The eye of war

This gathering, conceptualised as part of the exhibition Evil Eye. The parallel history of optics and ballistics, will follow the trajectory of modern technologies, developed in tandem with and under the aegis of regimes of visibility and novel notions of cognition.

Taking the form of three lectures and subsequent panel discussions, the workshop seeks to analyse and debate the ways in which we have historically been trained to observe and describe the world. At a moment when said world is undergoing a process of increasing fragmentation, the past becomes a site for nostalgic yearnings, seekership, and projections of eternal and lasting order, that is a place of redemption and reconciliation. These tendencies, which in past centuries gave rise to uncanny alliances between cultural and political forces that were either alien or opposed to one another, will be the object of analyses and starting point for a discussion, centered around concepts of attention, observation and objectivity, which we deem to be not only contingent but also determined by a disciplinary apparatus that does not exclude our own voluntary participation.

The three guest speakers, whose backgrounds represent disparate disciplines, will invite us to think through processes of mythification that are neither opposed to nor alien to the processes of modernisation that shaped Western techno-scientific culture. The pursuit of critical engagement with these processes will also lead to an analysis of aesthetic formations, categories, or the configuration and development of certain genres, imperial wars, new forms of observation and classification or economic models that begin to function on the basis of processes of quantification and data analysis.

PROGRAM

Conferences

• Fernando Esposito. Volare! Fascism’s Fascination with Flight

As a fascinating technological innovation and as the epitome of modernity, aviation was a sought-after symbol that was instrumentalized in the ideological conflicts that swept war-stricken Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. Airplanes aroused admiration and surrounded those who flew them with a bold, vital, and youthful aura. Thus, it was no wonder that the heroic, death defying, danger loving aviator became the incarnation of the fascist New Man. Whereas flight was a metaphor for fascism, the airplane and the aviator were its technoid totems. They symbolized both the revolutionary dynamism and destructive power of the fascist movements and the eternal order they were attempting to erect.

• Jaume Navarrro. In search for the best representation. Objectivity in history, objectivity in the sciences

Figurative artists hate it when their work is compared to a photograph or to a model obtained with a 3D printer. "It is almost as good as a photograph" is, far from a compliment, often seen as an insult. The quest for the "real" or "true" representation of a physical object, a human situation or a subjective emotion has often been a subject for discussion among artists, naturalists, scientists and historians, among others. In this talk, and following the work of historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, I engage with the varying notions of "objectivity" throughout modern history. A particular case was the development of the photographic image, which provided a new way of representation, one that was mechanical and supposedly value free, devoid of human agency. Yet, the first x-rays photograph, the one of Mrs. Roentgen’s hand, introduced a number of challenges both about the picture and the supposed serendipity of the discovery of these rays. I shall address two questions: who and how were these new images to be interpreted, and how was the serendipitous discovery of x-rays to be understood. The first has to do with the objectivity reduced to scientific experts; the second, to the history of nuclear physics and the atomic bomb.

• Ana Teixeira Pinto. Élan Locomotif

The early 20th century was marked by a search for supermen types, organized around an evolutionary schema, within which technology comes to occupy the apex position. In 1910, aviation was cutting edge technology and flight is used as a metaphor for everything the Futurists wanted to encode as high or elevated (form, man, future), in contradistinction to that which they see as base and degraded (woman, matter, the past). Flight, as Fernando Esposito sustains, is not simply a cipher for soaring towards the future or progress but "a metaphor for setting off into a mythical realm outside history". At the same time, the rebellion against the scientism of the nineteenth century cohered around Vitalism, a school of thought that opposed the vital to the mechanical. Crucially, Vitalist thinkers did not identify the mechanical with technology. For F.T. Marinetti technology had little to do with efficiency. It was rather an extraorganic organ, the fruit of the male ovary, which is the mind. In Vitalist technophilia, as Donna V. Jones argues, the body qua vehicle for life must be destroyed in order to be replaced by the superior machine, the optimal conduit for the Will. In this talk we will look into Marinetti’s 1910 novel, Mafarka, the Futurist. An African Novel, in which the ultimate expression of the will to power is the airplane-shaped Gazourmah.

Round table

• Participants: Fernando Esposito, Jaume Navarro, Ana Teixeira Pinto
• Moderator: Oier Etxeberria