Description
‘I have seen my own death!’ declared Berta Röntgen in 1896 upon seeing an image of her hand that had been subjected to x-ray by her husband Wilhelm Röntgen. New forms of technological representation, such as the x-ray, provided the possibility of emancipated and penetrative visual knowledge. The refinement of techniques by the ‘life’ sciences clearly enabled Röntgen to visualise death through a reconsideration of her own life. Indeed, photographic technologies promised new ways of perceiving both reality and the human subject. Indeed, as Michel Foucault and Jonathan Crary discuss, the human body became the new object of knowledge within modernity. Photography revealed and seemingly evidenced forms of ‘reality’ that would otherwise have remained concealed. For the modernist avant-garde, technological revelation intersected with converging ideas within art, science, literature and philosophy that were concerned with non-Euclidean geometries, n-dimensionality and simultaneity. From Eadweard Muybridge's photographic studies of a horse's gallop, to pseudo-scientific 'spirit’ photography, emerging psychological therapies to time-motion studies of human behavior, photography was a form of visual technology that evidenced actual and fantastical dimensions of reality. Visual technology is the condition upon which matter is revealed through a form of representation, unconcealing that which was hitherto concealed, yet also whose operations and processes are subject to the narratives of its operator – for example within modernity the indexicality of Röntgen’s hand as an x-ray appeared not so different from Adrien Majewski’s photography of hands and claims concerning the indexicality of spiritual ‘effluvia’ emanating from its host.| Period | 13 Jul 2017 → 15 Jul 2017 |
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| Event title | Modernist Life (British Association of Modernist Studies) |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | BirminghamShow on map |