Cultural imaginaries and laboratories of the real: Representing the genetic sciences

Abstract

In the wired world of coded connections, zeros and ones exert a daunting pictorial presence. From glamour glossies to public relations wars, from selling sex to the promises of noble sciences, to art as million-dollar kitsch, digital images endlessly spiral, circumnavigating the global sphere. As ‘signs in action’, what compelling narratives do they distinctly embed? Yet in media-driven societies engaged in and dependent on symbolic pictorialisations, how do these representations operate as part of a mutating cultural imaginary? One may consider the concept of the cultural imaginary as an over-arching term sinuously defined as ‘those vast networks interlinking discursive themes, images, motifs and narrative forms that are publicly available within a given culture at any one time, and articulate its psychic and social dimensions’ (Dawson 1994: 48). For cultural historian Graham Dawson ‘cultural imaginaries furnish public forms which both organise knowledge of the social world and give shape to fantasies within the apparently “internal” domain of psychic life’ (Dawson 1994: 48). In addition, these symbol sets can be termed critical fictions and may be located somewhere between illusion, proof and cognitive projection. Constituting a semblance of a ‘collective data-base’, the cultural imaginary traverses contested territories associated with either verifiable axioms or fanciful story telling. These visualising models, employed by artists, scientists, designers, corporate advertisers, journalists and/or politicians, clarify, mislead, aggrandise, stimulate or document. In short, they are representations embedded in social structures, policy decisions and commercial ventures. As aesthetic devices they perform their semiotic function of activating thought and emotion through their powers of communication and circumscribed belief (Anker 2004). Visual representations and their attendant sign systems, however, are not necessarily self-evident and in some cases seeing is, in fact, not believing. Hoaxes, illusions, sleights of hand, all part of image manipulation, are constituent elements of visuality’s deceptive regime. In other circumstances, visual interpretation is compounded by complex degrees of connoisseurship associated with astute visual understanding, explicitly due to an image’s power to evoke audience response. Furthermore, the study of these symbolic entities requires an analysis and contextualisation historically anchored in the cultural imagination. Pictorial devices, composed of formal aesthetic elements such as line, colour, light, space, scale and texture are functionally ‘performative’ ingredients in picture-narration. In the interactive media arts these elements can be reconfigured in real-time thereby amplifying potential modes of visualisation, illustration and simulation. Each style of representation carries within its aesthetic domain a distinctive yet culturally grounded set of values. Empirically situated in a network of discovery, scientific images and their related research data, are currently being integrated into an aesthetic realm. A basic reading of scientific images in their historical contexts renders it evident that these visual tropes are products of scripted visual communication systems and networks of fluctuating and competing discourses. These visual knowledge-producing vehicles emerge out of an amalgam of semiotic, technological and stylistic variations nuanced by their co-evolving actuality. Highly sophisticated visualisation tools and techniques have become an integral part of the early twenty-first century scientific laboratories and their cultural milieu. State-ofthe-art images are created through the use of Photoshop filters, multidirectional lighting effects, re-calibrated colour contrasting and post-production editing. Perhaps more than any other contemporary technical device, digital images have become a lingua franca of communicating systems, and these extend to digital mammograms and in-utero foetal sonograms. Added to this mix of technological developments around imaging is the connective transport provided via the World Wide Web, through which images traverse silicon networks at astonishing speed, thus affecting our consciousness and ethical bearing. In the early twenty-first century, scientific images, like popular culture icons, are increasingly entering the public realm. This migratory manifestation of the visual has, for scholar W.J.T. Mitchell, created a ‘social field’ of images, which underscores the ‘pictorial turn across disciplines’ (Mitchell 2005: 76-89). As artists engage with scientific iconography within their aesthetic practices, scientists employ visual images to illustrate material processes and to improve evidential comprehension. While visual art’s expressive modes often rely on historically deterministic visual connections, picturing in scientific practice is more explicitly causal or mechanistically bounded. In short, coded images, in full-colour regalia, have become part of new media installations, art and fashion magazines, Hollywood films and special effects, as well as extensively servicing the corporate culture of contemporary science and the laboratory sciences themselves. Developments in ‘picture science’ are also attracting scholars to cross-disciplinary intersections. For example, the interdisciplinary research group investigating The World as Image at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities studies ‘visual representations of world concepts and the analysis of scientific representations and models’ (see www/bbaw.de). Images, within this context are looked at as vehicles of historically produced world views encompassing variegated disciplines such as: art history, social history, astronomy, cartography, philosophy, et al. The scholars in this group examine the limitations and functions of visual artefacts in terms of what they both express and deny about a given culture. For example, in the seventeenth century, a revision of the number of continents required that a world map be reconfigured to account for the European ‘discovery’ of additional land mass. This change in the number of landmasses had deep religious consequences since it posed the necessity for a reinterpretation of the relationship of ‘kings’ to ‘continents’. What this kind of research tells us is that, within symbolic world making, there are contingent psychological, philosophical and even cosmological assumptions requiring articulation.1