Nina Samuel

Der vorliegende Leitfaden ist im Rahmen des vom Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) und der VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik GmbH geförderten Validierungsprogramms PriMus – Promovieren im Museum (2017-2019) entstanden. Er versteht sich als Handreichung zur Übernahme dieses neuartigen Promotion und Museumspraxis verbindenden Ausbildungsmodells und soll Universitäten und Museen dabei behilflich sein, diese Art von Kooperation zu begründen.

In den letzten Jahrzehnten haben die bildgebenden Möglichkeiten des Computers zum vieldiskutierten »Pictorial Turn« – der Wende zum Bild – in den Naturwissenschaften geführt. Mit dem öffentlichkeitswirksamen Auftritt der Bilder von Chaos und fraktaler Geometrie sowie ihrer breiten Popularisierung ab Mitte der 1980er-Jahre erfasste dieser Trend auch die Mathematik und damit diejenige Disziplin, die als »Reich des reinen Denkens« traditionell für ihre Bilderskepsis bekannt war.
Die Bilder dieses Forschungsfelds werden in der vorliegenden Studie erstmals bildtheoretisch reflektiert und diskutiert. Im Zentrum stehen Arbeitsmaterialien aus privaten Bildarchiven von Mathematikern und Physikern. Eine besondere Rolle spielt dabei die Handzeichnung als Denkform, die auf der Schwelle zum digitalen Medienumbruch eine neue Schwungkraft gewinnt.

"Over the past few decades, the "pictorial turn" in the natural sciences, prompted by the computer's capacity to produce visual representations, has generated considerable theoretical interest. Poised between their materiality and the abstract level they are meant to convey, scientific images are always intersections of form and meaning. Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010), one of the best-known producers of digital images in scientific and industrial research, was particularly curious about the ways in which the materiality of scientific representation was able to influence the development of the ideas and abstractions the images embodied.

Using images and objects found in Mandelbrot's office, this book questions the relationship between the visual and scientific reasoning in fractal geometry and chaos theory, among the most popular fields to use digital scientific imagery in the past century. These unpublished materials offer new connections between the material world and that of mathematical ideas. Work by Adrien Douady and Otto Rössler provides historical depth to the analysis.

Three cases of image circulation in the sciences, two from complex dynamics and one from microscopy, are discussed. The article deals with failed circulations, suspected errors, interdisciplinary communication, notebooks of scientists, the role of media shifts, mathematics and materiality, human perception, pictorial norms and conventions. It analyses how images circulate through different thought collectives and visual cultures. All three examples show different strategies of how images that break with visual traditions have been reintegrated into epistemic circulations and become “boundary objects” that are both robust and flexible.

Contemporary visual epistemic practices in the biological sciences raise new questions of how to transform an iconic data measurements into images, and how the process of an imaging technique may change the material it is 'depicting'. This case-oriented study investigates microscopic imagery, which is used by system and synthetic biologists alike. The core argument is developed around the analysis of two recent methods, developed between 2003 and 2006: localization microscopy and photo-induced cell death. Far from functioning merely as illustrations of work done by other means, images can be determined as tools for discovery in their own right and as objects of investigation. Both methods deploy different constellations of intended and unintended interactions between visual appearance and underlying biological materiality. To characterize these new ways of interaction, the article introduces the notions of 'operational images' and 'operational agency'. Despite all their novelty, operational images are still subject to conventions of seeing and depicting: Phenomena emerging with the new method of localization microscopy have to be designed according to image traditions of older, conventional fluorescence microscopy to function properly as devices for communication between physicists and biologists. The article emerged from a laboratory study based on interviews conducted with researchers from the Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics and German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) at Bioquant, Heidelberg, in 2011.

Focusing primarily on the work of one of the most notable mathematicians of the twentieth century, the exhibition 'The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking,' explores the role of images in scientific thinking in the aftermath of a historic media shift—the new, image based society created by the digital revolution. Here, the images produced by the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot can be seen as icons of two of the most popular fields to use digital scientific imagery in the last century: chaos theory and fractal geometry. This paper presents the general idea behind the exhibition and summarizes the main arguments of its three sections 'Making Visible/Sequentiality,' 'Iconographies of the Invisible,' and 'Drawing is Seeing.'

Contemporary visual epistemic practices in the biological sciences raise new questions of how to transform an iconic data measurements into images, and how the process of an imaging technique may change the material it is ‘depicting’. This case-oriented study investigates microscopic imagery, which is used by system and synthetic biologists alike. The core argument is developed around the analysis of two recent methods, developed between 2003 and 2006: localization microscopy and photo-induced cell death. Far from functioning merely as illustrations of work done by other means, images can be determined as tools for discovery in their own right and as objects of investigation. Both methods deploy different constellations of intended and unintended interactions between visual appearance and underlying biological materiality. To characterize these new ways of interaction, the article introduces the notions of ‘operational images’ and ‘operational agency’. Despite all their novelty, operational images are still subject to conventions of seeing and depicting: Phenomena emerging with the new method of localization microscopy have to be designed according to image traditions of older, conventional fluorescence microscopy to function properly as devices for communication between physicists and biologists. The article emerged from a laboratory study based on interviews conducted with researchers from the Kirchhoff-Institute for Physics and German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) at Bioquant, Heidelberg, in 2011.

The importance of visualizations for mathematical and physical research in nonlinear dynamics that became known in the 1980ies under the buzzword of ‘chaos theory’ can hardly be doubted. This paper, however, focuses on the role of imagery in the work one of the uncontested founders of this field in the 19th century: Henri Poincaré. Grappling with the complex interdependency of drawings, mental imagery and verbal metaphors, it argues that the caveats against images as well as the concurrent search for ‘missing’ images are crucial moments to approach and understand both Poincaré’s usage of imagery and their meaning for his own thinking and the invention of basic concepts in nonlinear science, i.e. the homoclinic point. Poincaré’s philosophical writings contain elements of a pictorial epistemology that are discussed with regard to his last unpublished paper. The essay concludes that nonlinear science already had been an ‘image science’ long before the age of digital computers.