is underneath. My paintings are a translation of these processes, a mixture of play, analysis, and a science-inspired investigation. Perceptions of nature have been shaped by historical depictions in western painting, illustrations, and drawings which were highly influenced by scientific explorations and drawings which placed “Nature” in opposition to the viewer’s gaze. The production of scientific imagery historically attempted to create objective images of life, nature, and our planet but in many cases consisted in rather unknowingly mental and philosophical drawings that created Western a priori assumptions about human nature.

We live in a world where developed tools and machinery exist, allowing us to see the microscopic foundations of life, where such tools are going beyond simple observations of life, of plant and animal anatomy but rather deeply impacting our perception of natural processes and our relation to them. As a result of technological advances, new discoveries have been made about the laws of nature, evolution, and natural selection for example. My work hopes to shed light on this relationship between some technological scientific advancements, historical scientific practices of observing, documenting, and visually analyzing nature, and how these practices have instilled mainly dualistic and distant views of nature. These practices have shaped human perceptions towards the subjects under observation as neutral, singular, and standing on their own when they must be analyzed and contextualized within natural history as a set of deep cultural practices that generate knowledge. When the means of representation change, the way an object of research looks changes as well—and thus the question is whether that implies an alteration of the object itself as well. What I am interested in is an anthropological conception of the picture and how natural-scientific imagery is not only instrumental and technical but has true epistemic agency. Rather than distant theories but as active entities that organize and regulate knowledge processes and the physical perceptual experience. Natural scientists established a literal “visual common sense”, an authoritative visual-pictorial memory of natural history where drawings not only served as visual aids in the individual scholar’s work but as a medium of exchange and communication of records between natural scientists that would transpose individual perceptions into the sphere of comparison and critique.

My hope is to instill a deeper curiosity into the context of early modern natural science image depiction as entities that are not singular and neutral elements of nature but exist within highly complex systems that benefit from new methods of visualization and exploration. I look to visual, pictoral, and artistic works to highlight in what ways the hand is trained in the interplay between seeing, depicting, and discovery.

My painting is rooted in the macro and microelements at the origins of geological and biological matter. I research human’s dependency on other life forms and processes, from microbiota bacteria to kidney stones and mineral calcification. Through studying and manipulating materials, colors, pigments, and surfaces, I reevaluate and reconsider mechanisms invisible to the human eye, but that lie beneath everyday life. My practice currently integrates traditional painting techniques with scientific inquiries. By using oils, raw and natural pigments, together with linen, jute, and wood, I explore scale, seemingly unassociated colors, and both the possibilities and limitations of the primed, bounded canvas and unprimed, organic surfaces.

To paint and create a painting means to act in relation to materials. I am in search of instruments that explore painting as something that occurs under – like a plant that places its profound roots. My painting is an act of translation rather than a figurative animation of the earth. I translate color and form, departing from scientific practices of dying and coloring specimen slides to achieve heightened microscopic visualization against the light. From investigating biological to geological phenomenon, I am interesting in distorted perspectives, the blurred line between the viewer and the object. The work acts almost like a layer of the earth’s strata or a microorganism specimen hung on the wall and under examination.

In addition, I consider a geological approach to my work by looking at the boundaries between our present ecology and the geological past. What happens when we pay particular attention to the microelements such as the minerals that build and make up our physical surroundings, landscapes, and geological terrains?

It was like a discovery: of minerals, fossils, and layers of rock stratifications to be continuously examined. I always subconsciously considered geology as something so far away from me, so impersonal and difficult to grasp and understand just how much we as humans are interconnected and overlap with the earth let alone the many other elements on this planet. Inside the human body, there are the same mineral elements found in hot springs, minerals calcifying over time in caves. Some bacteria in the human intestine that are necessary for digestion and healthy functioning gut are the same bacteria performing similar processes in earth’s soil. It’s not just us. We must understand how to live together with other living beings and elements. We cannot ignore the past that is in fact not so distant, there exists an extreme macro scale of time and space that ultimately represents the existence of our entire earth. We cannot consider microorganisms

without considering the large scale of elements and non-human beings as well. Learning and narrating their stories and timelines. Plate tectonics move and vibrate, forming mountains and oceans., bringing to the surface and into existance new and magnificent minerals, land, and rock formations.

Methdology

The images I chose to create arise from a long gestation, a process of researching scientific journals and articles based on fascinating biological and geological processes that are hidden to the human eye. Subjects that call for a heightened visualization, observation, and analysis. I am not interested in creating and depicting metaphors but compiling, making, arranging, and creating new images, a new imagination of these natural phenomena. My research, image selection, discovery and uncovering does not only inform my work but continues to lie connected to every project, like a web of knowledge and practices. It is not about simply showing a creative process, rather it is about auto-analyzing my methodology of categorizing, documenting, translating, and reinterpreting. What are the choices and connections I make in relation to a given microbial bacteria I am fixated on and another mineral element specific to the land I am standing on for example? How do I care for these elements, the network that lies beneath my work? Natural History museums have sought to display and narrate stories behind specimens and objects that seek to help humans understand the natural world. I refer to this process of collecting, categorizing, and analyzing as a means to create knowledge and further discovery. The choice of positioning certain objects and materials next to others is a powerful choice of care and curation that creates meaning through visual associations which are also based on preconceived notions. But together with placement and arrangement, the tool of vision and seeing is just as powerful in creating new meaning and associations.

My paintings explore, refer to, and recreate images of microscopic figures, elements, and forms that construct our natural landscape, our bodies, and our surroundings that we may not see with the human eye. They are imaginative and poetic but rooted in scientific, technical imagery resulting from developments in microscopy and biology that have shifted how we come to know the natural world. Visualizing and Representing Nature: An Understory is the result of a research-based artistic practice, an interdisciplinary approach to looking and uncovering diverse pictorial forms of scientific visual imagery.

After carefully analyzing the paths that have led me to my current research, position, and artistic practices, I chose to curate these connections, visual reflections, and habits by bringing attention to the customs of labeling, naming, analyzing, and categorizing the experiences of the past as survey for the future.

I tend to choose earth tones in my paintings as the natural pigments and raw colors I use come directly from the earth, deriving from a mixture of plants, seeds, or powdered stones. When working with these pigments, they are knowingly fragile, lacking preservatives and chemical ingredients as my desire is to limit myself to the use materials and colors that are not normally manipulable like concentrated acrylics and oils. I can be limited to certain color palette with natural colors that respond differently.

My process is investigative and positioned in exploring physical and biological territories, lands, and earth formations. This exploration involves studying theories and analyzing new hypotheses as I document discoveries and learnings, comparing and categorizing my studies. I link images, objects, and findings to find new meaning and challenge what I thought I knew about natural processes.

My cognitive approach directly relates to the subject under observation: through drawing forms deriving from under the partial view of the microscope, I can then analyze deeper with speculative thinking. I then become aware of my perception, my eyes, and consciousness, to focus on otherwise overlooked aspects, common and uncommon colors, forms, and shapes. I reproduce on surfaces of paper and canvas, tracing and juxtaposing this process to translate into a new, independent image that contributes to the knowledge of nature and the understanding encounters with other species, organisms, and natural materials.

I use natural history museum archives, scientific journals, and articles as a starting point for my research, where I am led to visually reinterpret natural phenomena such as symbiotic relationships between fungi and tree roots or bacteria inhabiting the human intestine. I search for highly

Emma Helene Moriconi ‘Unwinding Hyphae Filaments’ (detail) 2022. Oil on cotton, 25.5 x 25.5 cm

technical, scientific images from flattened, Petri dishes of bright, dyed, and color-stained specimens to colorless electron images that reveal greater ultrastructures of a specimen. Commonly, these microscopic images are colorized through software and graphic editing but do not in fact reveal information about the specimens. Therefore, the images I am interested in are frequently neutral and grayscale images that I then expand through the intervention of color and paint. This collection of images is growing as I continue to juxtapose, compare, and contrast images to find new relations and associations. Advances in technological instruments have led to the revealing of many landscapes but microscopes are nevertheless narrow and fragmented image sections. I am drawn to images that call for a greater survey, sprawling beyond the limits of a petri dish or the lens and these are the micro-worlds I focus on.

Visualizing and Representing Nature: An Understory is a project, a research, and a story, that focuses on not only coming into contact with these microworlds but on the act of examining and preserving them as highlighted in the work Encountering New Field Specimen (A Collection). The desire to preserve objects of nature that aroused a special interest or possessed some level of power is presumed to be one of man’s earliest instincts. However, ancient peoples lacked the knowledge of satisfactory means of preserving perishable natural objects. It is only with the establishment of natural history museums in the 18th-19th centuries that there was an active acquisition of specimens focused on the exhibition of materials. With the foundation of the Smithsonian Institution in 1857, specimens were initially collected solely to serve as materials for research, description, and theory, and not made to exhibit to the public. The museum collections were only later exhibited to the public and valued as educational tools. These processes and by the mere necessity for the orderly arrangement of museum material, civilization, species existence, and extinction has been documented and greatly contributed to the knowledge of nature and natural phenomena.

Rather than a traditional arrangement of objects alongside one another to determine and distinguish a specific species or specimen, I am interested in new relationships and groupings. I have selected drawings, images, and objects that belong to different moments and elements of my cognitive approach: drawings forms, becoming aware of vision and perception and reproducing or translating new understandings of nature. The stones were collected as direct objects under observation while researching the geological point in the area of the Biella Alps: the Insubric Line or “seam” at the level of the Earth’s surface that was created as a result of the clash between the European and African tectonic plate and marking the current boundary between the Eurasian and Adriatic plate. This macro process is placed next to drawings of specific forms and shapes of the micro-world and network of cross-species entanglements between fungi strands (hyphae) that penetrate plant root cells and tissues to provide and transport nutrients. The stones are then drawn on paper and positioned together with a technical,

electron microscopic image of strong and indestructible hyphae that branch and fuse repeatedly, building a network of mycelium that connects plants together and is responsible for transferring nutrients and minerals. The colored microscopic print of volcanic rock, originating from the area between the southern Alps of the Luganese Porphyry-district in the Varese province, depicts a stratification of the volcano-sedimentary basins that formed during the Early Permian geological period. The macroscopic appearance on a fresh fracture of this rock resembles that of obsidian: it shows a lustrous black color and to the naked eye it is difficult to detect the phenocrysts. Only with heightened lens investigation, many prismatic crystals of feldspar and olivines are observed. And only with a heightened visualizing techniques and lenses we can detect the details of the marine species zoea of squilla perseved on an antique lantern slide.

The vegetable fossils, a once alive and plant matter, were never assimilated and broken down. As part of a larger series that explores the plant food as a layer and stratification in connection to the greater landscape, the zucchini is no longer considered as nutrients for humans but rather a vegetable matter that is permanently fixed in time.

My paintings become something of their own that exists in their own form but with the curation of these materials sheds light on a research-based approach to my work that is connected deeply to my final pictorial works. These processes are carefully curated together, one-by-one, and side by side, as they are a web and linkage of knowledge, information, and energy that support one another, hence, curating understories. While placed under observation and inspection, the aim is to recognize the overlapping temporalities and processes. As the practice of archiving, categorization, and exhibition of natural materials and specimens is historically and currently still used as a tool for the generation of knowledge, the bringing together of these seemingly uncorrelated objects, subjects, and materials call for a new vision on how we come to know the natural world. By nurturing new encounters with these material formations, alternative to traditional teaching methods on scientific and technical images, I am giving space to ongoing research that is rooted in continuing the search for new visions, ways of seeing and knowing such biological and geological processes. I hope to instill inquiry, provide new perspectives, and considerations on how we have been taught to relate to the natural world, evoking physical relationships with this micro-world, the exchange of ideas, and the assembly of a new pictorial form.

Emma Helene Moriconi ‘Inside Fruiting Bodies’ 2022. Oil on jute, 30 x 40 cm

Emma Helene Moriconi ‘Unwinding Hyphae Filaments’ 2022. Oil on cotton, 25.5 x 25.5 cm

Emma Helene Moriconi ‘Blue Whispers’ 2022. Oil on cotton, 25.5 x 25.5 cm

Emma Helene Moriconi ‘The Survivors’ 2022 Oil on linen, 100 x 100 cm

Emma Helene Moriconi ‘Lying Below’ 2022 Oil on linen, 100 x 100 cm

Emma Helene Moriconi ‘Encountering New Field Specimen (A Collection)’ 2022. Graphite, ink, tracing paper, rock, zucchini, acrylic, injket print, antique microscopic lantern slide, 60 x 40 cm (each)

Emma Helene Moriconi ‘Encountering New Field Specimen (A Collection)’ 2022. Graphite, ink, tracing paper, rock, zucchini, acrylic, injket print, antique microscopic lantern slide, 60 x 40 cm (each)

Claes Oldenburg, Glass Case with Pies (Assorted Pies in a Case), 1962, burlap soaked in plaster, painted with enamel, with pie tins, in glass-andmetal case, 47.6 x 31.1 x 27.6 cm (18 3/4 x 12 1/4 x 10 7/8 in.)

Marcel Duchamp, ‘Boîte-enValise’ 1941. Leather valise containing miniature replicas and color reproductions of works by Duchamp, and one photograph with graphite, watercolor, and ink additions.

40.7 x 37.2 x 10.1 cm. Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York) © Association Marcel Duchamp, by SIAE 2020

Eva Hesse, Untitled, 1968, Glass-and-metal case, 6 objects (mixed media) 37 x 25.5 x 27 cm, © The Estate of Eva Hesse, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, Photo: Abby Robinson

Eva Hesse, ‘Case II’ 1968. Mixed Media, 37.1 x 26 x 26 cm. Photo Courtesy Attilio Maranzano and Fondazione Prada.

Joseph Cornell, ‘L’Égypte de Mlle Cléo de Mérode: cours elémentaire d’histoire naturelle, 1940.

Joseph Cornell, ‘Suzy’s Sun (for Judy Tyler), 1957. 27 x 38 x 10 cm

Installation views of the exhibition, “Joseph Cornell” November 11, 1980 – January 20, 1981. Photographic Archive. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. IN1297.19. Photograph by Mali Olatunji.

Installation views of the exhibition “The Flea Market and other Object Lessons” by Mark Dion, May 28 2021August 27 2021, Georg Kargl Fine Arts. Courtesy of Georg Kargl Gallery

Installation views of the exhibition “The Pursuit of Sir William Hamilton” At Fondazione Morra Greco. 2013-2014. Image Courtesy Fondazione Morra Greco, Napoli. © Amedeo Benestante

Historical Documentation: Identifying Earth’s Landscape and Species

A Brief History of Botanical Art

Botanical illustration dates back much further than the invention of photography as it was the only way to visually record plant life species. In botanical illustration and plant illustration, the focus is placed on the scientific record and botanical accuracy to enable the plant’s accurate identification. Conventional botanical illustrations are made from live plants and herbarium specimens, and they depict all of the relevant aspects of a plant such as form, life cycle, and dissections. Today, science books are filled with highly detailed photographs and images produced by the advanced technology of macro lenses and microscopes. However, prior to these technological advances, the artists who produced these images required much technical horticultural knowledge as well, drawing by hand almost all botanical illustrations initially monochromatically in pen and ink.

The illustrations themselves were historically used by physicians, pharmacists, botanical scientists, and gardeners for identification, analysis, and classification. Given technological advances in scientific machinery, these works are not considered very relevant for scientists and research today. However, not only can they be a contemporary inspiration for artists today, they shed light on the ways in which living organisms, plant, and animal life were systematically identified and classified through scientific exploration carried out across the globe.

The earliest portrayals of plants and trees were found in Mesopotamia and Egypt about four thousand years ago, where highly developed agricultural civilizations included images of plants and other motifs on the walls of their temples and tombs. Later, in Cretan, Greek, and Roman Art, figures of plants and trees were used to decorate ceramics or coins with greater or lesser degrees of realism. Aristotle (384 - 322 BCE) and Theophrastus (c. 370 - 285 BCE) were the first to study the medicinal properties of plants systematically.

Although no manuscripts of classical times, from the 5th and 4th century have survived, we know that they existed because Pliny the Elder (c. 23 - 79 CE), himself an important recorder of a vast amount of material relating to botany, mentions colored illustrations in herbals. Pliny refers to Krateuas in particular, a Greek physician of the first century BC, who is widely considered to be the father of botanical illustration. The oldest surviving illustrated manuscript, the Codex Vindebonensis, dates from 512 CE and is in the National Library of Vienna. It is a magnificent example of how

botanical art shows such a high standard in plant drawing, and this was not surpassed for almost a thousand years. The work is mainly a copy of Pedanius Dioscorides’ important manuscript De Materia Medica (50 – 70 CE) and the illustrations in this Codex are thought to be copies mostly after drawings from the works of Krateuas, and are exceptional for their naturalism. The early and influential work of the Latin herbal of Apuleius Platonicus, contained medical formulas assembled from Greek sources around 400 CE. The original is lost but the earliest known copy, at Leiden, dates from the seventh century. The drawings, copies after their Roman examples, are already showing signs of decline. The Codex Vindebonensis, the Apuleius Herbal and the De Materia Medica by Pedanius Dioscorides, translated into Latin in the sixth century, were the main works of botanical knowledge for the coming centuries, copied and recopied but with mostly poor results throughout the Dark Ages and Middle Ages.1

Pedanius Dioscorides, (c. CE 40, Anazarbus, Cilicia - c. 90) was Greek physician, botanist, and pharmacologist of the Roman army whose work De Materia Medica, said to be written around the year 77 CE, was the foremost classical source of modern botanical terminology and the leading pharmacological text for 16 centuries. Dioscorides’ travels as a surgeon with the armies of the Roman emperor Nero provided him an opportunity to study the features, distribution, and medicinal properties of many plants and minerals, discussing the characteristics of each plant, its habitat and its use in the manuscript.

1 Jutta Buck, “A Brief History of Botanical Art” in The Botanical Artist, 15, no. 1 (2009): 16-28.

Gaius Plinius Secundus “Pliny the Elder” 23/24-79 BCE. Book published Venice, J. Spira, 1469.

Gaius Plinius Secundus “Pliny the Elder” 23/24-79 BCE. Book published Venice, J. Spira, 1469.

Dioscorides Pedanius, “De Materia Medica” Libri Sex. Apud Gulielmum Rouillium, 1554, first edition printed in Venice, Italy 1553`

Historical Documentation: Identifying Earth’s Landscape and Species

The Herbal of Pseudo Apuleus. Circa 550 CE to 625 CE .

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Folio from the “De Materia Medica” by Dioscorides in Arabic, 13th century, Iraq, opaque watercolor on paper. Swietochowski, Marie, and Richard Ettinghausen. “Islamic Painting.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s., vol. 36, no. 2 (Autumn 1978). pp. 4–5, ill. p. 4 (b/w).

Inscription in Arabic: Thamt: It may...from the aqwanitun and some people call it the killer of the wolf. It grows abundantly in the lands called Italy in the mountains which are called Awayestina. It has leaves similar to that of a plant which is called Ghutaris and twisted branches about an armslength long or a little longer. And it has fruits within elongated pods and black roots similar to the feet of al-arbiyan (or al-armiyan). It is used to kill flies for if it is placed in raw meat and flies eat the meat they are killed. (Translated by Y. al Taba, 1978), The Met Collection, “Folio from the De Materia Medica of Dioscorides”

The naturalistic illustrations of Greek herbals served as models for Islamic artists, who simplified the plants and made them more symmetrical than their prototypes, in accordance with Islamic taste for ornamental design. Dioscorides had a large influence on Arabic medicine and medical practices. De Materia Medica was one of the first scientific works to be translated from Greek into Arabic and was translated first into Syriac and then into Arabic in 9th century Baghdad. 2

Dioscorides Pedanius, “De Materia Medica” Libri Sex. Apud Gulielmum Rouillium, 1554, first edition printed in Venice, Italy 1553`

The deeper historians dig into the past, the more examples they find of how differently scientists, humanists, or engineers have employed notes, drawings, photographs, and other media to understand the world and to circulate information. As late as the 18th century and the age of industrialization, different forms of illustration (from chronological and topological, to diagrammatic and sequential) made it possible to envision mental processes, geological deep time, or long-term evolutionary development. These radically new techniques of visualization and display led to vast 19th-century photographic archives and standardization of formats and terminologies which today are considered extremely successful modern inventions.

The 18th century also saw many advances in the printing processes, allowing colors and details of drawings to appear even more accurate on paper, and interest in botanical publications increased. Knowledge is communicated by images, but how can illustrations, patterns, legends, and photographs stand for a piece of information, intelligence, and evidence? Visual knowledge is a cultural and historical product shaped by social expectations and the views of specialists as well as by the design tools applied, as there are conceptualization constraints. It is important to recognize that scientific images are not translations of a given meaning, not simply aesthetically appealing but they are complex insights that emerge from and during the process of observation.

With growing global expeditions, physiologists, astronomers, and artists experimented with all kinds of lenses, chemicals, colloids, and printing procedures to record natural phenomena or to observe and preserve compounds and specimens. These new imaging technologies thus called for new efforts in visual documentation at the phase of industrialization and European expansion. The ways in which researchers, explorers and scientist would produce and employ images, played a profound role in changing the way the world was visually represented and ultimately shaping the ways in which natural processes and scientific phenomena are perceived and understood.

Mandrake (gr. ΜΑΝΔΡΑΓΟΡΑ, in capital letters). Folio 90 from “De Materia Medica” Naples, Biblioteca Nazionale, Cod. Gr. 1.

3 Eleanor Jones Harvey specifically discusses how Humboldt had almost an unprecedented quest to understand the universe, a concern for climate change, a taxonomic curiosity centered on New World species of flora and fauna, and a belief that the arts were as important as the sciences for conveying a sense of wonder in the interlocking aspects of the planet. Alexander von Humboldt’s quests and ties to both the arts and sciences illuminated some of the central issues of human’s relationship with nature and notions of responsibility and stewardship of the planet.

See E. J. Harvey. Alexander Von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, & Culture. United States: Princeton University Press, 2020.

A Model for Inspiring Scientific Observation, Exploration and Imagemaking: Alexander von Humboldt.

Alexander von Humboldt (1769 Prussia – 1859 Berlin), was a German naturalist and explorer who was a significant influential figure in the classical period of physical geography and biogeography which are today areas included in the Earth sciences and ecology. Humboldt’s scientific contributions came to span topics within geophysics, botany, anthropology, ecology, biogeography, economic geography, oceanography, physiology, ethnography, history, astronomy, climatology, and meteorology. His ability to work between and within so many disciplines may have aided in his understanding of nature, and the entirety of the universe, as interconnected and essentially singular.

With a background in mineralogy and geology, Humboldt left his position as an official in the Mining Department for the Prussian government in order to pursue scientific exploration, botanical geography, biogeography, and advocating for long-term systematic geophysical measurements. He was given permission by King Carlos IV of Spain, to visit the Spanish colonies in Central and South America and alongside French botanist, Aimé Bonpland from 1977 to 1804 the two traveled more than 6,000 miles (9,650 km) and upon their return to Europe would acquire worldwide acknowledgment for pioneering research.

They collected 5,800 species of plants, 3,600 of which were entirely new to Europeans and mapped over 17,000 miles of the Orinco River. They traversed the llanos and paddled wild rivers in a forty-foot canoe filled with twelve men, monkeys, a mastiff, and the most advanced scientific equipment of the day, including chronometers, barometers, telescopes, thermometers, eudiometers, compasses, sextants, magnetometers, and dipping needles. This commitment to quantitative methodology would become known as “Humboldtian science”, as Humboldt was so deeply committed to using accurate measurements with the finest and most modern instruments and techniques. Humboldt and Bonpland would return to Europe with a vast collection of new plants, determinations of longitudes and latitudes, measurements of the components of Earth’s geomagnetic field, and daily observations of temperatures and barometric pressure, as well as statistical data on the social and economic conditions of Mexico. 3

A Model for Inspiring Scientific Observation, Exploration and Imagemaking: Alexander von Humboldt

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In a letter dated June 5, 1799, Humboldt wrote to Karl Ehrenbert von Moll. Quoted from Karl Bruhns, in “Alexander von Humboldt: Eine wissenschftliche Biographie” (Osnabrück: Zeller, 1969, based on the1872 edition) p. 274.

By amassing and comparing this kind of data, Humboldt refined his theory that everything on the planet was interrelated. His idea of the unity of nature —that plants, animals, and climate are related in ecosystems—is widely accepted today, but was a radical concept when Humboldt first began writing about it. See Bonpland, Aimé, Humboldt, Alexander von. “Essay on the Geography of Plants” Edited by Stephen T. Jackson and Translated by Sylvie Romanowski. (Ukraine: University of Chicago Press), 2010.

“I shall collect plants and fossils and make astronomic observations with excellent instruments. I will conduct chemical analyses of the atmosphere…But all that is not the main purpose of my expedition; above all, I will observe the interaction of forces and the influence of the inanimate environment on plant and animal life. My eyes will constantly focus on this harmony”. 4

In 1805 Humboldt and Bonpland published Essai sur la géographie des plantes, considered the foundation of plant biogeography. This plant geography map, which Humboldt called his Naturgemälde or “picture of nature.” It combines illusionistic watercolor with a cutaway diagram labeled with the plants he and Bonpland observed in South America, shown at the altitudes where they found them. This map affirmed his belief that the distribution of plants around the globe could be correlated based on altitude and the rock underneath. 5

Alexander von Humboldt’s new ideas became widely accepted as what we know about the planet and due to his holistic thinking about nature and for introducing nature and world cultures to diverse audiences between the 1820s and 1850s, he was a widely internationally admired public figure.

the creeper bejuco de ayahuasca from Moyobamba (Viceroyalty of Peru), 1802. Ink on paper, 307 x 206 mm, Diagry VIIbb & VIIc, p. 180, 107 v.

A Model for Inspiring Scientific Observation, Exploration and Imagemaking: Alexander von Humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt. Electric eel profile, 1799. Ink and pencil on paper.

Alexander von Humboldt, Fruit of

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6 Humboldt’s studies on the interactions of plants with one another and their relationships to their physical environment also established him as a pioneer in ecology, although his contributions to this biological discipline, (which was not formally designated until 1866) are often not fully recognized. He anticipated what James E. Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1970s hypothesized as Gaia and sought to connect this equilibrium with an aesthetic appreciation similar to the romantic tradition, as discussed by Eleanor Jones Harvey, in Alexander Von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, & Culture. United States: Princeton University Press, 2020.

He contrasted his undertaking with traditional botanical research, which primarily focused on classifying plants based on their structural attributes and which he considered a critical first step in interpreting patterns of plant distribution.6 Among his many scientific achievements, Humboldt also theorized the spreading of the continental landmasses through plate tectonics, mapped the distribution of plants on three continents, and charted the way air and water movement to create bands of climate at different latitudes and altitudes. He tracked what became known as the Humboldt Current in the Pacific Ocean and created what he called isotherms to chart mean temperatures around the globe. He observed the relationship between deforestation and changes in local climate, located the magnetic equator, and found in the geological strata fossil remains of both plants and animals that he understood to be precursors to modern life forms, acknowledging extinction before many others.

See Eleanor Jones Harvey, “Alexander Von Humboldt and the United States” and Anna Maria Gillis. Humboldt in the New World: Journeying through South America, Alexander von Humboldt sought nothing less than “the unity of nature.”

HUMANITIES, Nov/Dec 2012, Volume 33, Number 6.

Consistent with the precepts of Enlightenment, Humboldt believed that the study of nature required observation and experimentation. He obtained the best instruments available at the time for taking measurements and believed that a wealth of such data would reveal nature as a dynamic equilibrium and the interconnectedness of physical forces. Humboldt believed that feeling and intellect were complementary ways of understanding nature as feeling would provide motivation and inspiration for scientific explorations and the earth’s natural phenomena, whereas knowledge and intellect gained from these explorations and research allowed for observers to have a heightened appreciation of natures “beauty” and finally be able to truly “see” the world.7

Humboldt died at 89, traveled on 4 continents, wrote more than 36 books and 25,000 letters to a network of correspondents around the globe. Humboldt’s publications and Cosmos, in particular, inspired many scientists and naturalists, including Charles Darwin, John Muir, George Perkins Marsh, Ernst Haeckel, Ida Laura Pfeiffer. A number of 19th Century artists traveled to Latin America, following in the footsteps of Humboldt, painting landscapes and scenes of everyday life. Charles Darwin idolized Humboldt, whose encouragement contributed to Darwin’s developing theories regarding the evolution of species.

8 Alexander von Humboldt, “Aspects of Nature: In Different Lands and Different Climates; with Scientific Elucidations”. United Kingdom: Lea and Blanchard, 1850, 244.

“It would be an enterprise worthy of a great artist to study the aspect and character of all these vegetable groups, not merely to hothouses or in the descriptions of botanists, but in their native grandeur in the tropical zone. How interesting and instructive to the landscape painter would be a work which should present to the eye, first separately, and then in combination and contrast, the leading forms which have been here enumerated!”8

Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, ‘Géographie des plantes Équinoxiales: Tableau physique des Andes et Pays voisins’, from “Essai sur la géographie des plantes” 1805. Handcolored print, 24 x 36 in. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, © Copyright The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

A Model for Inspiring Scientific Observation, Exploration and Imagemaking: Alexander von Humboldt

A Model for Inspiring Scientific Observation, Exploration and Imagemaking:

Alexander von Humboldt

Alexander von Humboldt, Topographic sketch of the volcano Pichincha, Three of the Nine American Diaries, 1799-1804.

Alexander von Humboldt, Sketch of the Orinoco Region, Three of the Nine American Diaries, 1799-1804.

Illustration from “Atlas zu Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos” Stuttgart, 1861.

The Technical Image and Visualizing the World: Scientific and Artistic Imagery

Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, there was an increased interest in acquiring knowledge of the natural world, as exploration and expansion of The New World lead scientists, explorers, and anthropologists to discover the unfamiliar, the unknown. Humboldt was one of many scientists sent on expeditions across seas, to study new species, resulting in a much greater production of illustrations and documents that depicted newly discovered animals, plants, and environments. In the 17th century, with colonial expansion, European explorers were eager to collect these specimens, instruments, and objects from around the world that were to become known as cabinets of curiosities, with traditionally a heightened attention to the boundaries of the natural and artificial world. Naturally, this interest would encourage an increase in a variety of types of illustration and ark making and therefore during this period, botanical illustration would see a revival. Specifically, with the development of the microscope in the 1590s, scientific illustration became much more prominent. Without photography, the only way for one to document what was seen under the microscope was through a highly detailed illustration. Scientists would become dedicated to researching, documenting, and depicting their explorations of the nature of The New World under the microscope up until the 19th century.

With the development of the microscope, as well as the telescope and instruments used to aid visualization beyond the human eye’s capacity have profoundly contributed to a pictorial tradition that merges and explores both science and art.

Knowledge of the Microcosm and the Contribution of a Pictorial Tradition

Knowledge of the Microcosm and the Contribution of a Pictorial Tradition

Le Voyage Dans la Lune (Trip to the Moon) 1902, by Georges Méliès’ is considered to be the first science fiction film in cinematic history. The 12 minute film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannonpropelled capsule, explore the Moon’s surface, escape from an underground group of native moon inhabitants (known as Selenites), and return to Earth with one of them as captive. While at once a spoof of more serious science fiction, the film can also be seen as a comment on France’s colonial exploits (it was at the time the world’s second largest colonial power). The mute film also calls on a scientific imagination of the moon that goes beyond the pictorial description of what the human eye can see.

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was seen by many as the hero of modern science from the seventeenth century and beyond. He has always played a key role in any history of science, as well as many histories of philosophy, most importantly with his astounding celestial telescopic discoveries and observations of the moon, the moons of Jupiter, the phases of Venus, and the rings of Saturn. Galileo believed that one must not base their work on writings and theories but on experiments and observations. He invented an early microscope and a predecessor to the thermometer and thus is a central figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century. He helped create and establish mathematical physics by calculating the law of free fall, conceived of an inertial principle, determined the parabolic trajectory of projectiles, and advocated the relativity of motion. He is thought to be one of the first “real” experimental scientists: he dropped stones from towers and ships’ masts, experimented with magnets, clocks, and pendulums.

His advocacy and popularization of Copernicanism would result in many debates and his condemnation by the Catholic Inquisition. This scrutiny prohibited the publishing of many writings due to the text’s favor of Copernican heliocentrism. 9 Galileo’s trials with the Roman Church in addition to his work in physics (or “natural philosophy”), astronomy, and the methodology of science still evoke debate after more than 400 years.

9 Copernican heliocentrism is an astronomical model developed by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543. This model was under scrutiny by Church authorities as it positioned the motionless Sun at the center of the Universe with Earth and other planets orbiting around it in circular paths, modified by epicycles, and at uniform speeds.

German art historian Horst Bredekamp provides a historical foundation for a special ability of art in the case of Galileo, in that his artistically molded forms of thinking and presentation were among the preconditions of his research.

While German-Jewish art historian Erwin Panofsky claims that the less aesthetic convictions are made conscious, the more they determine one’s view of the world, Bredekamp on the other hand questions Galileo’s conceptual condensation and execution that is carried out in draftsmanship: each drawing motion is able to decide on and influence the character of whole cosmologies.

In Galileo’s Thinking Hand. Mannerism, Anti-Mannerism and the Virtue of Drawing in the Foundation of Early Modern Science (2019), Bredekamp explores Galileo’s thinking hand: a historical core component of the philosophy of embodiment that involved the moving and shaping body, its limbs as indispensable organs of thought and parts of consciousness. Galileo’s literal drawing and acting hand not only reproduced but also

The Moon of Galileo Galilei

10

While Bredekamp addresses the impact of images fashioned by Galileo, the relevance of intellectual, material, and temporal constraints on their production, and the weight of artistic precedents and practices, his central preoccupation is with what the astronomer himself leanred about distant objects in drawing and redrawing them over time. See Bredekamp, H.: Forward, in Galileo’s Thinking Hand: Mannerism, Anti-Mannerism and the Virtue of Drawing in the Foundation of Early Modern Science. Germany: De Gruyter, 2019.

enabled and impelled his research. Bredekamp foregrounds Galileo’s sense of disegno: an abstract intention-driven concept combined with the proving grounds of relentless artistic activity.

“Galileo was always aware that pictures do not passively reproduce, but have a constructive power: they create what they depict. This is why he did not regard the drawing as a mirror, but as part of the penetrating analysis of what is visible. Galileo thought by drawing. He offers an outstanding historical example of the principle that design possesses an intellectual status of its own, especially in the natural sciences. This, he is a distant protagonist of the philosophy of embodiment that attributes power to the picture in the interplay among thinking, seeing, and acting”.10

In Galileo’s first report on his successes in building a telescope, he highlighted in 1609 that it must be based on the science of perspective, as he thought about the telescope’s implementation. Galileo gave theoretical value to his crafting and experimental activities: he was not only able to produce the telescope practically, but he also provided its theoretical foundation.

Galileo had learned about the laws of perspective by Leon Battista Alberti, understanding optical appearances as functions of three-dimensional phenomena that are based on the visual pyramid.

By 1610, Galileo would begin working on a telescope with a magnifying power of 20: an astonishing creation that was also met with difficulties such as its sensitivity to the user’s breath, movement, and trembling of the hand. His etchings and drawings resulting from his moon observations were rapid products that did not permit the elimination of even the most glaring weaknesses. Galileo had professional experience working in metal: he produced military compasses, he incised its lines, scales, numerals, and letters himself as his etchings and depictions of the moon also required a draftsman ability. As products of Galileo’s hand-drawn with a needle into a layer of wax, they align with the style of his pen-and-ink drawings, as a graphological study of Galileo’s personality and character. They display a craftsman’s skill and precision, but also impatience and an almost playful approach to his observations. Acting here is a scientific researcher for whom the artistic means of knowledge and forms of depiction were part of his own activity. With the etching needle, he was able to carry out his metamorphoses of the real phenomena like a draftsman, thereby accentuating their essence.

The initial Florentine Drawings, drawings of the moon by Galileo included in his letter from January 7th, 1610, in which he described for the first time his observations of the moon through the tube of his telescope, are relatively newly incorporated in studying the maestro. The seven small sepia drawings, each of a phase of the whole moon, are still preserved on two sides of a single sheet of artists’ water-color paper. Galileo dedicated his most extraordinary discovery, Jupiter’s four moons, to the House of Medici by calling them “medicea siderea” or “Medici stars”. The small book also caused a sensation on account of the engravings it contained showing the Moon’s uneven surface.

Analyzing Galileo’s drawings, it is clear the cause and effect between the practice of Italian Renaissance art and the development of modern experimental science. Late 16th Century Florence gave Galileo his intellectual nurture and the Medici grand dukes became Galileo’s patrons. In 1613 Galileo would join the extremely prestigious “Accademia del Disegno”, founded in 1562 by Giorgio Vasari under the Grand Duke Cosimo I, as an academy functioning as an association of intellectuals rather than of mere artisans, fostering higher social status. For Vasari, drawing meant composition, perspective, chiaroscuro, and focusing on Euclidian geometry.

Galileo’s moon drawings highlight his skill in the manipulation of ink washed, the rendering of the chiaroscuro effect, and would be reproduced as engravings in his book Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger), published in March 1610, six months after his first telescopic observation of the moon.

Galileo Galilei, ‘Sunspots’ Illustration from Galileo’s “Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti” (History and Demonstrations Concerning Sunspots and Their Properties or Letters on Sunspots), 1613.

In the etchings in the Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo justified the principle of compilation with the aim of analytical clarification, which corresponds to the “pretty pictures” of astronomy – like those distributed as images claimed to be captured directly by the Hubble Space Telescope. By shedding the imaginative aspects of the etchings, the Florentine drawings develop astronomy’s second, cartographic principle of visualization, which aims solely at what is given. The drawings reveal a much more “painterly” moon than to the published engravings, as in fact, most historians of science have studied only the engravings, which by virtue of their hard and linear technique tend to make Galileo’s moon look like the arid and lifeless body that modern science now knows it to be. However, the wash drawings show that Galileo still regarded the moon in the medieval “watery” spirit, with deft brushstrokes of at least 6 different grades of washes resulting in an image of a soft luminescent quality.11

More is at play that a pure repetition of what Galileo saw through his telescope. In a letter of March 19, 1610, Galileo had written that in his new series of drawings, he wanted to imitate the moon to a hair. This corresponds to the imitari of the Sidereus Nuncius and the doctrine of the creative content of “imitation” associated with this verb. This was true of etchings and the Florentine drawings. By “imitating” the breathtaking world that opened up to the gaze through the telescope, the beauty of the moon in its theater of light, which arose especially through the openings of the craters, Galileo employed his skill with brush and paint to embody the concept of beauty that he associated with the nature of the moon. All the

evidence permits the conclusion that this was the point of the five Florentine drawings that circle Moon 5 on Folio 28r. They stand for a concept that does not view imitation as having a secondary status, but as being a reproduction of the essence of what is depicted.

It is not preposterous to claim that these simple yet highly professional drawings belong as much to the history of art as they do to science. No other comparable art work exists that is attributable to Galileo’s hand. In the true spirit of the Accademia, Galileo did not engage in art for the sake of self-expression but rather in drawing for the sake of visual discipline. Disegno for him was a tool to train his eye and hand and not merely a means to making a pretty picture.

His efforts and telescopic discoveries opened the eyes of Europeans everywhere as Sidereus Nuncius offered a look into the foundation of the Italian Renaissance ways of seeing and the landscaped moon and “perspective glass” became frequent metaphors in the writings of many.

Leon Battista Alberti’s Visual Pyramid in his book ‘Della Pittura’ 1435.

Edgerton, Samuel Y. “Galileo, Florentine ‘Disegno,’ and the ‘Strange Spottednesse’ of the Moon.” Art Journal, vol. 44, no. 3, [Taylor & Francis, Ltd., College Art Association], 1984, pp. 225–232.

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

“Sidereus Nuncius” Venice, 1610. Courtesy Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. Post. 110, pp. 8-9

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

Drawings of the Moon, November-December

1609. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Ms. Gal. 48, f. 28r. Galileo produced this extremely famous set of six watercolours of the Moon in its various phases “from life”, as he observed the Earth’s satellite through a telescope in the autumn of 1609. They represent the first realistic depiction of the Moon in history.

The Moon of Galileo Galilei

12 See “Watered Silks, or Stuffs” in Hooke, Robert, and Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection. Micrographia: or, Some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses. With observations and inquiries thereupon. London: Printed by J. Martyn and J. Allestry, 1665, on the crudeness of man-made objects compared to natural objects.

“There are but few Artificial things that are worth observing with a Microscope; and therefore I shall speak but briefly concerning them. For the Productions of art are such rude mis-shapen things, that when view’d with a Microscope, there is little else observable, but their deformity.”12

13

Robert Hooke (1635-1703) was an English physicist who discovered the law of elasticity and was one of the first men to build a Gregorian reflecting telescope in 1664 and first suggested that Jupiter rotates on its axis. His detailed sketches of Mars were used in the 19th century to determine that planet’s rate of rotation.

Micrographia was published in 1665 and included Hooke’s observations following the development and improvement of the microscope including studies, illustrations, and small drawings from the crystal structure of snowflakes to the possibility of manufacturing artificial fibers like the process of silkworm spinning, to details on feathers, stingers of a bee, and would coin the word “cell” while naming the microscopic honeycomb cavities in cork. His description of similar structures led to theorizing on the transport of substances through the plant as well as his studies of microscopic fossils would make him one of the first proponents of a theory of evolution.

On the authenticity of microscopists and detailed scientific drawings, see Stefan Ditzen, “InstrumentAided Vision and the Imagination: The Migration of Worms and Dragons in Early Microscopy” in The Technical Image: A History of Styles and Scientific Imagery, Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)

The microscope had been invented around 1590. Hooke’s was a ‘compound’ microscope that used a second lens to magnify the image of the first to achieve a higher level of magnification than previous models, which had only one lens and which had been rather like a very powerful magnifying glass. As a trained artist, Hooke’s illustrations in Micrographia were of such quality that they came to constitute the standard for all later microscopists. Microscopists that doubted their own observations and drawings, due to the defects of their own equipment or inferior graphic skills, they would not only rely on Hooke’s images but copy them.13

From the Telescopic ‘Perspective Tube’ to Micrographia: Robert Hooke

From the Telescopic ‘Perspective Tube’ to Micrographia: Robert Hooke.

Visual images are now a ubiquitous method of scientific communication, but this tradition of visual communication in science dates back to Hooke’s Micrographia. The publication was shocking for its first audience at the time. Familiar objects such as nettle leaves, needles, and lice were transformed into extraordinary objects Hooke’s drawings and beautiful engravings. His vivid prose was also easy to understand compared to previous scientific writings. Hooke used everyday language for objects that had never been described before, to charming effect.

“The next care to be taken, in respect of the Senses, is a supplying of their infirmities with Instruments, and, as it were, the adding of artificial Organs to the natural; this in one of them has been of late years accomplished with prodigious benefit to all sorts of useful knowledge, by the invention of Optical Glasses. By the means of Telescopes, there is nothing so far distant but may be represented to our view; and by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding. By this means the Heavens are open’d, and a vast number of new Stars, and new Motions, and new Productions appear in them, to which all the ancient Astronomers were utterly Strangers. By this the Earth itself, which lyes so neer us, under our feet, shews quite a new thing to us, and in every little particle of its matter; we now behold almost as great a variety of Creatures, as we were able before to reckon up in the whole Universe it self.”14

Hooke

Robert Hooke, Micrographia, 1635-1703. London, 1665. Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Magl. 1.5.187, pl. 2, p. 241. This is the first representation of a limited area on the Moon’s surface: the crater known as Hipparchus, which Hooke portrayed in an admirably realistic manner, pointing up the limits of earlier cartography

14 Robert Hooke and Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection. Micrographia: or, Some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses. With observations and inquiries thereupon. London: Printed by J. Martyn and J. Allestry, 1665, preface.

From the Telescopic ‘Perspective Tube’ to Micrographia: Robert Hooke

Robert Hooke, Cork Cell Structure and Sprig of a Plant in “Micrographia” 1665.

Robert Hooke, ‘A female gnat’, from Micrographia 1665.

In the 82 illustrated plates included in his 1680 book The Anatomy of Plants, the English botanist Nehemiah Grew revealed for the first time the inner structure and function of plants in all their splendorous intricacy. Like Robert Hooke, Grew utilized the microscope for his investigations into plant anatomy and morphology. Along with Marcello Malphigi, Grew is remembered for his pioneering “mechanist” vision in relation to the floral world and establishing the observational basis for botany for the next 100 years. See N. Grew, The Anatomy of Plants: With an Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants: and Several Other Lectures Read Before the Royal Society. (1682)

Nehemiah Grew, Illustrative plate from The Anatomy of Plants, 1682.

Nehemiah Grew, ‘The Comparative Anatomy of Trunks, 1675.

Nehemiah Grew, “Illustrative plates from The Anatomy of Plants” (1682).

Early Microscopy and Image Visibility

With the emergence of microscopy, there was concern, however, about the quality of equipment, the capacity of lenses, as the instruments were not subject to any standardized constructions and subject to human error. Thus, each microscope was unique and offered different previews of the microcosm and as a result also made it difficult to compare observations, build consensus and agreement. Microscopic imagery emerges and develops in the relationship between what the instrument allows the microscopist to see, and what he is willing and trying to see, guided by theory. Imagery is a factor that shapes the process of perception. Microscopists would resort to information and representations of the subject under examination provided by other microscopists to gain a certain level of confidence in producing an image of what they were looking at. Such as was the case with microscopists that studyed Robert Hooke’s work.

The study of historical diagrams of microscopy suggests that the scholar’s gaze through the instrument is affected by previous traditions and prior visual information. Such technical and scientific images, however, played a significant role in generating interest in the microscope in the first place, as they formed a large part of a scientific scholar’s capabilities. It is more difficult to continuously identify an object that is “invisible”, as the discovery of something “new” is rather based on certain levels of previous familiarity with what is already known, theorized, and discussed. Individual images actively produce and transmit knowledge and thus, there is a need to normalize and standardize procedures of imaging techniques because imagery of specific given research areas is a product of the capacities of the instruments, the conditions and limitations of their usage, and theoretical biases or inclinations.

Images of the natural sciences must be thus, considered to encompass the totality of conditions determining their production, the production of an artificial image. Stefan Ditzen explains ‘the pictorial mycelium’ to be used to describe the ‘concrete’ image, including the conditions of instrument-aided visibility as well as the phenomena of shared perception, and hence the procedures a scientific community relies on to arrive at a common consensus on insights to then be integrated into

On the pictorial mycellium

the greater canon and spread this knowledge.15 Whether a photograph, microphotograph, or illustration based on an instrument, lens-aided visability, the resulting image must be seen within its context and the refering, translating, and imprinting processes at play.

does it behave? Recent advancements in neuroscience can shed light on some answers to these questions but fascinations regarding the study of vision remains today.

“The concrete image, that is to say, is two things at once: a concrete graphic product that may have its own claim to physical presence and an index of the underlying pictorial body, a composite that comprises the conditions of its genesis in their entirety”.16

The studies of scientific imagery and applying the concept developed in the discussion of art generates tensions. A perspective focused solely on the form of scientific images fails to do justice to their complexity. For example, it’s impossible to comprehend the epistemic agency of images without broadening the analysis to include experimental procedures, technological presuppositions and conditions imposed by equipment, and local traditions of knowledge and mentalities.17

Horst Bredekamp sustains that we must identify autonomous principles of visualization and concepts in the field of the natural sciences of super-individual stylistic features. He underscores that stylistic change can be described using the two concepts of imitation. Human beings have two conflicting drives: the urge to imitate the existing creation (natura naturata), and the incessant and curious urge to imitate the creativity of nature (natura naturans). Every new style evolves between these two forms of mimesis and imitation always produces a loss of originality. Although originality produces a lack of style, but this defines the balance that has been sustained throughout the history of humankind. Style and innovation: the two principles of imitation. According to Bredekamp, the natural sciences must be interested thus in considering the complexity, beauty, and anarchy of images as particular features that render a distinctive contribution to the sciences. In rendering an object, images construct it and inform it with the qualities of their own sphere.

One of the most compelling challenged in the study of vision is to discover “where” and “when” the eye focuses to observe, to determine whether there is a hierarchy between the perceived elements and in which relation they are organized. Totality and detail, macro and micro, configuration and shape: what does looking look like? How

Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977, p. 154

“A photograph is not an image (as painting is an image), it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint…” 17 Das Technische Bild, Horst Bredekamp, “A History of Styles of Technical Imagery: Between Description and Interpretation A Conversation with Horst Bredekamp” In H. Bredekamp, V. Dünkel & B. Schneider (Ed.), The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 18.

Through his laboratory work Roster began to take an interest in photography, which he viewed as having served as a fundamental tool since its inception in the pursuit of knowledge, in teaching, and in conducting scientific research and experiments. Roster was director of the Italian Photographic Society in Florence from 1890 to 1894 and wrote influential essays and technical articles (in particular, on photomicrography and telephotography) for the Society’s Bullettino. He achieved noteworthy results in the field of photomicrography that earned him international recognition. See: Museo Galileo and Archivio Roster nelle Raccolte Museali Fratelli Alinari, Firenze.

see: S. Ditzen, “InstrumentAided Vision and the Imagination: The Migration of Worms and Dragons in Early Microscopy,” in The Technical Image: A History of Styles and Scientific Imagery, Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015)

S. Ditzen, “Instrument-Aided Vision and the Imagination: The Migration of Worms and Dragons in Early Microscopy”, p. 137.

Giorgio Roster, Camera Obscura (1869).

Lamphouse microscope

Filippo Bonanni, Musaeum Kircherianum, Roma, 1709. The microscope designed by Filippo Bonanni (1638-1725) was a horizontal version. The light of an oil lamp was concentrated on the stage by two convex lenses, mounted at the ends of a little tube (mobile condenser).

Robert Hooke’s microscope. Robert Hooke (1635-1702/3), the great British scientist and ingenious inventor of scientific instruments, designed a microscope featuring innovations in the optical system, in its more sophisticated lighting system and in the stand.

Giorgio Roster, Capsules and spores of Muscus hepatici (Borraccine) enlarged under the microscope, (1880-1910). Photo 1 autochrome, b/n, Archivio Roster nelle Raccolte Museali Fratelli Alinari, Firenze.

Giorgio Roster (1843-1927) was a doctor, professor and hygienist who cultivated many other interests and studied mineralogy and botany in depth. Roster’s photographic collections that he used as a primary support to his studies are of particular interest. An encyclopedic, but at the same time rigorous and systematic scientist, Roster was a leading figure in 19th century scientific culture. The notable bibliograph and photographic material produced by Roster, not only highlight his variety of interests, but represents a testimony of a fundamental survey of the nineteenth century scientific culture. The Natural History Museum in Florence and Fratelli Alinari aim to virtually collecting the significant documentary heritage of the scientist.

Roster’s telephoto camera was a complex apparatus comprising a tripod with a revolving platform; a wooden camera body; and two pleated bellows resting on a custom-made frame that was extendable to a length of nearly one metre. The supporting frame could rotate freely around its vertical axis. This apparatus allowed one to take a series of photographs covering a considerable part of the horizon and compose detailed panoramic vistas. Courtesy Museo Galileo.

Negative lenses of Roster’s teleobjective. 1892-1898.

To make his telephoto lens more versatile, Giorgio Roster divised a series of five negative lenses whose function was to vary the objective focal length. The photographer could then adjust the degree of magnification of the image tha was being projected onto the photographic plate. Courtesy Museo Galileo.

Giorgio Roster, ‘Photomicrography of a flea’ 1893-1894. Courtesy Museo Galileo.

Giorgio Roster’s telephoto camera, ca. 1885.

Anna Atkins, ‘Dictyota dichotoma, in the young state and in fruit’ from Part XI of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1849–1850.

Anna Atkins (1799-1871) was an English botanist and is considered one of the first women to create a photograph. Atkins was interest in terrestrial and acquatc plans, from alge and confervae, many of which are so minute that accurate drawings of them are difficult to make. Atkins combined a passion for scientific inquiry, technological experimentation, and artist expression as she collected, classified and pictured her specimens and obtained impression of plants themselves. In pursuit of an accurate yet ecovative mode of representation, she adopted the technology of photography that had just emerged years prior. [https://www.moma.org/ artists/231#fn:1]

Giorgio Roster, ‘92. Trichina spiralis, antique, in capsule, (photo., 1 print, b/n, 9x9 cm, 03/03/1888. In: “Fotomicrografie Roster I: Esposizione internazionale di fotomicrografia” Anversa, 1892.

Anna Atkins ‘Pteris Rotundifolia (Jamaica)’ from the album “Cyanotypes of British and Foreign Plants and Ferns” 1853.

Anna Atkins ‘Alaria esculenta – dabberlocks, badderlocks, or winged kelp’ from the album “Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions,1843.

From Micro to Macro: An Unprecedented Approach of Depicting Geologic Land Formations by Orra White Hitchcock

Mycologists and biologists were not the only scientists, intellectuals, and artists who contributed to the creation of technical and scientific imagery that would shape the knowledge of the natural world and use drawings and paintings as a translation of seeing and imitating.

Orra White Hitchcock (1796-1863) was one of the earliest female American illustrators of the mid-nineteenth century who specialized in botany, zoology, paleontology, and geology, exemplifying the capacity of artistic interventions with the liminal spaces of geology and physical limits. Her works are the illustrations of the scientific research of her husband, the geologist, and professor, Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864). Orra Hitchcock realized more than two hundred plates and one thousand wood-engraved illustrations. The couple shared a passion for investigating the natural world and thus went on to produce dozens of books and articles of scholarship and artwork. The subjects notably included geologic strata specimens at the moment of the formation of geology as a scientific field as Orra and Edward Hitchcock actively tried to depict what the Earth is made of, strata per strata.19

Many of the less figurative paintings done by Orra were not shown publicly and perhaps seen as solely “women’s work”, undermined by her husband’s “real” work as a scientist. However, Orra’s unprecedented scientific and artistic mind was interwoven, she depicted nature’s workings that overlapped seamlessly with other spiritual or religious aspects even of her life. Orra’s unprecedented approach to depicting nature’s land formations, the earth’s elements that humans are deeply connected to, radically preceded discussions on the nature and culture divide, and contemporary discourses on the links between humans and nonhuman elements at both the macro geological scale and the microbiological and mineral element scale.

From Micro to Macro: An Unprecedented Approach of Depicting Geologic Land Formations by Orra White Hitchcock

19 Orra White Hitchcock, ‘Classroom Drawings and The Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Papers’ in the Amherst College Digital Collections.

From Micro to Macro: An Unprecedented Approach of Depicting Geologic Land Formations by Orra White Hitchcock

Orra White Hitchcock, drawing of crust of the earth, 1828-1840. Pen and ink on linen 184 x 187 cm. 1 of 61 drawings for use in Professor Edward Hitchcock’s classes on geology and natural history. All images courtesy of the Archives & Special Collections, Amherst College, Massachusetts.

Orra White Hitchcock, drawing of vibro tritici, 18281840. Pen and ink on linen, 86 x 84 cm.

From Micro to Macro: An Unprecedented Approach of Depicting Geologic Land Formations by Orra White Hitchcock

Orra White Hitchcock drawing of invertebrate fossils,1828-1840. Pen and ink on linen, 60 x 89 cm.

Orra White Hitchcock, drawing of anthracite in greywacke slate, Newport, Rhode Island, 1828-1840. Pen and ink on linen, 40 x 61 cm.

Orra White Hitchcock, drawing of hydra viridis. 1828-1840. Pen and ink on linen, 66 x 83 cm.

From Micro to Macro: An Unprecedented Approach of Depicting Geologic Land Formations by Orra White Hitchcock

Orra White Hitchcock drawing of strata, Tyrolese Alps, 1828-1840. Pen and ink on linen, 48 x 103 cm. Courtesy Amherst College Digital Collections.

A Shift and Reconsiderations in Biology

The focus of 19th-century biology on organs, organisms, and environments shifted to instead a focus on genes, as biology became a science of information, theory of systems, communication, and automation. The understanding of evolution shifted from being a paleontological reconstruction of ancient fossils to the analysis of gene occurrences. The 20th century view of life has been called “The Century of the Gene” due to such revolutionary theories, laws of inheritance, the sequencing of the human genome, and the discovery of DNA structures. Discoveries explained how biological inheritance could be transmitted through physical molecules as plants and animals’ evolutionary relationships were studied by comparing DNA sequences. Biological studies shifted towards understanding processes of plasticity, mutualistic symbiosis, and extinction. Plastic organisms have shown that in addition to genes, both the environment and the organism have agency because many organisms alter their development and respond to different environments by activating different genes. These living beings do not just come into contact and communicate with other living beings, but there is an actual composition in which there is a manifestation of organisms’ social being. From the moment in which living beings associate themselves with other living beings and forms of life, they enact their own capacities and abilities. According to Donna Haraway, nature is in fact social, it is just a question of composition.

Life bases itself on continuous interspecies relations, situated and dynamic, towards which processes of incorporation should be rethought and reconsidered. And these relations refer to species as fundamental categories of analysis. The creatures that make up the heterogeneous multitude of the living, from humans to non-humans, from animals to microbes, appear always be tangled in relations rather than ordered in precise taxonomies. In regard to this infinite entanglement, indefinitely extended but infinitesimal and extremely small, species is a label that can only be applied retroactively. 20

As 20th-century biology was rooted in the late 19th century affirmations towards a competitive model of evolution and the negative view towards bacteria and viruses as predators. Microbiology became a medical science and there was an eradication and successful fight again deadly viruses like smallpox and polio, for example, there was almost an erasure of the study

20 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008.

Developmental biologist

Scott F. Gilbert discusses how these struggles between science and shifting perspectives can be applied through the arts as the two are not oppositional practices, but rather have parallel negotiations and generative resonances when really looking at the autonomy of art on one hand and the genetic isolation of discrete organisms on the other. He aims not to distill descriptive, unifying, history between the two fields, but rather to speculatively explore what connections these reverberating stuggles might open in our present situtation. See Scott F. Gilbert and S. R. Gilbert. (2019). “Understories: A Common Ground For Art And Science”.

Exhibition Catalogue for ‘ , /~` mediums,.’_ ” bodies,.’_ ” ° ∞ logs,∞ ‘ , /~` ‘ holes, .’ `-. ` .’ — °habitats / /`‘ * ‘-‘ . , ‘ /~`want to feel (,) you inside \| * . . * * \| * . . *./. .-. ~ .’ , ‘ /~` ~..

and research of non-pathogenic (non-dangerous) microbes. Research of the 21st century has in fact brought to light the importance of human, animal, and plant interdependence on “good” bacteria.

In regard to Biology, unfortunately, the 21st century has become a categorization of loss in contrast to 19th-century and 20th-century depictions and discoveries of lush and vibrant ecosystems. There is no doubt that human, anthropogenic processes have had both negative and positive planetary effects, on inter and intra-action with other life processes and species. We live in the age of the “Sixth Extinction”, the Anthropocene, not in the robust nature anymore of Darwin or von Humboldt.

We must shift a focus towards the signature of life on this planet is in fact mutualistic symbiosis, the ability of organisms of different species to cooperate for their mutual good. This means there is cooperation between organisms and not competition. There is an exchange and providing of nutrients and thus the surrounding and embedded context is fundamental in how an organism is viewed and understood. From mycorrhizae to lichens to cyanobacteria, partnerships are necessary for survival. 21st century biology has become a science emphasizing reciprocal relationships and processes, not singular entities. 21

Mycorrhizal fungal colonization in preserved ericoid plant roots.

Transmission electron micrograph of smallpox viruses.

Negative stain of a small naked icosahedral virus (poliovirus). Bar, 100 nm. Magnification, x100,000. (Courtesy of Joseph Esposito, CDC.)

Prochlorococcus marinus, second image with overlay green coloring.

A globally significant marine cyanobacterium. Prochlorococcus marinus may be the most abundant organism on the planet, of approximately 3 octilliion, 3 x 10ˆ27. These bacteria can be a blessing or a curse for the future inhabitant of earth. Cyanobacteria-plant symbiotic relationships are responsible for creting much of the biologically usable nitrogen in the northern Atlantic Ocean. They are extremely important and go unseen. As photosynthesizers converting sunlight to sugar as food nd nutrients for plants. they enable life for not only plants but animals and fungi. However, with warming water and pollution, these processes negatively produces explosive zones of cyanobacteria that ultimately causes the drastic death of fish.

From Classical Categorizations Towards Simpoetic and Social Microorganisms: Donna Haraway

22 Timeto’s acute, passionate and critical reflection on Donna Haraway’s thought has been fundamental for my research and critical look at the system of economic natural sciences, representative practices and on the human desire to be the ventriolquist of nature. See F. Timeto, “Bestiario Haraway. Per un femminismo multispecie”, Mimesis, 2020.

Donna Haraway has woven alliances with different non-humans to restore a critical system and make the links that bind gender and species visible in the circuits of capitalism and patriarchy. Historically, bestiaries have conceived the relationship between human and non-human in an analogical way, constituting themselves as real spaces of domestication and functioning as a device to redeem significance and meaning. Federica Timeto proposes a counter-bestiary, a naturalcultural bestiary that begins with a critique of classical representationalism as an epistemological device at the basis of colonialist, patriarchal, and speciesist practices. The analogical approach of representationalism is structured by starting from the subject/object binarism and leads to acts of ventriloquism that make the other, from the male, white, western, owner, a matter of its own repetition. 22

The agency of animals goes beyond the epistemological and material domestication practices of the human, the anthropos and thus the contradictory taxonomic boundaries of species must be shifted. Haraway’s thought has always been through continuously thinking-with animals.

Alma Heikkilä, ‘soil ~ minerals mixing with the living, lichens, slime molds, traces of insects and roots, mycelium, erosion, earthworms’ 2019. Polyester, coniferous wood, acrylic polymer emulsion, steel, cotton, sand-based pigment from Hyrynsalmi, industrial pigments and inks, plaster. 265 x 240 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

From Classical Categorizations Towards Simpoetic and Social Microorganisms: Donna Haraway

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She is capable of illuminating the paths, concepts, and companion animals that animated her thought, taking root in interstitial spaces where it is possible to forge alliances and elaborate situated narratives.

It calls for representing diffractively, or radically rethinking the epistemological tools of representation in the sense of a “co-implication between observers, observed and observation devices and on a positioned vision that removes the human from the privilege of invisibility.Implementing diffractive representative practices becomes a way to make a world with the animals themselves and to return to a naturalcultural history that does not merely understand animals as raw material for human well-being.

Donna Haraway adopts a radically molecular perspective on becoming naturalcultural with the world, it is a “becoming-with” and “becoming worldly”. Sympoiesis is the name of becoming together with the world, a term coined by Haraway and her student Beth Dempster at the end of the 1990s. In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway describes sympoiesis as “a simple word; it means ‘making-with’. Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing … Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it.”23 Shared configurations are simpoietc and extended, by going beyond the principle of self-sufficiency of living systems and a presupposed partiality rather than considering the totality of the being. Subjects and objects, nature and culture, co-make one another, together, in intra-actions: where companion partners do not exist before their knots. Intra-actions are relations in which correlating terms don’t preexist as separate from their relation, different from their interaction, that would instead bring together the communication between preexisting identities.

Simpoietic associations are naturalcultural: the social is always materially adapted and vice versa. There does not exist a nature that is not already provided with agency and able to establish and modify social relationships. The sociability of nature, however, is not only that which is observable to the naked human eye. The most prolific agents of the biosphere are in fact bacteria. Miniscule companions that live inside us to form the microbiota.

social intelligence that can recognize alterity, as communication occurs between communities of different bacteria. They have developed complex communicative strategies in distributive systems that regulate the division of work and genetic mutations. Bacteria also possess a collective memory. In the case of extreme environmental conditions, like nutrient deficiency, bacteria form spores that slow down metabolism to almost zero, but this occurs after a consultation process in which there is a collective establishment of the level of stress of the bacteria community.

Mucilaginous fungi, or amoeba, are also called social amoeba because they associate themselves in multicellular communities. When they have access to food, they act like individual amoeba, but when food resources are lacking, they aggregate forming multicellular assemblages of a gelatinous consistency similar to those of snails. The fact that zoologists classify them as animals, botanists as plants, and mycologists as fungi, highlights that social amoeba confuse the nature of identity and own’ binaries of an anthropocentric, species-ist, perspective that sets off this panic of invasion. Nevertheless, the high level of cooperation and relationality of social amoeba in scientific articles is described frequently in moral terms, which ends up reinforcing the separation of nature and culture and confirms humans’ privileges.

In order to become productive, the differentiations between nature/cuture and human/ non-human must be unhooked and released from the identitarian foundation. For more on companion species, and naturalcultural companions, see: F. Timeto, “Microorganismi” in Bestiario Haraway. Per un femminismo multispecie, Mimesis 2020, 191-192.

Even if the kingdom of microorganisms in Linnean taxonomy was not originally differentiated from that of plant and animal, today, microorganisms - all those invisible to the naked eye - make up 3 out of 5 of living kingdoms: animal, plant, fungi, protist, and monera. Bacteria, prokaryotic microorganisms (unicellular and whose cells lack a nucleus), that belong to the monera kingdom, were the first forms of like to evolve 3.5 billion years ago. They have the most intimate relationship together with the environment, of all other living things and they create and sustain continuous symbiotic relationships that can be defined as “companion species”. 24 Bacteria convert the substances from which all living beings depend for life. They are equipped with a

From Classical Categorizations Towards Simpoetic and Social Microorganisms: Donna Haraway

Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Stained Amoeba Proteus

25 Anna Tsing tells the story of human and non-human affairs, on the matsutake mushroom and on fabricating a world that is not only reserved for humans. She sustains that it is necessary to turn to ways of being, of making, and of existing that go beyond the human, that look around us rather than in front of us in support of entangled species relations and growth despite decay. See Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Fungi, (composed of isolated cells grouped together in filaments that can constitute complex, multicellular structures and that include yeast and molds), are our naturalcultural companions. Rather, the concept of symbiosis refers initially to lichen. (Viruses, acellular and bounded parasitic organisms, whose definition of life is debated on, but nevertheless evolve and reproduce, establishing evolutionary relations with their eukaryotic hosts and they can function like symbionts, rather than pathogens.) Lichens are symbionts deriving from the association between fungi and cyanobacteria - which the latter enacts metabolism with photosynthesis, while the fungi allow lichens to live even in extreme environmental conditions. Fungi form mutualistic symbiotic associations with plants, permeating their roots (mycorrhizal fungi), nourishing themselves, and providing plants with the minerals they need. They even form a network between different species of plants, in addition to guaranteeing certain microbes the possibility of traveling and moving throughout their connections.

According to American anthropologist Anna Tsing, fungi are the embodiment of clever, resilient survivors. Fungi are moving from the periphery to being considered at the center of biology. They interact, play, and exchange with other beings, living and surviving at extreme temperatures and in extreme, depleted environments. 25 Tsing more specifically, proposed methods that move from technological and ethical object making to pursuing social worlds. She goes beyond how sociologists have addressed non-humans through questions of technology on one hand, and ethics on the other. She sustains that it is through exploring a multispecies landscape and specifically through interspecies socialites. The sociality of mushrooms and fungi for Tsing, highlight dynamic relations among other species, that is capable in exchanging nutrients like no other plant or animal. They literally create the forest’s web of social relations. 26

27 F. Timeto, Bestiario Haraway. Per un femminismo multispecie, Mimesis 2020, 200.

Only starting with an understanding of a heterogeneous configuration of the world can we take on the responsibility of its continuous heterogenesis. Compost, for Haraway, is an ensemble of diverse processes that are connected to one another, a form of “external rumination” where worms have mutual relationships with other organisms like bacteria and fungi. There is no net discrimination between who does and who is done in the compost-assemblage, rather compost is a reciprocal syntonizing. Haraway’s use and sustain of compost is a beautiful example of paying careful attention and responsibility responding to the different trans-species that make us up with whom we share the world. 27 What is needed is that which Timeto sustains: a multispecies feminism that is understood as a continuous practice of responsible articulation that develops starting from a simpoietic and non-binary approach.

26

Anna Tsing, More-thanHuman Sociality: A Call for Critical Description in “Anthropology and Nature” edited by Kirsten Hastrup. New York, UK: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2013.

When symbiosis, the common life between different organisms, brings evolutionary modifications for the host and hosted organism, symbiogenesis occurs. Symbiogenesis is the stabilization of symbiosis that causes a new phenotype to appear, it is literally the becoming of living together, responsibly. In Haraway’s terms, this is different from the mathematics of competition that considers evolution as a gradual linear accumulation of small, favorable, mutations starting from genetic, individual unities to the uniting of species. For Haraway, symbiogenesis privileges epigenetic mutations, such as the modifications of a phenotype that do not directly involve changes in DNA. Symbiogenesis highlights how evolution is not a question of direct filiation and reproduction of oneself, but it is the result of transversal transformations, assimilations, digestions, and dejections. Evolution continuously folds and collapses upon itself, with chaotic processes of sympoiesis and of a shared living and dying.

Cross-section of a foliose lichen. Lichens have been called “fungi that invented agriculture.” Non-lichenized fungi include molds, mushrooms, and morels, are more closely related to animals than plants. Instead of producing their own food by photosynthesis as plants do, fungi need to “eat” something. The body of most fungi consists of hairlike filaments, hyphae. Hyphae are the organs fungi use to acquire food, by secreting extracellular digestive enzymes and then directly absorbing the digested food (mushrooms do this), or, as in some parasitic and symbiotic fungi (including lichens), by using special absorptive hyphae to adhere closely to, surround, or even directly enter the cells of other organisms. In both molds and the underground portions of mushrooms, the hyphal strands are loose and sparsely arranged. Often, hyphae are packed tightly together, forming a firm, macroscopic (visible to the unaided eye) complex structure such as a toadstool, a bracket fungus, or a lichen.

From Classical Categorizations Towards Simpoetic and Social Microorganisms: Donna Haraway

Nomeda & Gediminas

Urbonas in collaboration with with MIT Climate Visions, The Swamp Game, 2020. Courtesy of the artists, © Climate Visions. Produced in cooperation with the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe

This exploratory game invites us to experience the sympoietic relations unfolding in the sintient swamp. The swamp is a perfect milieu to sense the fragile interdependencies between organisms and their habitat. Here, every member of the community is part of every other member’s environment, as well as being necessary for the survival of the whole. The game probes the change of perspective and allows us to embody different species by floating into swampian creatures: plants, insects, birds, amphibians, fungi, bacteria, or algae and to discover the main rule of Cannibal Metaphysics: to become the other, you have to be eaten. The swamp game transcends the Darwinian logic of survival of the fittest and offers the player a chance to embody different species, and thus change variety of perspectives. The game experiments with a biotope model of the Aukštumala moor, Lithuania, where German botanist Carl Albert Weber (1856-1931) conducted the world’s first scientific study on wetlands. The creatures dwelling in the game are inspired by Weber’s drawings as well as informed by the scientific data that is collected by biologist. Reflecting on the swamp as an ecotone the game engages with transitional nature of deep listening, chameleonic colors, aberrations of three-dimensional space, disoriented pace of movement, and chimeric language of the glyphs. (https://critical-zones.zkm. de/#!/detail:the-swampgame).

A simpoietic and non-binary approach to radically rethinking the epistemological instruments of representation means redefining humans’ relation to nature and the world. In the Western tradition, the nature/ culture dualism is for the most part rooted in Enlightenment rationalism, where nature is considered “other” in relation to culture. Many thinkers have recently challenged this assumption, through terms like “transversality” nature-culture “hybridity.” For example, Donna Haraway’s notion of “making kin” with the more-than-human world takes account of the gendered and racialized aspects of the nature-culture dichotomy.

28 Bruno Latour explores the potential candidate previously proposed by James Lovelock when he chose the name ‘Gaia’ for the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the Earth. In the series of lectures on ‘natural religion,’ Latour argues that the complex and ambiguous figure of Gaia offers, on the contrary, an ideal way to disentangle the ethical, political, theological, and scientific aspects of the now obsolete notion of nature. He lays the groundwork for a future collaboration among scientists, theologians, activists, and artists as they, and we, begin to adjust to the new climatic regime. See B. Latour, Facing Gaia: eight lectures on the new climatic regime. Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA, USA: Polity Press, 2017.

29 First Lecture “On the instability of the (notion of) nature” in Facing Gaia: eight lectures on the new climatic regime. Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA, USA: Polity Press, 2017, 15.

Bruno Latour argues that there should be instead a profound mutation in our relation to the world. If a radical mutation of our earth were really at issue, we would have already radically modified the basis of our existence, we would have already acted, 30 years ago. Instead, an alteration of how we relate to the world must be studied and understood, because it is not that we were unaware of the climate warnings, but rather, there are many different ways of knowing and ways of not knowing. 28

In particular, the notion of the nature/culture relation is in fact unstable. The expression itself demonstrated the extent to which we are alienated. According to Latour, in the Western tradition, most definitions of the human stress the extent to which it is distinguished from nature. This is what is meant by the notions of “culture,” “society,” or “civilization.” As a result, every time we attempt to “bring humans closer to nature,” we are prevented from doing so by the objection that a human is above all, or is also a cultural being who has escaped from, or is, in any case, be distinguished from, nature. Thus, we shall never be able to say too crudely of humans “that they belong to nature.” In this regard, if human beings were truly considered “natural,” they would then be no longer human at all but only “material objects” or “pure animals”. This is exactly why notions must be radically reconsidered if we want to understand the nature/culture divide and relation. Hence, Latour writes, “We understand then, why every definition of the ecological crisis as a ‘return of the human to nature’ immediately unleashes a sort of panic, since we never know if we are being asked to return to the state of brute beasts or to resume the deep movement of human existence.”29 Ecology sets off this panic because it forces us to experience this instability of the concept of “nature”, when interpreting the impossible oppositions between nature and culture that are presumed to exist in the real world.

Redefining our Relation to the World: Bruno Latour

Anicka Yi, ‘Biologizing the Machine (spillover zoonotica)’ 2022. Glass vitrines, powder-coated steel, mud, calcium carbonate, calcium sulfate, egg yolks, cellulose, Raspberry Pi 4, Waveshare 2.7-inch e-Paper Display, SGX Sensor Board and H2S Electrochemical Sensor. Commissioned and produced by Pirelli HangarBicocca. Courtesy of Pirelli HangarBicocca

Anicka Yi, ‘Le Pain Symbiotique’, 2014. PVC dome, projectors, singlechannel video, glycerin soap, resin, dough, pigmented powder, plastic, Mylar, beads, tempera paint, cellophane; 320 × 430 × 630 cm. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Courtesy of Pirelli HangarBicocca

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Donna Haraway coined the topic “situated knowledges”, regarding her concept of feminist objectivity. In “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988), Haraway assumes that all scientific knowledge is fundamentally conditional. For this reason, the concept of situated knowledge incorporates the social location and contextual advantages of the researcher into the research process. Against an assumption of an apparently neutral and unmediated knowledge of the (male, white) Western idea of science and its representation through overview visualization techniques. Haraway develops her concept of embodied knowledges by drawing on a description of the eye and “vision” (in the broad real and metaphorical sense). She argues there is no such thing as unconditional observation because every “acquisition of knowledge” takes place in a dynamic “apparatus of bodily production.”

The perception of how the human is conveyed and understood as distinguished and alienated from nature is deeply tied to visual representations and the depictions of the subject/object. Looking back at the 15th Century, we can see how Western painting had the habit of organizing the viewer’s gaze so that it can serve as a counterpart to the spectacle of objects or landscapes. Viewers remain at a calculated distance from what they are observing, and what they see is arranged, prepared, and aligned so as to be rendered perfectly visible. Bruno Latour discusses how our perception of nature has been shaped through painting, through this scopic regime which implies that between the subject and object there is the midpoint or the plane of the painting, assigning a certain position to the viewing subject and the object. But we must pay more attention to this strangeness, the object whose only role is to be seen by the subject. This is a particular type of gaze invented by Western painting, that creates a pair that cannot be separated, the object for the subject and the subject for the object. Therefore, there is proof that there exists an operator, an operation, that distributes the object and subject, exactly the same as the distribution of the roles of nature/culture. This distribution of the respective roles of nature/ culture exemplifies that it is in very large part from a historical landscapestyle painting that we draw the basis for our conceptions of nature, while the painter exists as the manipulator themselves despite an almost invisible privilege that acts in a hierarchy of power.

Pictures not only cease to be illustrations; like objects of knowledge, they are also treated as active and operative entities that organize and regulate a knowledge process. Visibility is preceded by the action of rendering a defined something visible, which raises further questions: How is knowledge manifest in the picture and/or image? Of what kind is the knowledge being shown? And how can it be seen as such? These questions lead to different answers concerning the knowledge surrounding the picture, the particular quality of the representation of the research—and hence eidetic—content, and the adequate and (ostensibly) formal visual realizations of such content. 30

Latour further discusses image-making in regard to scientific fields and practices as the connection between scientific visual documents is different than works of art that refer many times to other works of art that instead practice a form of allusions or citations. Latour argues that in science, visual documents and every image refers to another image, another inscription that has come before it, that is itself transformed by, yet again, another

Anicka Yi, ‘Middle Earth Medical’ 2015. Kombucha leather, metal, paint, stainless steel, 72 x 12 x 12 inches. Image courtesy of Kunsthalle Basel

In a note on the book, New Representations in Scientific Practice” edited by Charlotte Coopmans, Michael Lynch, Janet Vertesi, and Steve Woolgar, Bruno Latour discusses imake making in science and in particular how these visual aspects of scientific practices have brought to the surface many philosophical claims about objectivity. See Bruno Latour, “The More Manipulations the Better.”

In New Representations in Scientific Practice, 158-. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

inscription. It is for these transformations and continuous inscriptions that the objectivity of scientific imagery and pictures must be understood. For example, scientific visualization practices are paradoxical when considered solely from an art history point of view, because the level of “realism” is entirely different from such traditional artistic illustrations. Visualization practices in the sciences are never just a simple two-step process of a copy and a model. For this reason, science is not a “mirror for the world”, as these transformations are never an exact replica of the former. Scientific imagery does not mimic in this sense. Therefore, scientific imagery creates knowledge and instills a certain gain of information between these steps and processes of inscription and translation. The differences between these steps are what allow for change, growth, and movement. This act of referring rather than mimicking is what in fact creates a long series of manipulations, transformations, and mutations rather than an isolated, objective image that is extracted from a contextual chain as to visualize and see only one image, one phenomenon, one occurrence. Isolated scientific images have no reference.

Thus, the goal is to highlight the interconnections, the translations, and inscriptions that have come before. Rather than considering scientific imagery as iconography for example, studying an ecological interpretation of scientific imaging practices sheds light on what is changed, what is transformed. Once we distance ourselves from the scopic obsession for mimetic imagery s a copy, scientific imagery can be truly studied as something than influences on one hand the conception of nature and on the other our perception of it. 31

The following section focuses on contemporary artists who through different visual mediums use this ecological and scientific discourse in their work, to explore themes relating to the realism of scientific imagery, scientific image practices, processes, and the power and knowledge that this visual documentation holds concerning the greater understanding of nature. By questioning dominant, hegemonic methods of knowledge production and artistic image-making, these artists directly confront the discourse of human and non-human agency, essentialism, the nature/culture dualism, and ultimately the development of new forms of representation of a radically dynamic and simpoietic nature.

Oliver Thie ‘Oliarus polyphemus’ 2014-2016, Residency at the Natural History Museum Berlin, Graphic research on the Hawaiian cave cicada.

Oliver Thie’s ‘Oliarus polyphemus’ is a project that looks at a new assembly of a pictorial form of the exemplary animal, the Hawaiian cicada - Oliarus polyphemus - an animal 3 mm tall, colourless, blind, and unable to fly. A model organism for evolutionary research with a variety of microstructures on their surface with countless hidden unknown features are revealed by a scanning electron microscope. .

Thie worked directly in the musuem in order to give visitors an insight into the research work. The space between the pictures served as a meeting place to exchange ideas with the museum’s cicada experts. The size of the illustrations created a physical relationship to the tiny animal, which showed us what an immeasurable topic the diversity of organisms harbors.

Oliver Thie is a German artist that draws to deal with the visable. He explores themes of observation, perception and reproduction on paper in order to creare representations, analysis, and new interpretations that contribute the knowledge about nature. He works directly with scientists to understand their apporaches and methodologies as a starting point for his investigations. His work is rooted in scientific research that questions artistic strategies and opening up unconventional perspectives of nature.

Oliver Thie ‘grow pimple skin and ‘The elastic belt’ 2014 - 2016. Pencil and ink on paper, each quadrant 20 x 20 cm.

Mirra

Helen Mirra, ‘Mittel’ 2006. Pallet wood and pinecones 17 x 65 x 14 cm, Image courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery

Helen Mirra, ‘Hourly Directional Field Notations realised in Arizona in 2012’ installation view, Courtesy of Galleria Raffaella Cortese

“My work can perhaps be described as conceptual ecology, or pragmatist artmaking. My disparate though generally minimalist practice occurs in varied scrap media. In various ways, moreover, I’ve been thinking in my making life about the relationships between scale, time spans, modesty and bluntness. I build in a simple way, trying to engage with the objects and ideas I find compelling so as to provoke and complicate my own thought processes. I hope that the thingsI make can command attention without asking for it.

Neither a specialist nor a generalist, I feel free to move between research interests, and to keep my investigations unrestricted. With sea-, rail-, and foot-transport as subjects, I’ve developed projects, and objects, in proximate relation to cartography, geography and geology. I approach the forest and the library similarly, treating language and visuality as an amalgam. Whatever the object of concern—a blanket, book, rock, or shipping pallet—I have always perceived physical, aesthetic thingness as being simultaneous with and of equal import to intellectual and emotional information. I imagine that my practice might hone how we perceive and order our knowledge of the world.

A natural consequence of my process is that I often find myself pulling ideas conceived elsewhere into another form. I have composed music based on Friedrich Froebel’s original kindergarten system; developed indexes that variously transpose books by novelist W.G. Sebald, activist Jane Addams, and Pragmatist philosophers John Dewey and William James; made paintings and sculptures alongside the microscripts of the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser, as a response to them and a way better to perceive their ways of making meaning. In such projects, and in my approach to ideas and to things, I am as much an editor as an author: it is important to me that the given or found should remain evident, even as I make various kinds of decisions—editorial, compositional, or other—upon or with the given.”32

In the summer of 2007 Mirra returned to a focus to ecology more narrowly conceived and spent three months working in Oslo, making a group of works related to botany and geology. She began to think of the rock as a signifier which functions as a synecdoche for the landscape’s substance. Mirra traveled far north to Tromsø to investigate the fragile arctic ecosystem, and also spent time in Trondheim studying the tapestries of Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970), an artist whose political thinking is impossible to extricate from her direct material practice. Her work brought her into the company of plants and rocks, both in the alpine landscape and at the Oslo Herbarium and Geological Museum. The sculptural work using rocks, plants and lichen that emerged from these encounters seemed to her at first out of step with my more familiarly conceptual practice, but in time she came to connect the sensibility and scale of the sculptures with the decisiveness that drew her to Robert Walser’s work and with the directness of Ryggen’s encounter with her environment.

by Helen Mirra

Helen Mirra Research Statement October 3rd, 2010, courtesy of the artist. Helen Mirra was born in 1970 in Rochester, New York. She lives and works in Muir Beach, California.

Helen Mirra, ‘Field Recordings, 7 X 5000 Schritte, In Berlin (Grunewald), 6 August, 2011’ Oil on Linen, 31 1/2 x 68 7/8 Inches

Helen Mirra, ‘Hourly Directional Field Recordings, Aquacheta, 12 May’ 2011. Oil on linen, 155 x 155 cm. and ‘Hourly Directional Field Recordings Arzengio, 5 May’ 2011. Oil on linen, 155 x 155 cm

by Helen Mirra

Helen Mirra, ‘Grayish green, rhubarb-dyed blue-green, yellow-green, lichen-dyed light brown’ 2015. Linen and wool on linen, 70 x 39.5 cm. Courtesy Galerie Nordenhake Berlin, 2016

Helen Mirra, ‘Untitled, Group of seven rocks’ 2007. Casein paint on serpentinite, with moss, dimensions installed: ca. 16 x 120 cm, Courtesy Galerie Nordenhake

Field

by Helen Mirra

Helen Mirra, ‘6th Walking Comma, 8 October, Bärental’ 2013, black and white photo and text, 26 x 42,4 cm” Courtesy of Galleria Raffaella Cortese.

Helen Mirra, ‘6th Walking Comma, 29 May, Cajas’ 2014, black and white photo and text, 26 x 42,4 cm. Courtesy of Galleria Raffaella Cortese

Helen Mirra, ‘5th Walking Comma, 2 October, Cortina’ 2013, black and white photo and text, 28 x 43 cm. Courtesy of Galleria Raffaella Cortese

Helen Mirra & Allyson Strafella. Installation “Fieno Fieno Fieno” Galleria Raffaella Cortese, September 21 – November 26, 2016. Courtesy Galleria Raffaella Cortese.

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From Microbiological Forms to Narratives That Challenge Paradigms of Modernist Painting: Ellen Gallagher

The myth of Drexciya is featured again in Gallagher’s film installation ‘Murmur’, 2003–04, made in collaboration with Dutch artist Edgar Cleijne. Combining celluloid film with computer animation, Gallagher and Cleijne developed an aesthetic that emerges from the intersection of archival sources, fiction, and memory. See https:// www.freud.org.uk/ exhibitions/ellen-gallagherichthyosaurus/

American artist Ellen Gallagher (Rhode Island, 1965) bridges the gap between organic iconographies based on microbiological forms from oceanography, and racialized icons and symbols. She reinterprets both everyday images and black idols from pop culture as she wrangles with American history and culture and the formal geometries of postwar abstraction. Much of Gallagher’s ancestry— in particular her Black father who is from the Cape Verde archipelago off the west coast of Africa—defines the territory of her practice, which relates to the culture and language of the Black diaspora. Gallagher has invented a densely saturated visual language through processes of accumulation, erasure, and extraction, using overlapping patterns, motifs, and materials. By fusing narrative modes including poetry, film, music, and collage, she recalibrates the tensions between reality and fantasy—unsettling designations of race and nation, art and artifact, and allowing the familiar and the mysterious to come together.

Gallagher began her ongoing Watery Ecstatic series in 2001, where she invents both real and imaginary, complex biomorphic forms that she relates to the myth of Drexciya, a myth created in 1997 by a Detroit house band of the same name. The musicians imagined an underwater world, an undersea aquatic kingdom populated by the women and children who were the tragic casualties of the transatlantic slave trade. From a distance, the drawing appears abstract, but upon closer inspection, we see that the darker marks are collaged pictures of small black faces that have been affixed to the paper. Their exaggerated lips and distorted, bulging eyeballs evoke minstrel images, the stereotyped physiognomies that Gallagher frequently references in her work. Gallagher relates her labor-intensive cutting into thick paper as a version of scrimshaw—the practice of carving and illustrating on whale bones, ivory, and other materials. The bright white paper, sometimes tinted with watercolor, ink, or oil, emulates the mammal bones used for such carvings, while the forms depicted conjure a world deep beneath the sea’s surface. Gallagher invests the afterlives of the Middle Passage with a sense of material control, through persistent markings that allow botanical and biological marine life to suggest a utopian realm, adjacent to a horrific one, that speaks to new peripheries, opportunities and a way of life allowed only in fantasy. 33

From Microbiological Forms and Narratives That Challenge Paradigms of Modernist Painting: Ellen Gallagher

From 2008 to 2012 Gallagher worked on Morphia, a series of doublesided drawings displayed in custom glass and metal cabinets, in which representations of transformed artifacts merge with marine imagery to create transparent palimpsests resembling stroma or organic matter. As they mutate and congeal, microbial patterns seem to convey a certain euphoria, a narcotic state suggested by the series title. The series Morphia (2008-2012) combine the intimate with the epic, the urban with the oceanic, the ethereal with the physical. The works emphasize how Gallagher’s shape-shifting signs bring materiality to both natural and social histories. These hybrid symbols evolve and mutate in relation to the viewer’s perception, resembling organic forms such as cells and marine creatures while also evoking various iconographies from Africa and its diaspora. For Gallagher, a character like a jellyfish can be made up of several bodies, can exist in different times, can be a character that is symbolic.

From Microbiological Forms and Narratives That Challenge Paradigms of Modernist Painting: Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher ‘Watery Ecstatic’ 2001. Ink, oil, watercolor, pencil, and cut-and-pasted paper on paper, 56 x 75 cm. Courtesy Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift.

Ellen Gallagher, ‘Watery Ecstatic’ 2001. Watercolor, ink, oil, plasticine, pencil and cut paper on paper, 69.8 × 100.3 cm

Ellen Gallagher, ‘Watery Ecstatic’ 2003. Watercolor, pencil, cut paper and varnish on paper, 74 x 104 cm. Courtesy Gagosian Galley

Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher, ‘Highway Gothic’ 2017. Installation view at ‘Liquid Intelligence’ 2019, WIELS, Brussels. Bonniers Konsthall, 16mm film installation with 70mm film and canvas cyanotype banners, Courtesy Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher & Hauser & Wirth & Gagosian Gallery

Ellen Gallagher, ‘Morphia’, 2008 and ‘Water Ecstatic’ 2018 in Exhibition ‘Liquid Intelligence’, 2019 at WIELS, Brussels. Courtesy the artist and WIELS, Brussels

Ellen Gallagher, ‘Osedax’ 2010. Installation view of ‘Liquid Intelligence’ 2019, WIELS, Brussels. Film installation courtesy of Ellen Gallagher & Hauser & Wirth

From Microbiological Forms and Narratives That Challenge Paradigms of Modernist Painting: Ellen Gallagher

From Microbiological Forms and Narratives That Challenge Paradigms of Modernist Painting: Ellen Gallagher

Ellen Gallagher, ‘Watery Ecstatic’ 2021. Watercolour, varnish, egg tempera and cut paper on paper, 198 x 140 cm. Courtesy Gagosian Galley

Ellen Gallagher, ‘Watery Ecstatic’ 2021. Watercolour, varnish, cut paper on paper, 197 x 139 cm. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth

Ilana Halperin (New York, 1973) currently works between Glasgow and the Isle of Bute and encourages a holistic view of our planet by highlighting the relationship between geology and the cyclical existence of our daily lives. Geology becomes a language to explore our understanding of time and our relationship to our constantly changing environment: a planet that is an entity and a living organism that breathes, moves, and holds potential dangers. From the expulsion of rocks during a volcanic eruption to the constant production and destruction of new landmasses. Halperin juxtaposes fast and slow time by connecting personal events and human histories to deep geological time. By making sense of the world through personal experiences, unexpected ways of thinking arise about the intersection between a personal individual, or daily sense of time and a geologic sense of time. Her intimate and honest exploration of life’s events allows for the unfolding of unique ways of relating to geological time: a bodily or corporeal sense of geology that examines our place as human organisms within a very long line of past and future organisms and existences.

Halperin’s artistic practices search for ways in which we can connect not only to the notion of time, but specifically geological time, provoking new responses and possible future directions of our planet. Her philosophical approach wants to find how and where we fit within a greater timeline, one that is exponentially longer and more complex than our human lifespan and individual existences.

From the intimate poetics of rocks, minerals, stones, to a personal reading of volcanic and geological landscapes, Halperin is shifting consciousness on the idea of existence as one human lifespan, towards an understanding of a holistic earth that lies within a greater geological timescale that we as human organisms are however, deeply connected to. Geology becomes a language to explore this bond we have with our ever-changing environment, a juxtaposition of slow and fast time, personal happenings, and geological events. We do in fact relate to volcanic islands, cave casts, and body stones. We are connected to the formation of new landmass: from natural minerals existing within our human body to minerals found naturally at Earth’s surface.

Whether Halperin is producing sculptures that explore geologic time through the calcification of minerals or personally reflecting on her individual existence as a human organism on this earth related to a volcanic landmass, she highlights the spontaneity of geological events and formations occurring in every dimension of our universe, to which we are forever intrinsically tied.

Physical Geology (cave cast/ slow time) 2008-2009, is a cast relief made in the limestone caves of Saint Nectaire are the results of a geological process operating around one hundred times faster than normal, production of artifacts that can be made within one year, rather than over a century – the manifestation of geological time in fast forward. A geological time diptych, the lava medallions and cave casts are the fusion of slow time and fast time directly placed side by side. Like a drawing: a record of incremental change and a minuscule representation of expansive geological time.

The works take more than one year to complete which is very long within the context of the art world and production as we know it, but microscopic on the geological scale. Geological transformations taking place can be naked to the human eye, a deep temporal process that we cannot always see nor comprehend within the boundaries of our own lifetimes.

Ilana Halperin, ‘Physical Geology (a field guide to New Landmass in three forms)’ 2013. Etching on Fabriano Artistico paper (300gsm) 91 × 114.5 cm.

Courtesy of Patricia Fleming

Ilana Halperin, ‘Physical Geology (cave cast/slow time)’ 2008-2009. Limestone cast, 19 × 23 × 4 cm.

Courtesy Patricia Fleming

Developed over a two-year period, Geologic Intimacy (Yu No Hana) continues the historical narrative between the Japanese island Kyushu and Scotland which began with the 19th Century ‘Scottish Samurai’ merchant Thomas Blake Glover.

Geologic Intimacy (Yu No Hana) is a project that features geothermal sculptures formed over the course of one year, in the Kannawa hot springs of Beppu, alongside a geothermal sculpture formed in Iceland and new works on paper. To employ experimental processes, field work, and traditional printbased methods, Halperin developed a new series of prints with Peacock’s Master Printmaker, Michael Waight, utilising Yame Washi paper – the oldest Japanese handmade paper in Kyushu which can last 1,000 years – in combination with hot spring minerals she collected in Beppu and a selection of Scottish soil from The James Hutton Institute’s archive.

“The National Soil Archive gave me a core sample of earth from James Hutton’s farm where he worked and thought about deep time – literally some of the same red earth he watched travel down a stream and thought – the earth must be very, very old.” 34

Ilana Halperin, ‘Geologic Intimacy (Yu No Hana)’ 2017. installation view. Image Courtesy Patricia Fleming Project

Ilana Halperin, “We Are Autobiographical Trace Fossils” in An Archive of Recent Work.

Ilana Halperin, ‘Pseudomorph Sisters’ & ‘My Conglomerate Family’ 2019. Watercolour on paper, 28 x 39 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Ilana Halperin, ‘James Hutton (parent material)’ series in Geologic Intimacy (Yu No Hana) 2017. Woodblock print composed of Scottish soil from James Hutton’s farm on Yame Washi paper. Courtesy of Patricia Fleming Projects

Ilana Halperin, ‘Geologic Intimacy (Yu No Hana)’ 2017. installation view. Peacock Visual Arts, Image Courtesy Fiona Stephen.

Ilana Halperin, ‘Geologic Intimacy (Yu No Hana)’ 2017. Installation view, Peacock Visual Arts, Image Courtesy Fiona Stephen.

Ilana Halperin, ‘The Library’ 2020. Etched books of 400-800 million year old Inverness-shire and New England Mica.

The Library references the shimmering mica in the ceiling of the Drawing Room. Sourcing mica from both sides of the Atlantic, Halperin presents an alternative geologic library of laser etched ‘books’ of mica with tourmaline alongside research and archival material. Ilana describes, “For years, the skyscrapers in New York were firmly planted in mid-town and down at the end of the island not by choice, but because there the dense pegmatite-rich rock was exposed at the surface - mica schist strong enough to hold the weight of towers. This same type of rock inhabits the coast of Maine, vast areas of Scotland and Riverside Park along the Hudson. As a kid, I knew mica from streets that glinted in the sun, playgrounds peopled by boulders that seemed made of silver and gold, rocks on the beach with layers you could peel open like pages in a book. Mineral samples of mica are sometimes termed ‘books’. If you find a stone on West 83rd street and leave it on the granite plaque nearby, your book of mica becomes part of a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. I imagine all these volumes together. A library composed of only rocks and minerals, every layer another narrative. It continues to grow.”Courtesy of Patricia Flemming

of 400 - 800 million

by Ilana Halperin

Ilana Halperin, Etched ‘books’ of Mica on display in ‘The Library’ 2013. Exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland

Ilana Halperin, ‘The Library’ 2020. Etched books

year old Inverness-shire and New England Mica, (detail) Courtesy of Patricia Flemming

Minerals of New York is a project that is a mineral biography of the city, through different media such as drawings, photographs and objects. At the heart of the project is a piece of garnetiferous gneiss, excavated from beneath the street that Halperin grew up on, it is a point of connection between her biography, that of a modern city, and the deep geological time that shaped it.

Ilana Halperin, ‘Excerpts from the Library’ 2016. 15 etched ‘books’ of 800 million year old Inverness-Shire and Maine Mica, 190 × 9 cm. The books of mica range in size, approximately 10cm x 10cm each

Ilana Halperin, Installation views “Minerals of New York” Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow, 13 July – 13 October 2019. Courtesy of Patricia Fleming Gallery.

35 Alma

Alma Heikkilä is fascinated by the collective activities of soil creatures, from nematodes to fungi, spores to mycelium. Heikkilä’s artistic work evokes a deep sensorial knowledge of ecosystems and the interdependencies of myriad organisms in mutual co-existence. Finding form in sculpture and large-scale painting, she strives to create a space for humans to imagine an up-close encounter or experience with the invisible processes that occur in the soil, often at a microscopic level.

“My body, its evolution and its future, depends on things that are so small I can’t even see them with my bare eyes”. 35

Heikkilä explores largely misunderstood single-cell organisms and the basis of life that is constantly created and remade by microbes. Given that only 1 percent of soil-dwelling species have been identified to date, this field offers fertile ground for the imagination. For her most recent body of work, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, she created a series of paintings that radically enlarge bacteria and fungi that exist within the human body and could normally only be seen through the use of a microscope. Microbial life exists everywhere, the human body is one of the places of life, as we are deeply dependent on the microbial life that happens in all places, like the soil, air, and sea. Her paintings use a mix of commercially available pigments and as well as self-made pigments from sand, plants, and mushrooms found in the local forest. The resultant paintings have craggy, textured surfaces, which are emphasized by the choice to use specific lighting or natural light when exhibiting the works. Heikkilä is fascinated by the complex relationships and transformations that create microscopic ecosystems. Incorporating swarms of tiny sculptural elements into her paintings, Heikkilä portrays organisms whose ecologies and capabilities humans are only in recent years beginning to appreciate. Heikkilä’s works make visible the abundance of life that teems within a decaying tree trunk or within our intestines. Countless lives are found to live in total darkness and even without sunlight, life radiates equally in our nervous system as in the depths of the earth.

Heikkilä , interview with C. Stead, “In a Nutshell: Alma Heikkilä selects five texts that recognize the interdependent relationship between humans and other lifeforms” See www. friendsoffriends.com/art/ hed-in-a-nutshell-almaheikkila-selects-fivebooks-that-recognize-theimportance-of-biodiversity

“Microbes are everywhere; they’re also inside and a part of mammals’ bodies, where they provide the most essential life-sustaining services…For artists, I think it’s interesting that so many things we are dependent on are so difficult to experience bodily…I’m interested in the type of life that is difficult to see. It’s nice to try and make their existence more tangible.” 36

Heikkilä’s paintings embody her belief that in order to combat climate change and ecological issues we need to stop thinking of humankind as unique and individual from other life forms. She co-founded Mustarinda Association, a group of artists and researchers whose goal is to promote the ecological rebuilding of society, the diversity of culture and nature, and the connection between art and science.37 The organization, which is based in an old elementary school surrounded by a forest in the Finnish countryside, with other environmentally-minded students when she was at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts ten years ago. At that time, there wasn’t any discussion in art schools about climate change or nonhumans. The co-founders wanted to do something that wasn’t like a one-time art project because of the way that art funding works where often artists do things that start and end very quickly. They wished to make something that would last, as we are facing troubles that won’t be solved anytime soon.

Alma Heikkilä , interview with C. Stead, “In a Nutshell: Alma Heikkilä selects five texts that recognize the interdependent relationship between humans and other lifeforms”, Friends of Friends.

See www.mustarinda.fi

Alma Heikkilä, ‘Found Living in Total Darkness’ 2020, at Grazer Kunstverein, Photo Courtesy: Christine Winkler.

Alma Heikkilä, ‘warm and moist | decaying wood - red, gastrointestinal tract, vomit, nipples, Mycetophilidae, Fuligo septica slime molds, jelly fungus, mycelium, Parasitoid wasps, wood-decay fungus, Hyaloscypha epiporia, xylariaceae, Crustose lichen, pseudoscorpions, arcyria denudata, long-legged flies, ruby-tailed wasps, cuckoo wasps, damselflies, snakeflies, metallic wood-boring beetles, halcophora mariana, crane fly, harvestmen, greenfly, ants, black-fly, larvae, ticks, snails, mosses, Heteroptera, bacteria’ Polyester, aluminium, hardwood, acrylic polymer emulsion, cotton, sand-based pigment from Hyrynsalmi, ink from black alder fruits, industrial pigments and inks, plaster. 308 x 240 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Alma Heikkila

Alma Heikkilä, ‘Primary Sensory Interface with the External World’ 2017.

Top: 28 x 35 cm and Bottom: 285 x 213 cm. Courtesy of the artist

Alma Heikkilä, ‘Immune system are created, in part, by microbial symbionts’ 2022. 137 x 270 cm, Courtesy Tempesta Gallery

Alma Heikkila

Installation view ‘Ubiquitous, not visible nor recognizable in any form’ Ki Nurmenniemi & Alma Heikkilä at Tempesta Gallery, 2020

Alma Heikkila

Alma Heikkilä, ‘Body of’ 2019. 50 x 60 cm, mixed technique. Courtesy Tempesta Gallery

Alma Heikkilä, Dark Biosphere, 144 x 115 cm, 2019, mixed technique. Courtesy Tempesta Gallery

Visualizing and Representing Nature: An Understory is a collection of stories, practices, and approaches that have shaped my artistic work as well as contributed to new ways in which we see, visualize, and understand nature and ecological processes: from the origins of scientific imagery and microscopy to contemporary artistic practices. Historical documentation shows how both scientists and arts have used instruments as well as visual and artistic means to translate nature that was not visible to the human eye and to diffuse knowledge of micro and macro phenomena. As a result, these practices have influenced the ways in which humans perceive and relate to nature. It is widely accepted that the current geological epoch: the Anthropocene is defined by human impact on the changing earth from climate change to mutating ecosystems. However, I argue that we must distance ourselves from an Anthropocentric view of life, living beings, and nature, and place value on other forms of non-human life. My interest lies in the depiction of nature that is closer to humans than previously understood: not-so-distant and that is not defined in dualistic terms between nature/man. But most importantly, I am interested in highlighting intertwined relations and beings, the life of non-human elements and beings move from the periphery to the center and the forefront. It is a matter of recognizing the agency of organisms: from powerful bacteria to fungi to non-living elements like calcifying minerals. The fact that human cells only make up only 43% of the body’s total cell count and the rest are bacteria, viruses, fungi, archaea, and other microscopic organisms that colonize both the inside and outside of our bodies and form the human microbiota is exemplary of the ways in which we must radically change the anthropocentric views of nature and focus on mutualistic and symbiotic living.

Our current contemporary knowledge and awareness of the world is rooted in these documentations, records, and scientific expeditions or discoveries that contributed to new pictorial traditions. My desire is not only to narrate and tell the story of these pictorial traditions, but of diversified artistic practices that have the power to explore, convey, and translate such infinite entanglements, and deep sensitivities towards ecological, interdependent processes. Through my use of painting, my analysis, and reflection, I hope to shed light on the care and curation we must take of these entanglements, holistic views of earth, and new visual-pictorial memories to tell new narratives and stories: understories.

Bredekamp, Horst, Dünkel, Vera, and Birgit Schneider. The Technical Image: A History of Styles and Scientific Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Bredekamp, Horst. Galileo’s Thinking Hand: Mannerism, Anti-Mannerism and the Virtue of Drawing in the Foundation of Early Modern Science. Translated by Mitch Cohen. Germany: De Gruyter, 2019.

Buck, Jutta. “A Brief History of Botanical Art” in The Botanical Artist, 15, no. 1 (2009): 16-28.

Das Technische Bild, and Horst Bredekamp. “A History of Styles of Technical Imagery: Between Description and Interpretation, A Conversation with Horst Bredekamp” in The Technical Image: A History of Styles in Scientific Imagery, edited by Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, 18-35. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Ditzen, Stefan. “Instrument-Aided Vision and the Imagination: The Migration of Worms and Dragons in Early Microscopy” in The Technical Image: A History of Styles and Scientific Imagery, edited by Horst Bredekamp, Vera Dünkel, and Birgit Schneider, 130-137. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Edgerton, Samuel Y. “Galileo, Florentine ‘Disegno,’ and the ‘Strange Spottednesse’ of the Moon.” Art Journal, vol. 44, no. 3, [Taylor & Francis, Ltd., College Art Association], 1984, pp. 225–232, https://doi.org/10.2307/776822.

Gilbert, Scott F. and Gilbert, S. R. . (2019). “Understories: A Common Ground For Art And Science”. Exhibition Catalogue for ‘ , ‘ /~` mediums,.’_ ” bodies,.’_ ” ° ∞ logs,∞ ‘ , ‘ /~` holes, .’ `-. ` .’ — °habitats / /`‘ *‘-‘ . ‘ , ‘ /~`want to feel (,) you inside \| * . * * \| * . . *./. .-. ~ .’ ‘ ‘ /~` ☼☼ ~. https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-biology/575

Gillis, Anna M. “Humboldt in the New World: Journeying through South America, Alexander von Humboldt sought nothing less than ‘the unity of nature’” HUMANITIES November/ December 2012, Volume 33, Number 6.

Grew, Nehemiah. The Anatomy of Plants: With an Idea of a Philosophical History of Plants: and Several Other Lectures Read Before the Royal Society London, 1682.

Harvey, Eleanor Jones. Alexander Von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture United States: Princeton University Press, 2020.

Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Haraway, Donna J. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1988), 575-599,1988.

Hooke, Robert. Micrographia: or, Some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses. With observations and inquiries thereupon London: Printed by J. Martyn and J. Allestry, 1665.

Humboldt, Alexander. Aspects of Nature: In Different Lands and Different Climates; with Scientific Elucidations. United Kingdom: Lea and Blanchard, 1850, 244.

Latour, Bruno, and Porter, Catherine. Facing Gaia: eight lectures on the new climatic regime Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA, USA: Polity Press, 2017.

Latour, Bruno, Charlotte Coopmans, Michael Lynch, Janet Vertesi, and Steve Woolgar. “The More Manipulations the Better.” In New Representations in Scientific Practice, 158-. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012.

Machamer, Peter and David Marshall Miller, “Galileo Galilei”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2021/entries/galileo/>.

Tsing, Anna L. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Tsing, Anna L. “More-than-Human Sociality A Call for Critical Description” in Anthropology and Nature, edited by Kirsten Hastrup. New York, UK: Routledge, Taylor & Francis, 2013.

Timeto, Federica. Bestiario Haraway. Per un femminismo multispecie Mimesis 2020.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to all who have supported me and encouraged me along the way, for the guidance and wisdom. To my family, my collegues, and my friends. Thank you to my professors and to my advisor Luca Trevisani.

Milan, Italy

April 2022