tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post8209630897539042860..comments2024-01-23T13:58:48.688-08:00Comments on The Trenches of Discovery: Three Impossible ImagesShaun Hotchkisshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04832423210563130467noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post-36339260874973284272012-01-01T12:01:27.921-08:002012-01-01T12:01:27.921-08:00I recently ran into this OpEd piece on the idea of...I recently ran into this OpEd piece on the idea of the impossible in art.<br /><br />Art as the politics of the impossible, by Hamid Dabashi: http://bit.ly/sfWnlUMichelle Menzieshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04247049669215697236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post-47322724013443523922011-12-07T15:28:19.317-08:002011-12-07T15:28:19.317-08:00I'm going to attempt a longer and a shorter re...I'm going to attempt a longer and a shorter reply to your question. It may be that the longer version should just be a future post. This concept-cluster is an open research question for me right now, and my thoughts about it are sometimes exploratory. In any case, it fascinates me that we all have slightly-differently variant reactions to this idea of impossible images.<br /><br />So, for a shorter answer I'd say that by 'impossible image' I mean to describe a quality of the incommensurable. That is, to gesture at an aspect of power in the image (in a broad sense of 'image', covering textual, pictorial, visual, informational, filmic, conceptual, digital images -- an imagistic sphere) that arises from its "real properties," but that is not reducible to those real properties, not contained by the plain fact of those real properties. These are images that contain a high component of imagination: they invoke the imagination of a viewer, and are partly constituted by the imaginative work triggered by their reception by a viewer. So the phenomenal dimension of an impossible image has a quite paradoxical quality: the phenomenal materiality matters immensely, because it is these real properties that trigger the imaginative process; yet the sum total of the imaginative work unleashed by its reception covers emotional, affective, aesthetic, perhaps ethical and political dimensions that are not commensurate with the real properties that produced them.<br /><br />Perhaps James means something a little different by the impossible image - perhaps something to do with the gap between visualization and the visible.Michelle Menzieshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04247049669215697236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post-71802050555859455682011-11-29T07:53:34.702-08:002011-11-29T07:53:34.702-08:00I am wondering whether I am experiencing, from the...I am wondering whether I am experiencing, from the other direction, the divide in disciplines that Michelle discovered <a href="http://trenchesofdiscovery.blogspot.com/2011/10/smoking-cmb-evidence-of-big-bang.html?showComment=1319649195943#c3603146274520075494" rel="nofollow">here</a>.<br /><br />You both talk about "impossible images" and yet of the six impossible images, five of them... are images. The sixth is a description of something that seems far from impossible to image.<br /><br />I think I can understand the argument being presented as to how a photograph of a building and an image of a supernova are somehow definably different and that the supernova is "<i>more impossible</i>". However, I can't see this difference emotively at all. They're both just existing images of something with real properties. Even when you have to do creative things to make the image I don't see it as any <i>more impossible</i> than an "ordinary" image. Is a photograph itself not something that required a creative human construction to make the image (i.e. the camera)?<br /><br />OK, maybe I am being extremely dense here, but by "impossible image" do you mean something that was previously impossible to see, but has somehow now been made visible? Because surely, describing an image that someone has successfully made, and you are looking at, as impossible, doesn't make much sense. Otherwise almost all images would be impossible. I mean I even need to turn a light switch on, or wait for daylight to see any image at all (except naturally fluorescent objects, I suppose). How is this different to having to build an X-ray telescope to see a supernova? After all, it's all just electromagnetic radiation being recorded by a measuring device.<br /><br />I feel like I'm being absurdly pedantic here, but only because I'm kind of confused.Shaun Hotchkisshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04832423210563130467noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post-9071719571893824652011-11-08T10:22:39.118-08:002011-11-08T10:22:39.118-08:00This may be a bit silly, but since we are after al...This may be a bit silly, but since we are after all writing in the blog genre... Here's a link to The Kant Song -- http://www.auburn.edu/academic/liberal_arts/philosophy/kant.htm<br /><br />It does a pretty good job of laying out some version of this problem in a musical number that gets rather slow and sad at this part:<br /><br />But a problem here arises with respect to natural science:<br />while empirical in method, on pure thought it lays reliance.<br />Although for Newton’s findings we to Newton give the glory<br />Newton never could have found them if they weren’t known a priori.<br /> <br />We know that nature governed is by principles immutable<br />but how we come to know this is inherently inscrutable;<br />that thought requires logic is a standpoint unassailable<br />but for objects of our senses explanations aren’t available.Michelle Menzieshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04247049669215697236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post-16658660819292560412011-11-07T20:30:51.857-08:002011-11-07T20:30:51.857-08:00This question of fine-grained image resolution is ...This question of fine-grained image resolution is interesting from the perspective of, well, aesthetics. As is your explanation of fluorescence microscopy. But to hit a pause button for a moment and go back to a previous comment: that so much of science is devoted to seeing the invisible.<br /><br />This point about circling the ineffabile is lush because seeing is always-already a physiological thing, a situated phenomenology of reception, whether you are looking at a cell or a painting.<br /><br />I was trying to suggest that art is useful in a very concrete, practical way, for understanding what happens when you 'see' the invisible. With the jellyfish poem, for instance, you're dealing with something analogous to a cell (and it's interesting how much science relies on analogy). But the whole situation is plotted in out in the real world -- taken out of the domain of a laboratory and dropped into a space of lived experience. And in as much as my perplexity before the image of a live cell is a real reaction of wonder, the poem helps me begin to start to understand it.Michelle Menzieshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04247049669215697236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post-27800032269068929822011-11-07T14:31:51.574-08:002011-11-07T14:31:51.574-08:00So what you're actually seeing in the Drosophi...So what you're actually seeing in the Drosophila is a DNA dye called DAPI that binds to A/T rich regions but doesn't interfere with DNA function. The red actin is probably labelled with an anti-actin antibody conjugated to a red fluorophore. The technique is called immunofluorescence and it's always difficult to ensure that what you're using to stain the cell doesn't interfere with function. Generally, it's accepted that if the cell behaviour is the same in the presence and absence of the label then it's probably ok (usually...).<br /><br />At this bulk level of fluorescence microscopy it is reasonable to assume that what you see is an accurate representation of what you're labelling, but when you start getting down to much smaller levels it becomes very difficult. I do a lot of single-molecule TIRF microscopy (TIRF=total internal reflection fluorescence), which is capable of tracking individual proteins at the surface of living cells. The resulting image is essential lots of individual points moving around the cells, but it is important to remember that the points are diffraction-limited and so are about 20x bigger than the actual receptor your labelling. There is currently a hugely productive field that has been born out of physics and biochemistry collaborations and is focussing on achieving finer and finer resolution in these fluorescence experiments. There's quite an interesting article here: http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/84/8436sci2.html, which explains some of the newer techniques, such as PALM and STED, and also has some impressive examples of the kind of images you can get.<br /><br />It is though, as you say, important to bear in mind that the image you get is not actually the thing you are investigating and so the nature of the image and how it fits into a physiological context has to be taken into account.James Felcehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14031758835739415241noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post-170309613747631812011-11-07T12:44:00.327-08:002011-11-07T12:44:00.327-08:00I'm perplexed and fascinated by the question o...I'm perplexed and fascinated by the question of what you are seeing in the mitosis video.<br /><br />On the one hand, it seems like the film really is a camera turned onto something real. It isn't a 3D visualization or an architectural fly-through, but rather a set of photographs made by imaging something that is physically real, even if incomprehensibly minute.<br /><br />But on the other hand, as you say, "the video of the Drosophila cells undergoing mitosis is actually a false image of the invisible."<br /><br />From what I can understand the red actin filaments aren't actually red in 'real life', and so also for the 'green' DNA - they are only red and green because they have been given those colors with a fluorescent dye.<br /><br />But surely if the color was truly external to the cell, or even slightly toxic to it, the whole point of live cell imaging would be lost? Because in that case the color would interfere with the cell and its business, as opposed to acting as a passive agent doing nothing more than making them visible..<br /><br />I guess the question is: if a method of tagging is so subtle that it becomes part of the thing being tagged ---- what's the nature of the 'visualization'/ the nature of the resulting image?Michelle Menzieshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04247049669215697236noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1513704378254120283.post-39532932652663684332011-11-07T11:46:54.969-08:002011-11-07T11:46:54.969-08:00The idea of the 'impossible image' is one ...The idea of the 'impossible image' is one that fascinates me. So much of science is dedicated to seeing the invisible, whether it be minutely small or unfathomably vast, or literally invisible to the human eye. The video of the Drosophila cells undergoing mitosis is actually a false image of the invisible, since the red actin filaments and green DNA are only visible because they have been fluorescently tagged - so it's not actually them you're seeing.<br /><br />I love how this is such a universal theme in all academic pursuits, since art is often trying to visualise and express the intangible; history is trying to make the past understandable; philosophy illuminates areas of thought and existence that are not otherwise perceivable; and most other areas of knowledge have similar examples.James Felcehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14031758835739415241noreply@blogger.com