Society for Literature and Science (SLS) Conference

16th Annual Conference
Oct 10 – 13, 2002
Pasadena Hilton
Organizing committee: Jay Labinger, Amir Alexander, and Amy King
Institutional Support: Caltech (the President’s Office, the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Beckman Institute), the Huntington Library, the Planetary Society, and UCLA (the Department of English).

Reviewed by Ellen K. Levy
40 East 19th Street
NYC 10003
levy@nyc.rr.com

One of the great prototypes for forward-looking interdisciplinary exchange was the Warburg Institute, founded in the 1930’s by Aby Warburg, chief proponent of "the science of culture." The institute helped change art history to cultural history as it attracted humanists from a wide variety of disciplines, including Ernst Gombrich. Although Warburg’s extraordinary program might appear positivist in its search for a "scientific" explanation of the visual, its crossing of disciplinary boundaries set a fruitful precedent. Today’s Society for Literature and Science (SLS) is similarly responsive to new developments within science and culture. At present the trend toward visual culture has coalesced with renewed scientific interest in observation, signification, and recurrent patterns. One sees rapidly changing phenomena in areas of scientific study that earlier appeared more static (e.g., cosmology), and more interest within the art community exists in representations that are not art (e.g., diagrams, equations). This year’s SLS call "to transcend disciplinary boundaries" resulted in sessions that explored our place in the universe, encompassing works such as Darwin’s Origin of Species, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and Donna Harraway’s Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. In addition to historians of science, engineers, scientists, social scientists, and literary theorists, the program is attracting increasing numbers of artists and art historians, who see in these exchanges ways to re-invigorate art and visual culture. In short, the SLS conference provides an effective way for professionals of diverse backgrounds to share practical skills, knowledge, and history – and to grapple with the philosophic dimensions of their pooled knowledge.

This reviewer was able to attend only a limited number of sessions, including Charles Falco’s plenary lecture, "The Science of Optics: The History of Art," which built on the controversial symposium first held this past year at NYU. The lecture elaborated the premise of David Hockney’s book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters that, starting from 1430, many painters relied upon concave mirrors to project their subjects onto a flat surface. Falco discussed a device he and Hockney believe artists used at that time -- a new camera obscura that incorporated a concave mirror to project an inverted image onto a surface. Falco declared that by the end of the sixteenth century, refractive lenses began to be used. Participants of the earlier NYU symposium critiqued the Hockney/Falco thesis that optical devices were used in the early fifteenth century on several grounds, including lack of written evidence, the absence of sufficient light, and the necessary focal length needed for such devices to work effectively. At least one critic of the thesis pointed out that the number of candles necessary to provide illumination would have likely presented a fire hazard to the typical Dutch studio at that time.

The decision by SLS to give further attention to the Hockney/Falco thesis at the California conference was completely justified by the important issues raised in two consecutive conference sessions. In these sessions Susan Halpine and Amy Ione questioned the relevancy of the thesis to the production of significant art. Michael Gorman, Christopher Tyler, and David Stork provided fascinating demonstrations of optics, perspective, and the history of science and art debunking the thesis. Gorman argued that Giambattista della Porta’s invention of a new camera obscura that used a concave mirror in 1558 was most likely to be the one Hockney and Falco claimed was first used by artists from the 1430’s. During the second session Andreas Tuber provided a context for discussions on optics by exploring the multiplicity of perspectives in art, thus multiplying perspectives on art.

Linda Henderson’s session "Art, Science, and Science-Fiction in the 1960’s," included her own paper on Robert Smithson’s "Enantiomorphic Chambers," Anne Collins Goodyear’s talk about the artist Panamarenko, and a paper by Bruce Clarke on Robert Smithson’s "Sites/Nonsites." Artistic attempts to create varied space-models of flight and of the fourth dimension were explored. Two conference sessions that examined complexity, included papers by Victoria Alexander, Luis Arata, Sharon Lattig, Leyla Ercan, Maria Assad, Jeff Lawshe, and Perla Sasson-Henry. Cited literature included Jorge Luis Borges’s Library of Babel for chaos theory and Karen Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange for emergence. The interest in "representations that are not art" encompassed Feynman diagrams, contrary to common belief that quantum theory cannot be visualized.
Kathleen Woodward, well known for her Explorations of the Posthuman, chaired another panel of note that included examination of protein folding. Two sessions were devoted to guest scholars, Hillel Schwartz and Fiona Giles. Schwartz has authored such texts as Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat; The French Prophets: The History of a Millenarian Group in 18th-Century England; Century's End: A Cultural History of the Fin de Siècle from the 990s through the 1990s; The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, and Unreasonable Facsimiles. As a totality, Schwartz’s work suggests an alternative model of cultural studies of science. The conference description states, "Instead of a genealogical or archaeological model, Schwartz's heterodox method of analysis by similitude suggests a fluid dynamics that follows flows of history into eddies swirling backward and forward in time." Heather Paxson , Stefan Helmreich, Richard Doyle, and Michael Witmore were among the scheduled speakers. Fiona Giles’s book, Fresh Milk: The Secret Life of Breasts, is forthcoming, and the scholar was scheduled to speak in one session and act as respondent in a following session on the subject of breastfeeding. The session focused "on the experience of the lactating subject – as a psycho-physiological process, a socio-sexual behaviour, and the manifestation of an affect."

The historical event that catalyzed this meeting was the 150th birthday celebration of the famed Spanish Anatomist Ramon y Cahal (1852-1934). This reviewer recalls that, inspired by Cahal’s example, the Scottish geneticist C.H. Waddington authored an influential art and science book entitled Behind Appearance: A Study of the Relations Between Painting and the Natural Sciences in this Century. Cahal’s interdisciplinary spirit of inquiry was everywhere present in the SLS conference – and even could be intuited in several recent publications about cyber culture and psychology.