edited by
Chiara Cappelletto (University of Milan), chiara.cappelletto@unimi.it and Giulio Galimberti (University of Milan), giulio.galimberti@unimi.it
Deadline
The deadline for submitting essays is September 4, 2023.
Submission Process
Please send your full article to chiara.cappelletto@unimi.it and giulio.galimberti@unimi.it
About
In this special issue of Reti, saperi, linguaggi, a peer-reviewed A-ranked journal released by Il Mulino (https://www.mulino.it/riviste/a/issn/2279-7777/newsitem/331) we want to address the topic of imaging technologies.
Sixty years ago new visualization strategies came to the public floor displaying “pictures” of our living bodies and our cerebral and reproductive functions. These strategies make visible– that is, they visibilize–biological processes that are not visual per se, but rather chemical, thermal, magnetic, acoustic, electric.
The resulting visual outputs do not simply implement the iconosphere, but actually pervert it, since they cannot be looked at as icons, no matter how operational or environmental they are conceived of being. They call for a new understanding of the entanglement of pictures, imagers, actual practitioners involved in their production, the technologies entailed, and the onlookers, whether experts or lay.
However, even though such visual outputs challenge media and cognitive studies, the performances of people and apparatuses involved in making them have not yet been properly addressed. They are mostly discussed within science and technology studies, on one side, and image theory, on the other, which often neglects the interplay between devices and participants, with a few exceptions (see Catherine Waldby (2003), The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine; Joseph Dumit (2004), Picturing Personhood; Amit Prasad (2005), Making Images/Making Bodies: Visibilizing and Disciplining through Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI); Kelly Ann Joyce (2008), Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency; Silvia Casini (2021), Giving Bodies back to Data; Ruggero Eugeni (2021), Capitale algoritmico. Cinque dispositivi postmediali (più uno); Nicole Starosielski (2022), Media Hot and Cold).
We suggest that the material conditions of image production need to be taken into account, acknowledging the situated, embedded, and participatory nature of the visibilization processes. Based on these considerations, we propose to discuss the entanglement among images, living bodies, environments, and apparatuses by soliciting contributions on the following topics:
In vivo imaging
Media archaeology of in vivo imagers
Human/machine interaction and visual processes
Human/nonhuman visual and bodily agencies
Materialism and visual apparatuses
Technoscience and visual environments
Artistic and scientific performances in visual environments.
The deadline for submitting essays is 4 September 2023. Please send your full article to chiara.cappelletto@unimi.it and giulio.galimberti@unimi.it