Dream MachinesTechnological Imaginary and Visual RepresentationJb Labrune - MIT Media Lab Conference, March 23rd, 2009, Cambridge, MA.

Visual Representations & Technology

• Visual Representation is a necessary reduction

• Its constraints invite authors to make choice andto reduce the complexity of the ideas and structuresthey want to manifest

• Visual Representation is a lie, since it masks and destroy what is not evident or visible

• Metaphor (transport, coherence, correspondence) vs Aletheia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aletheia )

• Epistemological critique of visual representations: risk of pseudo-scientific drift when social scientist or artist relay on technological and scientific visual imaginary ( Fashionable NonSense )

Wood Paintings (1 bc)

Illuminations (1500)

AlmagestumEsoteric/Exoteric Representations

Media Lab (1515)

UTOPIA

• Thomas More, 1534

• Vision of an ‘Ideal City’(Pierro della Francesca)

Uchronia, (1876)

• Charles Renouvier

• Apocryph History vs Religion

Fragments of Future History, (1896)

• Gabriel Tarde, Underground Man, written from 1879 to 1884 but published in 1896 with a Postface in french from H.G. Wells (1905). Published in a Sociological Journal. Considered as a precursor of modern SF.http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/tarde_gabriel/fragment_histoire_future/fragment.html

• Criminologist precursor of Modern Sociology

• Critiqued in France to be a rip-off of Cournot (François Vatin - Thanks Manuel for the reference) Tarde, Cournot and the End of Times ( http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=1551067 )

This paper proposes a new interpretation of Gabriel Tarde's science fiction novel published in 1896 and titled A Fragment of Future History' (English translation published in 1905 as Underground Man). Influenced by the philosopher Augustin Cournot, Tarde imagined a world where the extinction of the sun forced a realization that time is finite. This realization of the possibility of collective death evoked in Tarde's novel may have influenced the emergence of sociology at the end of the nineteenth century

Anticipation

Translation

• Nadar, 1876

Voyages Imaginaires

H.G WellsJules VerneGeorges Melies

SCIENTIFIC Romance

Illustrations

• Vannevar Bush, 1945

Popular MECHANIcs

Imaginary

• Lacan, 1944

Fashionable NonSense, 1997-8

• Sokal and Bricmont intellectual impostures and postmodernism critique

• For ex, critique of Lacan, Deleuze, Latour usage of scientific concepts

• Fashionable Nonsense examines two related topics:

• the allegedly incompetent and pretentious usage of scientific concepts by a small group of influential philosophers and intellectuals

• the problems of cognitive relativism, the idea that "modern science is nothing more than a 'myth', a 'narration' or a 'social construction' among many others as seen in the Strong Programme in the sociology of science.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_Programme

Everything Digital

• Ted Nelson, 1974

• You can and MUSTunderstand computersNOW

Uchronia to Althistory

NeoSurrealism

NeoFiction - UbiFiction

• NON Fiction - Realisation | Realization

• SEMI Fiction - Transition | Hybridization

• SCIENCE Fiction - Exploration | Revolution

• DESIGN Fiction - Aesthetics | Information

• SOCIAL Fiction - Reflection | Influence

• POLITICAL Fiction - Rethorics | Control (Power)

• META Fiction - Transport, Translation | Revelation/Reception/Unveiling