 Okay, so I think it's time to get going. We've got five papers this afternoon, so we'll get started. I'd like to start by saying good afternoon to all of you and welcome to this Paul Mellon Centre webinar. I'm Anna Reed and I'm Head of Research at the PMC and this is of course a virtual event during a second lockdown in the UK which is yet to close and it's part of a fully virtual autumn programme of events by the Paul Mellon Centre and it's the penultimate event also of the Research Series British Art and Natural Forces. The final event of that series will take place on Thursday at 12.30pm until 2pm so please do sign up for that final session as well if you haven't already. So this year in which autistic practice and the practice of art history has met with the unprecedented force of a global pandemic. This multi-part programme of research events has focused on the encounter between autistic or art historical practice and the forces of the natural world and places it places such encounters in both contemporary and historical perspectives. The series aims not only to respond to the exigencies of the current moment but also to foreground some of the most vital activities and conversations taking place within the field of British art studies now. And recordings of each of the events that have taken place so far are to be found on the Paul Mellon Centre website so please do refer to those. Unstable boundaries ecologies is today's session. We have five papers and the event will run from 12 until 2.30pm. We'll take two papers and then questions and then two further papers followed by questions and then a final paper with some discussion to follow. I'd like to start with a little bit of housekeeping before I introduce our first speaker. You'll be automatically muted when you join the webinar and can only communicate verbally if the host unmeets you. So be aware of that and when the time comes and you would like to raise your hand and ask a question please do raise your hand so that you can be unmuted. Each talk will last 20 minutes and we have plenty of time for discussion. So again raise your hand or use the Q&A box to write your questions so that I can read it out to our speakers. So you can use the raise hand button or use the Q&A box please do get on and do that if you like also while the speakers are still talking so that we can go straight into some questions and use the chat box if you have any comments or have any problems or technical difficulties. No photographs should be taken of the session although it will be recorded if it is being recorded and of course any offensive behaviour won't be tolerated and attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host. So moving on to our first speaker I'd like to welcome Siobhan Angus. She is a Bunting postdoctoral fellow at the Department of the History of Art at Yale University in 2020 to 2021. She is the William H. Health and Visual Culture programme fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia and a visiting scholar at the Yale Centre for British Art. She is a co-editor of The Goose, a Journal of Arts Literature, Culture, the official publication of the Association for Literature, Environment and Culture in Canada. And the title of her paper is Sermons of a Disquieting Instability, Iron Industrialisation and Anna Atkins's Sinotypes. So welcome to Siobhan and turn the podium over to you. Thank you, Anna, for the introduction and thank you to everyone for coming out this morning. Consider the spidery tendrils of the Traderia flagella formis superimposed over a flat even background of Prussian blue. The slender elongated branches are meticulously arranged on the photographic paper highlighting the formal structure of the plant. The emphasis on pattern and rhythm adds a sense of dynamic movement to the image which is appropriate for a plant whose name comes from flagellum which is the Latin for whip or scourge. The other part of the title signals to the viewer the colour of the algae as Traderia is a family of brown algae. In the photogram however the stark bleached white of the contact print forms a striking contrast to the saturated blue of the background. In a sense, the photogram forms a ghostly echo of the algae. These algae live in the ocean however so the blue background replicates the marine environment of the plant. And what one loses in the very similitude of colour of the plant is made up for by the emphasis on pattern and rhythm. In 1842 we find the root structures of the plant extending into the earth. The cyanotype was made by the photographer and botanist Anna Atkins who used Sir John Herschel's cyanotype process which uses iron salts as a light sensitive material. In 1842 Herschel discovered the effect of light and called his invention cyanotypes after the distinctive shade of blue that surfaced on the print. Underneath the impression of the plant Atkins has written its Latin name accented with tendrils of algae. The specimen is thus collected, catalogued and identified. The print is nearly one of 1,000 images produced for multiple albums of the plant. This is a self-published book series photographs of British algae cyanotype impressions. But in many ways her blue cyanotypes are unusual in the history of scientific illustration. The algae were gathered by Atkins from her native ecosystem of Kent. Once the algae was harvested the specimen was placed upon paper and the print turned blue and washed leaving a negative print. Through its unnatural coloration the image denies photography's claim to represent the world truthfully. Instead it makes a different truth claim that the direct contact with the plant itself is a form of accuracy and truth. As Atkins wrote the book, the plant's findings of such small specimens led her to obtain impressions of the plants themselves. While Atkins was pressing algae that she gathered from around her home to make contact print photographs that she fashioned into books, the world around her was undergoing tremendous change. Photography emerged in England in the year that Sir John Herschel invented the cyanotype. Friedrich Engels arrived in the rapidly industrializing manufacturing center of Manchester. Atkins systematic documentation of the botanical world is mirrored in Engels documentation of the social changes brought by the factory system in the condition of the working class in England. Indeed iron used in steam engines, railway tracks, locomotives and ship stalls was a key material in the emergent industrial economy. Symbolically linked to civilization, progress and power. In the arcade's project, Walter Benjamin engages with A. G. Meyers writing on iron's material properties. Writing on the architectural possibilities of iron, Meyers describes the rapid innovations in refining iron in the industrial period which, in the perspective of historical reflection, these are for months of a disquieting instability. So it is these for months of a disquieting instability in iron's material transformations that I want to draw attention to today. So this is the larger social context that Atkins work is imbricated in. But her photographs don't tell us very much about the rise of industrial capitalism and the growth of empire. The subject matter of the prints are not very revealing about the changes brought by industrial growth. However, I want to propose a material connection by doing an eco critical reading of Atkins images. So how can we think about Atkins botanical prints in the context of ecology and the unstable boundaries of nature and culture? In a move that may seem counterintuitive, I'm not interested in the subject of the images today, the plants themselves, of which, of course, there's much to say. But rather, I want to focus on the materiality of the print itself to consider the use of iron salts. So the series are cyanotype prints, a type of photography that uses iron as a wide sensitive material. Through the material and extractive history of the image object itself, important questions are introduced about material transformation and porous boundaries, inviting us to rethink the geological, botanical, and human alongside each other. As eco critics have demonstrated, the separation of nature and culture into separate ontological categories is a core conceit of Western thought. Daniel Smith's crucial insight, the capitalism developed and spread, an ideology of nature as separate from humanity, suggests that the conceptual severing of nature from culture is deeply connected to capitalist development. For once something is made external or other, it can be exploited. New ways of seeing nature accompany capitalism's new ways of organizing nature. In many contexts, the Victorian period's way of seeing nature symbolically affirmed development and progress. So the Victorian period's dream worlds of progress to borrow a Benjaminian phrase were invested in projects of industrial modernity, which were accompanied by symbolic and material projects for separating nature and culture. This is most clearly exemplified in the emergence of specialized museums, like nature and culture as separate categories through the Art Museum and the Natural History Museum. However, the unfolding of life undermines the conceptual clarity offered by rigid categories like nature and culture. Projects like Atkins, which occupy an uneasy space between scientific experimentation and artistic mastery are also hard to place in this hierarchy. So today I'm interested in exploring how iron's prominence in the plant, human and industrial worlds highlights the disquieting instability between nature and culture. Iron's potential for material instability predates industrialism. In the symbolism of the classical era, the successive ages narrate a fall from grace that moves from the Golden Age to the Iron Age. The mythology of the Golden Age promises a period where nature offers gifts without any effort. For Ovid, the Iron Age saw men demarcate nations with boundaries. They learned the arts of navigation and mining. There were like greedy and empires. So in the Iron Age, things like iron need to be mined. Indeed, as they move away from the beginning, the ages are also described as having an increasing materialization. So the progression from the caress metal gold to the most malleable metal iron implies involution. So in this framing, gold is a gift, but iron has to be worked, it has to be forged. It is perhaps for this reason that cultural imaginaries of iron often center on a mill where iron is processed and refined, rather than the mine where iron ore is extracted. Iron, more than most materials, directs our attention to human ingenuity, to industrial power. But in addition to its centrality to the industrial economy, iron was also prominent culturally. The architectural possibilities of iron were showcased in the Crystal Palace. The glass and cast iron structure built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. The extraction and refining of iron and coal had devastating impacts to workers, ecosystems, and atmosphere. These effects were not showcased at the Great Exhibition, however, which was a celebration of industry, a tribute to the glory of iron. Within the exposition, displays showcased the applications of casting molten metal, in locomotives, steam engines, and lamp posts. The structure of the Crystal Palace, however, was designed by Joseph Paxton to preserve centuries-old trees in Hyde Park. Indeed, as miners reflect, the origin of iron and glass construction is in fact the greenhouse. As Benjamin reflected on the iron and glass arcades in Paris, it's curious that this world should be bound in its origin to the existence of plants. So the celebration of the industrial age, with a strong emphasis on the botanical, points to Victorian preoccupations, while at the same time, linking iron with the botanical world. The iron that provided the scaffolding of the Industrial Revolution was extracted from iron ore deposits deep in the earth. The iron that chemically interacted with light to produce the distinctive shade of blue in Atkinsianotypes is in many ways quite removed from the extractive history of iron as an industry. In contrast, the chemical interaction that first produced Prussian blue came from organic materials, blood, hide, hair, feathers, horns, hooves, or flesh. The chemical interaction that Herschel used dates back to the discovery of Prussian blue. The prehistory of cyanotypes lies in an accidental ferment in an alchemist lab in Berlin in the early 16th century. The generally accepted origin story begins with Johann Jacob Despach, a pigment maker who shared a workspace with Johann Conrad Dippel, an alchemist working on the elixir of life. Despach brought potash that was contaminated by an oil produced through the destructive distillation of bones, which resulted in the unexpected shade of blue. In fact, any nitrogen as animal matter or protein can be used to produce the reaction. Dried ox blood was particularly popular. So this accidental cross-contamination of the pigment with nitrogen from bones created one of the first modern synthetic pigments, once again highlighting unruly boundaries. As a mineral, iron is essential to growth and metabolism. In human bodies, iron is central to the protein's hemoglobin, which carries oxygen from the lungs, and myoglobin, which provides oxygen to muscles. Indeed, there's enough iron in the body to make a fairly large amount of oxygen. And there's enough iron in the body to make a fairly large nail, pointing to the intimate links between metals, minerals, and human bodies. In plants, iron is essential for the synthesis of chlorophyll. So iron as a material in its seepage through registers destabilizes a neat binary separating nature and culture, or nature and humans. Instead, we find a network of relationships and connections. So Atkins' photograph as representation, the plant specimens, and the photograph as a material object, the use of iron salts, poetically trouble boundaries between the geos and the bios, between the mineral, plants, and human worlds. To return to Atkins, for example, in one framework, her project of scientific classification fits neatly into an enlightenment project of observation, classification, and scientific distance. Harvesting and cataloging is a practice of extraction, though when compared to the extractive projects in England in that period, especially iron, it's extraction on a very small scale. But there's another dimension to Atkins' project that I'm more interested in. One alternative to extraction is relationality, a process of initiating relationships that consciously tries to move away from extractive relations. And Garcia describes how as image objects, the process of making cyanotypes dissolves the nature-culture dualism, just as sunlight dissolves the cyanotype liquids. As she reflects, the captions themselves are permeable human algae entwinements as they combine Atkins' handwriting with tendrils of algae. This practice of placed-based gathering of plant specimens also directs our attention to the natural world and is a way of being in relation to what is gathered. So there's a material intimacy in Atkins' cyanotypes and the process of making that blurs boundaries between the artist and the material. In part, this is due to the materiality of iron. Iron-based processes have a low light sensitivity and can only be used to make contact prints and photographs. So visually, Atkins' cyanotypes anticipate both the illuminated inversions of the x-ray alongside modernist experiments with photographs by practitioners like Ben Ray. However, in contrast to the formal experimentation of the modernist photograph, an intimacy of touch is required to make contact prints of plants. The sharpness and softness of each print reflects the physical process of flattening and pressing the specimen. The camera-less photographs are singular images, which also undermine narratives of mechanical reproduction, which cast photography as detached and objective. As Carol Armstrong describes, Atkins prioritizes the laying down by hand above their ordering by the eye. So there's this haptic dimension of making in Atkins' practice that is redoubled as the photographs are formed into books. Books are objects intended to be touched, they're for your hands as well as your eyes. So this conception of photography, especially the photographic book, introduces a relational element. Further, Atkins' choice to gift the books as unbounded volumes roots the project in an engagement of reciprocity while also positioning the recipients who could rearrange the images. By way of conclusion, I want to think about what these botanical impressions might tell us about the Anthropocene. Atkins' ionotypes point to the material intimacies between the human and extra human worlds, but there's something fundamentally haunting about the white impressions. They point to absence. As the photographic role in Varus has observed, all photography has an implicit connection to death, loss, and absence. As the photograph creates a temporal paradox where something is here now that was there then, the plant begins to die once it's harvested. So in this sense, the image becomes a funeral shroud. The cyanotype as a material object also carries on it the marks of its own history, of its chemical and material deterioration. And so this ghostly plant cyanotype gives the material deterioration a new inflection. As the editors of the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet write, quote, the winds of the Anthropocene carry ghosts. The vestiges and signs of past ways of life still charged in the present, end quote. So the paradox that Varus highlights in photographic time has something in common with climate breakdown. For while climate catastrophe is here now, it was caused by something there then. As climate crisis has materially demonstrated, the traces of the past never fully disappear and the future is always prefigured in the present. So the ghostly forms of the plant cyanotypes are a type of haunting, that might be able to speak to us in the present. Eve Tuck and C. rewrite that haunting is the cost of subjugation. It is the price paid for violence or genocide. Tuck and Rhea are specifically referencing settler colonialism, which is a project of empire. But these hauntings are inescapable. The subjugation of nature, the privatization of land in the enclosure, the discipline of the fact. These are deaths that we've inherited, hauntings that make themselves known in species extinction, in rising temperature, in melting ice claps, caps and climate migration. As a material, iron is rich with narratives of development, of trade, of the alienation of the factory system, of empire building and colonization, of the links between industrial growth and slavery in the antebellum south, of migration and conflict. And through its material trace in the photograph, it forms an archive that carries memory and history into the everyday, that carry this algae into our present. So in this way, these algae speak to us through time. They invite us to look at the natural world more closely, more precisely, and to enter into relationships of reciprocity. At the same time, they also remind us of what has been lost. They invite us to mourn. If capitalism reinforces dualisms, such as nature and culture, these ferments of a disquieting instability, of ecosystems, of human and non-human labor, of nature and culture, might point to new ways of living and relating in the Anthropocene. Thank you. Gosh, thank you, Shabal, for such an evocative paper and for this, for conjuring this really transformational kind of a sense of material, of iron, and also this final comments, which is so, they'll be taken up in discussion. I'm certain of it. It's a great paper. Thank you very much. I'd like to move on now to also a second paper, and then we'll take some questions, but please do get your questions written up so that I can make the most of the time that we have. I would like to move on to introduce Laura, Laura Francketti, who is a PhD student at the Courtauld Institute of Arts. She specializes in interdisciplinary research that examines the intersections between late 19th century British art and science. Her thesis focuses on the work of Frederick Leighton and argues that Leighton's mid-late works are phrased by the imagery and theoretical concepts of Victorian physics. She is a recent recipient for Paul Merlin's Center Research Continuity Fellowship for her doctoral project, utterances of physical phenomena, Victorian physics and the work of Frederick Leighton. So Laura's paper is titled The Undulating Self, Acoustical Physics in Bodied Sensations in Frederick Leighton's Reading the Wreath, 1872. Over to you, Laura. Thank you, Anna. I just also wanted to say just a brief thank you to the Paul Merlin Center for organizing today's events. Before I start, I just want to briefly set this paper in some context. This is material of which forms part of a thesis chapter that I'm currently working on. These are very much ideas in progress, but I'm very grateful for the opportunity to present them today. This paper considers the impact that it has on the human body's sensation in the 19th century. It uses ideas derived from the work of Victorian physicist John Tindall and from the developing field of acoustical physics more broadly to activate a discussion about the representation of the self and the sensing body in Frederick Leighton's painting, Weaving the Wreath. The paper begins with the brief overview of the painting. It then introduces some of the key ideas that were developing out of the field in the early 19th century. In the early 19th century, there was a popular cultural and scientific interest in the physics of sound was culminating. The painting depicts a young and drudgenous female figure who sat weaving a laurel wreath in front of a wall with a base relief freeze. She sat cross-legged upon the lip of a marble step, poised atop an intricately patterned woven rug which stretches across the full width of the composition. There is a line of strings stretched across a body which appears visually reminiscent of those found on a stringed instrument. Whilst the painting initially appears to be a tranquil scene of Leighton's eclectic aesthetic classicism, there are a number of oppositional forces and tensions within the work. The laurel wreath is one of the main attributes of Apollo, the ancient Greek god of music. Positioned to central to the work via its given title, the painting's tacit allusion to Apollo introduces a fundamental tension within the composition that is best consumed in terms of the philosophical and literary dialectic between the concepts of the Apollonium, which stands for measured restraint, reason, harmony and balance, and its dialectical counterpart, the Dionysian, which stands for reverie, ecstasy and unbridled emotion. The dynamic relationship between these two concepts and their philosophical and psychological tragedy, which was first published in 1872. However, it is worth noting that these terms as theoretical concepts have been used in work prizes, including in the art historical work of Winckelman. In Weave and the Wreath, the basally freezed behind the central female figure depicts a dynamic group of Bacchanalian dancers, composed of two minas and a satyr, animatively dancing in a circling undulating movement, hopping from foot to foot twisting and rotating round, they're lost in the rhythmic pulses of the music that moves them. Streams of drapery peel away from their bodies as they dance, and raveling in loops that twist around limbs and shoulders was exposed in glimpses of bare breasts and backs. The various stages of undress seem to heighten the liberating yet licentious nature of the scene, serving to underscore the erotic associations of the unclothed and naked body rather than the revered classical nude. There was a stark contrast between the physical activity of the female figure and the unruly scene behind her between her stillness and their writer's movement. Yet the form of the laurel bow that the female holds aloft visually echoes the thesis and drapery of the male satyr on the right side of the base relief, who is also depicted wearing a wreath upon his head. It is as though we are being asked to establish an imaginative link between the female figure and those in the scene behind her, as though there were a connection between the female's thoughts and the disorder within the solid stone as if the relief were a kind of carved projection of her hidden fantasies and desires. As Anna Florence Gillard Estrada observes, Layton was aware of the hiatus between the notion of Hellenic restraints and the idea of romantic agitation, and here he seems to be playing on a contrast between outer order and inner movement, between a statue-like female and elements that point to inner agitation or psychological tension. Layton's work has long been associated with the artistic project of the aesthetic movement, which believed that art should aspire to the condition of music. In works by artists such as Santa Gabriel Rosetti, Albert Moore and James McNeil-Whistler, music is thematically foregrounded as the basis of an aesthetic and ideological ideal, which stressed sensuality over didacticism and form over narrative. The presence of similar artistic interest and motivations within Layton's work has been the subject of much scholarly attention. This works in a way that instead aims to look beyond the ways in which music functions as an aesthetic objective or immediate subject matter in order to explore the ways in which sound and musicality are alluded to and operate within Layton's work. Whilst weaving the wreath does not depict any literal instances of digetic sound, this paper draws upon the advances made in acoustical physics at this time in order to explore the notion of a subterranean or bodily music within the work that speaks to the internalization of Layton's play in the ephemeral formation of a fluctuating and undulating self. John Tyndall records first meeting Layton at a dinner hosted by Layton's father in early December 1869. From this point onwards until Tyndall's death in 1893, the two appeared to have shared a friendship or at the very least been close acquaintances. They were part of the same social clubs and social circles and dines somewhat frequently alongside others at gatherings hosted by other groups of mutual friends. The correspondence between them that remains also reveals that they wrote to each other affectionately on a number of occasions between 1875 and 1890. On the 12th of June 1875 Layton received a letter from Tyndall informing him that he was soon to receive copies of the new editions of Tyndall's books on sound and light directly from the publisher. You would do me a favour, Tyndall wrote, if you would accept them with my best wishes, explaining to Layton that they were a gesture of thanks for a book that the artist has sent in the previous year. The two books to which Tyndall refers to are sound, a course of a lecture delivered at the Royal Academy of Great Britain and six lectures on light delivered in America. And from this point onwards I'll refer to those texts as Tyndalls as simply as sounds and light respectively and it's also briefly worth noting at this point that Layton also owned a copy of Tyndall's seminal work, Fragments of Science. Tyndall's sound first published in 1867 emerges one of the key works of acoustical physics. The field developed rapidly throughout the 19th century, a period termed recently as the occultative age by literary historian Janet M. Picker and the age of insonement by sound theorist Jonathan Stern. In sound Tyndall explores the physical transmission and physiological reception of auditory phenomena and explains how sound should be conceived as material rather than a ethereal entity. His research built upon the pivotal work of his soon-to-be-close friend the German physicist Heinrich von Helmholtz entitled On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. Helmholtz began his research into auditory phenomena in 1855 by 1861 he had been invited to London to deliver two high-profile lectures on musical acoustics at the Royal Institution which Tyndall attended. From 1861 onwards Tyndall gave lectures on sound at the Royal Institution which continue for the best part of the following three decades. These included the Christmas lectures in 1865 and 1873 and lectures at the Royal Institution's prestigious Friday evening discourse slot in 1871 and 1879. All of which were reported as having filled every seat in the theatre demonstrating both the popularity of the speaker and his topic. In his works and lectures Tyndall describes how sound travels through the air as a wave or a pulse. In the process of hearing he explains waves of sound physically strike the tympanic membrane of the ear which vibrates upon impact. His molecular tremors are then transferred through the tympanic membrane of the eardrum to the ear which transmits the vibration to the brain producing sensations of sound. Via this process Tyndall explains and as a result of the molecules of the brain being thrown into tremors, sensation, thought and emotion are said to arise. The physical hear it becomes the psychical as mechanical vibrations give birth to the consciousness of sound. For the purposes of this paper today there are two main ideas from Tyndall's work on sound that I want to focus on. The first concerns the implications that Tyndall's work on acoustical physics had for how the Victorians conceptualised the relationship between the body, the self and the external world. By establishing that waves of acoustical energy excited sensations which influence the character of our mental life, the conception of sound constructed from the work of both Tyndall and Helmholtz conveyed a picture of the human body with a dynamic in a life that was shaped by its nervous response to forces from the external world. The human body thus appeared increasingly permeable, penetrable and porous as energy and sensation were perceived to flow through it. On this view the self became an entity that appeared transitory and unstable, shaped and reshaped on an almost momentary basis with each wave of auditory sensation that it received. To many this threatened and undermined notions of a stable and singular self by suggesting instead a self that was the site of perpetual self-creation as something dynamic, changeable, fleeting and constantly responsive to the undulating vibrations of physical sensation. Notes and references throughout Tyndall's work indicate that he was reading the work of 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume who Tyndall would later come to site in his infamous Belfast address in 1874. Although Hume's work significantly predates Tyndall's a quotation from Hume's essay of personal identity is helpful to augment our understanding of the picture of the individual self that developed from the work of Tyndall and Helmholtz. Hume describes the individual as nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions which succeed each other and are in perpetual flux and movement. Our thought is variable and also our senses and faculty contribute to this change. Nor is there any single power of the soul which remains an alterably the same. The mind is a kind of theatre where several perceptions successively make their appearance pass, repass, glide away and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. This picture of the self is perhaps most famously echoed in Walter Pater's conclusion to the Renaissance where we observe on how our physical life is in perpetual motion as a result of the unstable flickering and inconsistent impressions and sensations which modify the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound. This continual process he explains leads to a perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves. Through the work of acoustical physics, hearing was subsequently afforded a newly established epistemological and ontological significance in the 19th century. The body's capacity to understand the imagery sensation now became a way in which the individual self could be both dissected and problematised. For once the self is to be understood as nothing but a succession of ephemeral data, it becomes a very precarious thing indeed. Alongside Tyndall and Helmholtz's advances in acoustical physics, work from Charles Darwin and fellow biologist Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer similarly advanced ideas that evidenced the fluidity of the natural and physical world where the human body was regarded as subject to forces beyond reality. As a result of these scientific developments, Benjamin Morgan observes a tendency which developed within Victorian thought where the self was no longer painstakingly cultivated but was instead an ephemeral woven together multiplicity of successive sensations that were made and remade with every sensation that rhythmically registered upon the consciousness. The second key observation is the didactic model of human sensitivity that Tyndall developed which was particularly attuned to the perception of auditory phenomena. So playing the mechanism of hearing in its relation to the nervous system, Tyndall advanced a model of the body as a musical instrument. At this point I want to briefly acknowledge that there was a scientific precedent for the use of this image which can be traced back to the late 18th century. It also has an even larger cultural history as a literary metaphor for either the hypersensitive or hyper-emotional individual. Although I haven't got time to discuss these today, I do want to quickly draw attention to its usage in cultural satire from the 1860s onwards when Tyndall described the sensitive element in the inner ear known as the caughty as, and in quote, to all appearances in musical instrument with its chords so stretched to accept vibrations and to transmit them to the nerve filaments. The caughty he continued is a lute of 3,000 strings that has existed for more than 30 years. The third key is the sound of the instrument. The sound of the instrument is 3,000 strings that has existed for ages accepting the music of the outer world and rendering it fit for the reception by the human brain. In addition to the structure of the inner ear the auditory nerve as well as the nervous system of the human body more broadly was similarly likened to the strings of a musical instrument. As the auditory nerves were thought to be thrown into vibrations and tremors upon receiving auditory sensation the vibratory nature of instrumental strings became a particularly opposite model for the body's hearing mechanism. In his read lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1867, Tyndall reiterated and expanded the image of the human body as a musical instrument explaining how, and I quote again between the mind of the man and outer world are interposed the nerves of the human body which translate or enable the mind to translate the impressions of the world into consciousness and thought. He continues, if you open a piano and sing into it a certain string will respond change the pitch of your voice the first two strings ceases to vibrate and implies, change again the pitch the first two strings are silent was another resounds thus is sentient man acted on by nature the auditory and other nerves of the human body being so many strings differently tuned and responsive to different forms of the universal power. This image illustrates a model of hearing and bodily sensitivity initially developed by Helmholtz which was based upon his concept of sympathetic resonance as Helmholtz explains every musical tone received by the excites a series of sensations that exactly correspond to the vibrations in the air caused by the source of the sound upon hearing the end of every fibre of the auditory nerve is therefore set in sympathetic vibration by these incoming waves of sound. In this way the nature of auditory sensation was perceived to directly impact and shape the nervous infrastructure of the human body which was made to vibrate in accordance with each successive external sensation in this didactic image of the human body as human instrument the body's sensorium was seen as an instrument played upon by the external forces of the natural world. On this picture the body's internal world was alive with its own bodily music throbbing and pulsating with vibratory sensation that influenced the nature and character of its mental life. In weaving the wreath I want to suggest that the body of the female figure can be read as a human instrument as Leighton's biographer Ernest Rhys observes the string held aloft by the female figure is curiously rigid stretching across the body like the string of an instrument the way in which it is held and positioned can be read like so. The female's right hand seems to equate to the scroll of an instrument such as the violin with the string coiled around her third finger as it would be wound around a tuning peg. The thumb of her right hand across which the string presses appears to apply the tension to the string which is essential if the string were to be able to vibrate. This would normally be achieved on an instrument by the bridge. Her left hand on the right hand side of the painting then equates to the opposing end of the instrument where the tailpiece would be. Her body can thus be seen as a sensitive and sensing instrument open to the sensations which flood in from the external worlds and reverberate through the body's nerve-like strings orifices and typhanic surfaces becoming harmoniously or discordantly woven into our subjective experience which is reshaped with each auditory sensation. However, as the idea of the human body as human instrument passed into Victorian culture more broadly carrying with it the implications of physical physics, it left open the idea that the body could be played upon by external forces to harmonious or to discordant effect. To some, as Helmholtz states, the effects of certain sounds or musical combinations could have on the soul was believed to be beneficial. This notion had been advanced by the work of German physicist Ernst Kladni in the latter half of the 18th century. In sound, Tyndall recreated Kladni's experiments and findings. Kladni had conducted a series of experiments to document and ascertain the material effects of sonic vibration by studying the movement patterns formed by dust or sand scattered on sonorous metal plates. The results are documented in images that are today known as Kladni figures. The patterns formed symmetrical and orderly and to some and to some extent conformed to a degree of regularity. As such, they appear to reveal a world of invisible order that suggested a beautiful underlying formal structure to the physical world. Whilst Tyndall reframed these images as part of his project of physical materialism, culturally, the idea of a somewhat divine beauty and order to the physical forces shaping the natural world persisted throughout the 19th century. In terms of acoustics, it was believed that certain types of music could therefore bring the mind of the perceiver into harmonious concordance with the beauty and order of the external world. Others, however, recognized the duality implicit in sounds inward-reaching nature. They therefore also had the power to be a corruptive influence via kinds of music and sound that were regarded as being able to consume the listener with degenerative or detrimental effects. Before finally returning to Leighton's Weaving the Reef, I briefly want to mention Leighton's own engagement with the ideas developing from the field of acoustical physics more broadly. In Leighton's epistolary documentation of his trips to Venice in 1852 in North Africa in 1868, there are two statements of notes. The first formed part of a letter to his father whilst Leighton was in Venice. Describing his experience of hearing music from the drifting across the water, Leighton writes that the sound like a distant echo dawns on your ear and how, upon hearing, his soul like those of so many other breathless listeners seem to melt with delicious sounds and combine with them. This evocative passage is couched in tactile imagery that stresses the physicality of acoustic sensation. Leighton's image of music melting, combining with the soul, also anticipates Tindall's later account of auditory phenomena as that which melts into music upon the brain. This imagery, however, also reveals something about Leighton's personal experience of the music himself. The image of something melting suggests a softening relaxation that here hints at a relinquishing of conscious control of the rational self which, under the influence of the waves of acoustic sensation it receives, instead gives itself over to pleasure and dreaminess. The image of breathless listeners too suggests a visceral rapture that captivates and overwhelms the bodies of the listeners so much that their normal bodily functions appear arrested with fear. In this way, the experience that Leighton describes seems to suggest a move from the rational to the emotional self facilitated and instigated by the body's physical experience of music. The second reference is located in a letter from Leighton to his father, this time from North Africa in 1868. Recalling the first time he heard the Islamic call to prayer, Leighton describes one of the first finest voices ever heard which sang notes that vibrated in distinct waves like sonorous metal set in motion. This description leads direct reference to the field of acoustical science. It borrows from the vocabulary used to describe the physical transmission and motion of auditory phenomena whilst also directly referencing either the experiments of Kladni, Helmholtz or Tyndall that used sonorous metal. Returning finally to weaving the wreath, I want to suggest that the model of the sensing body derived from the nascent field of acoustical physics can be used to reflect upon the painting's illusions to both the Apollonian and the Dionysian which demonstrate Leighton's work as typically given credit for. The Bacchanalian scene depicted in the base relief seems to pulse through the female's mind in an undilatery movement reminiscent of the motion of sound waves. It appears as though a wave of acoustic energy surges through her imagination or subconsciousness, attuning her mind and thoughts to repress desires and sensual liberation. The dancers in the base relief free seem to represent or suggest a music that is viscerally overwhelming. They appear swept up in its rhythm, losing themselves and their own ambitions in a manner that serves an acoustic metaphor for more essential Dionysian themes of exuberance, profusion and unruly sensory overload, derangement and even mania. Under the influence of such forces that appear to resonate internally, the female figure is balanced in a momentary state caught between an Apollonian out-of-order and internal Dionysian forces. Amidst the orderly structure of the composition, its strong horizontal compositional lines the organised section of the paintings into orderly tears, the calm and stationary nature of the scene it depicts and its smooth outer surfaces there are moments of riotous Dionysian rupture that attest to an internal and dynamic agitation. At various points in the painting the horizontal compositional lines are breached by objects that spill over. The unbalanced laurel bow in the painting's foreground tips over the lip of the marble step and the excess material of the female's drapery similarly spills over the same rim. At the top of the work the calm smooth the wall are likewise disturbed by riotous curls of hair and twists of leaves from the wreath that the female wears. The female figure appears to be hovering on the verge of an unconscious state where a swift transition from social propriety to a dreamy unruliness could occur. Her heavy-lighted eyes are cast down so that they appear almost shut. While she is not quite asleep her body is engaged in an oddly but repetitive task which could in the monotony that comes upon mastering a repeated activity coax the minds away from the task at hand to drift towards a state of dreamy reckless abandon. Whilst my work in this painting continues I want to conclude today with a brief suggestion that what we are presented with here is an image of a body and a self sensitive to its external environment and in a dynamic undulating state which teeters between rationality and the stirring temptation of deep-seated desires. Thank you. Thank you Laura that was really excellent and so such wonderful movement between these kind of domains of abstraction and rationality and physicality and nervous system and vibration and thank you and I think it will be great now to take some questions and then talk to both of you as first two speakers. I think some questions are beginning to come through as they stack up. I was hoping to ask you both a question and really it was just thinking about you both as kind of these very kind of classic or historical sites where you're producing your research and again you both touch beautifully on these ideas of unstable boundaries and I was wondering if you could each talk a little bit about these processes of research that you have undertaken here. Both of you are working within reading works and visual material within history of science context, history of industrialization context and I was curious about the kinds of resources and materials and encounters that you are having through those processes and how they maybe deviate from what you know the kind of processes you might have anticipated through your original trainings and yeah I mean as art historians all those boundaries of what your research might look like becoming destabilized I think you could both comment on that would be great Laura maybe you could go first you're muted. Yeah sure yeah great question. Yeah I mean it's been a really interesting process for me I think I'm engaging with material that's been so distinctly separate to the world of art history that I'm used to but I think for me a large part of it has been learning how to extract ideas from these works of science and to follow how they were adopted and appropriated within Victorian culture more broadly but it's certainly been very eye-opening also using and drawing from some of the visual material produced by the sciences themselves. I mean there's a way in which there is a bit of an overlap that I'm sure Siobhan will speak to a bit more where you had like botanical artists who were copying and going through the same process of recording and documenting things that the artists were so appreciating that kind of overlap that they sometimes are coming from a position of similar skill set as well was quite interesting for me. Thank you Thank you Siobhan Does you want to say anything? Thank you for that great question. It's definitely been on my mind a lot lately so I kind of came to this research through a sort of larger interest in mining and extraction and the use of like basically like where metals and minerals end up and so I was doing research at George Eastman house in old photography journals and I was really struck by kind of how literal the references to materials were right there's discussions on where to buy uranium and how expensive bitumen is and it just kind of struck me as strange because you think of the photograph as like we see it in transformed ways right it's something that's been refined and processed and turned into this beautiful art object that seems so removed from the idea of the mine or the kind of other histories that we know that these materials like especially something like uranium or iron you know it's a kind of strange link in a way. So through that I became very interested in tracing the materials themselves so my writing on Atkins is part of a larger project where I'm basically structuring my chapters around material that's used in photographic processes and I'll admit you know it's been a little confusing at moments the materials have such different extractive and visual histories and in some ways that's very obvious but I was very surprised at moments like the different places that each material has taken me the sort of different primary sources that come up the different secondary source literature so those unstable boundaries have posed definitely some challenges in research and I feel like I'm continually being reminded of the limits of my knowledge but I think at the same time there's also something really productive and exciting about thinking about things beside each other that might not fit super neatly together like those kind of tensions or fragments or complications that might give kind of something a little bit different to it but to ground it I'm just trying to center it through the visual and material analysis of individual artworks and then working back from there so in most of my chapters it's kind of centered around one or two artists just as a way of grounding it and grounding it in the discipline as well which is always important but I do think photography more than most mediums has always kind of had unstable boundaries right like is it an art, is it a science is it art, is it history so I think there's kind of space within that to work with a kind of broader conception of how art history might read images in an eco-critical way Thank you That's great We have some questions we have a great long question from Mark Cheatham So a question for Shavonna Angus with Thanks for her excellent paper You likely know that contemporary British artist Simon Starling has also traced the material dimensions of photography in for example one ton two 2005 a photo of a giant Martin and mine whose title refers to the amount of ore extracted to make this one contemporary photograph Regarding your concluding comments about material reverberations of past industrial practices in the present as a feature of the Anthropocene to what extent do you think we can productively link mid 19th century and more recent artworks of this sort Was Atkins in effect witnessing the Anthropocene before the epoch was named Thanks Thank you Mark for that very generous question Yeah, I think that there's something really interesting about the fact that there's so many contemporary artists who are grappling very openly with these histories of extraction and many of them are turning to analog film processes and that was the sort of other animating question that really inspired my research is, you know, like Maureen Carey's photographs made with bitumen from the Athabasca Tarsans that he uses to document the Tarsans Latoya Ruby Fraser's cyanotypes of deindustrialization in Pittsburgh so these artists in the contemporary moment that are making these very clear links between materiality and meaning and so in my kind of chapter structures I'm placing these 19th century analog processes and the histories that they open up about the rise of capitalism settler colonialism empire and those climate effects with contemporary artists who are reactivating these modes of making in the present because I do think that there is something recoverable from these histories and I think that with extraction you know we have this very complex and contradictory relationship to it right is the foundation of our world but it's often very out of sight so I think that in particular photography can do something really powerful by bringing it into view and I think that the fact that all of these artists are returning to these sites of history or the archive suggests that there might be something productive in linking those things which I guess is maybe just a kind of broader sort of Benjaminian approach to history thinking how the past is always sort of active in the present and then I think to really grapple with the challenges of our current moment these historical questions about how we got here and which processes you know we've continued to replicate in the present are really important so thank you for your question I hope that answers it thank you we have a question for Laura from Rebecca Musk Laura and at the start of your talk you noted that the female figure in the painting is androgynous do you think that the idea of the self as unstable and influx has anything to do with how gender is presented in weaving the wreath yeah absolutely that's a really really great question thank you the part of the chapter that I'm currently working on at the moment just wasn't quite ready or quite there to present to you today is actually exploring this idea and it's definitely looking at the way how this gender was seen as something that was, yeah, people were exploring I think its boundaries pushing it particularly in the figures associated with the aestheticism movement and it's looking at the ways in which what those boundaries were and how far that could be pressed and pulled in relating that to this idea of a very flexible and motile and mutable self I'm also very very interested in the image itself in between in these little details that I think really pay heedance to the androgyny within the work there's like a laurel bow on the place on the female's lap but it has this very phallic upwards curve to a position between her legs and it sets on top of an opening in her drapery which kind of shows like the internal fabric if you will and it has like, yeah, a very volvic folds so the idea of those two kind of subtle references to things that suggest both sexual organs I think as well really plays into this idea which is a very mutable and fluctuating idea of gender within the work for sure and yeah, that's a great, that's a really great question thank you I will do one more question which before we move on, which is also for Laura and it is from Mark Steenis he says, thank you for that interesting paper do you have any thoughts on the amount of importance relating attached to perception you talk about the embodied self surface tension and sensuality but in the Royal Academy addresses in his private letters the notion of the perception of form and colour as a quasi-musical experience keeps resurfacing do you have any thoughts on his attachment to perception as an isolated aspect of bodily experience that's a brilliant question, thank you yes, so he I'm sorry, I'm just going to get the text up of your question in the Q&A so that was quite wordy sorry, I think I've just said can I have a look at the question again please can you see that if you go to dismissed question very great, sorry, thank you yeah, so I mean I'm kind of working through this at the moment and this is all kind of material that I'm really thinking about at the minute, I think for him it kind of he doesn't leave a lot behind in terms of written documentation of his thoughts, so I'm picking up things from his work and bits and pieces from how he himself was documenting and recording his own perceptual experiences through his travels like in journal notations but mostly in letters and that proven to be quite an interesting resource in terms of how he is responding to perceptions he certainly seems to document and record yeah, his bodily experience of them and he does so in this very musical terminology this is also this is all very new material for me sorry that I'm currently thinking about this at the moment and I know Martha so I would be more than happy to discuss this with her when I've completed some research a little bit later but yeah thank you another really really good point thank you Laura thank you for that and we'll move on we're going to go on now to move to papers by Thomas and Evelyn so let me introduce Thomas Hughes Thomas is a postdoctoral fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Arts he is currently transforming his PhD thesis on John Ruskin Walter Pater and aestheticism into a book and he's also co-editing a series of essays on Ruskin and Ecology for the for Courtauld Books Online he's writing a chapter for that on Ruskin Gothic Architecture and Time and his paper today is titled Ruskin, Drawing and the Limits of the Human so over to you Thomas oh thank you very much thank you very much for having me it's very exciting to be here one of the striking things about the elements of drawing 1857 John Ruskin's drawing manual for amateurs is that it departs from the conventional procedure of mid 19th century drawing manuals of which there were many in that it prioritizes shading and gradation over line and outline from the beginning in doing so Ruskin's instruction can be understood to be moving in the direction of elevating color of a drawing colore of a disegno on a conceptual level in what follows I take the time to unpick Ruskin's aesthetics of drawing to argue that in seeking to liberate the Victorian mind from the damaging effects of industrialization and to make possible an individual encounter with nature Ruskin destabilizes binaries and productively blurs the boundaries between drawing and color subject and object and ultimately between nature and the human it is as though in real communion with nature all distinctions begin to fall away however they don't fully for Ruskin love of the diversity of other than human life is finally grounded in human loss and I'll deploy this as a way of looking at a Ruskin drawing at the end there are interesting implications here for gender and sexuality which I don't have time to elucidate in the paper but which maybe I can discuss in the Q&A so the first exercise in the elements of drawing is one in shading everything you can see in the world around you says Ruskin as his instruction begins presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors variously shaded so the reader is told to draw some lines within any finely pointed steel pen in any direction in a rough manner inside a roughly drawn box and then to draw some more lines over the initial ones in another direction and so on not being too quick but not too slow learning basic control of hand and the instrument in the process eventually the reader will produce something with lines crossed quote so completely and evenly that it shall look like a square patch of gray silk cloth in doing so the amateur witnesses line literally disintegrate or rather lines cohere into gradated form it is an elegantly simple pointed departure from the standard popular drawing manuals of the mid 19th century which began by instructing the reader to master the drawing of straight and then curved lines in elements of drawing the skill of drawing an unbroken outline is laid until the second exercise third, fourth and fifth exercises inculcate greater control over and nuance in gradation that is tone or light and dark building on the first exercise the seventh exercise instructs the reader in the principles and practical control of gradation in watercolour at first with Prussian blue then lake, gamburge sepia, blueback cobalt and vermilion the full treatment of colour is delayed until the third letter but as I said in negating outline and emphasising shading and light and dark Ruskin can be understood to be moving from the very beginning of the elements of drawing in the direction of giving colour rather than line, preeminence in the pictorial description of substance as is often been pointed out Ruskin's procedure here is a radical departure of the so-called South Kensington system of drawing instruction which was initially practised at the original school of designs founded in London in 1837 the larger point however is that the South Kensington system or variations drawn from it came to dominate drawing pedagogy across the board even when there was no question of manufacturing processes and here we have some pages from JD Harding's incredibly popular Lessons on Art JD Harding which epitomises the standard mid-century popular drawing novels and JD Harding actually due to Ruskin in drawing ironically at one stage in all manifestations of this kind of drawing the conventional kind of drawing industrial and amateur like the appearance of the world is approximated through the articulation of pre-existing lines lines learnt by rote repeated and repeated a priori conditions of drawing as David Brett who has written the best account of drawing and the ideology of industrialisation has called them these elementary standardised lines and curves are an arbitrary visual language pre-existing the articulation of forms from nature I don't think it's hard to imagine what Ruskin saw as the problem with this system as these lines are built up and up repeated and repeated they initiate self-involved systems that have little to do with individual perception and observation Ruskin's serious objection to dominant mid-19th century attitudes to drawing is that the a priori lines aggregate a status equal to nature and make a false claim as an independent manufactured form of knowledge denigrating both nature and observer in the process in order to retune the mind towards its own individual experience of nature Ruskin prioritises gradation as we have seen and he aligns gradation with colour the perception of solid form is entirely a matter of experience we see nothing but flat colours and it is only by a series of experiments that we find out that a stain of black or grey indicates the dark side of a solid substance or that a faint hue indicates that the object in which it appears is far away the whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye that is to say of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour merely as such without consciousness of what they signify as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight we need to let our eyes be innocent again to look out freely through them freely of a priori lines only then will we be able to organise colour into a coloured world according to our own individual experience rather than the predetermined outlines of the ideology of industrialisation this noted statement of Ruskin's the innocence of the eye which it must be said he inserts a footnote to the first exercise has been interpreted in lots of interesting ways fundamentally Ruskin's argument though is instinctive he wants the eyes to have the innocence of an infant but he does not want the mind to be infantile he is not calling for less experience but experience which is rich and alive taken in and reproduced with colour rather than ideologically compromised line and this is not just individual experience in isolation but individual experience of the world rematerialised in the world as the power of painting for others to see it is true that Ruskin's rhetoric could be misleading to put it another way Ruskin does not want a thoughtless or dumb vision rather a fresh one in which thoughts about the appearance of objects and have individual claims to truth and which can visually communicate about the world and experience of it to other people the primacy of colour is crucial in the healthy functioning of this something else you get from the elements of drawing very clearly is that above all drawing for Ruskin is an ethical activity involving personal witness and the moral gravity of fully being in the world therefore as always in Ruskin the politics are the aesthetics in these matters of beautiful arrangement invisible things says Ruskin the same rules hold that hold in moral things in the second part of elements Ruskin gives three laws of landscape composition which he says applies much to human relations as they do to pictorial ones the first law is the law of organic unity which coheres individual units into conglomerate bodies so ruling over quote the masses of herbs and trees of rocks and clouds and waves the second law governs quote the individual liberty of the members subjected to these laws of unity and I'll get to the third law in a moment these first two laws are not weighted equally the accurate representation of distinguishing characteristics is more important says Ruskin to pictorial composition in governing unities I've been repeating the word individual over and over again and Ruskin puts emphasis on it here individual liberty is enabled by the governing law but because it is the more difficult to attain it is the more essential of the two good drawing therefore says Ruskin was prioritized quote perpetual difference play and change in groups of form how do line and color operate in this drawing of difference play and change well this is dealt with in the third law the law of incomprehensibility which concerns says Ruskin the mystery under which the separate character of each individual object is more or less concealed he returns to flesh out the third law in greater detail a few pages later reflecting on the proper limits of human knowledge and on quote the law namely that nothing is ever seen perfectly but only by fragments and under various conditions of obscurity therefore says Ruskin the line must essentially stop break draw only those parts of it which you really see definitely he says he fleshes this out further in relation to an engraving by Turner in this way Ruskin intriguing me says surprisingly the visible objects of nature will be rendered quote complete as a type of human nature that is by drawing mystery where knowledge stops one encounters the mysteries of nature and of nature's most mysterious creation the human heart for there is says Ruskin sorry I should have shown that so this is just where he's outlying the three laws of composition by drawing mystery where the line stops you encounter the mysteries of nature and of nature's most mysterious creation the human heart for there is says Ruskin a perpetual lesson in every serrated point and shining vein which escapes or deceives our sight among the forest leaves how little we may hope to discern clearly or judge justly the rents and veins of the human heart how much of all that is round us in men's actions or spirits which we at first think we understand a closer and more loving watchfulness to show to be full of mystery never to be either fathomed or withdrawn at the point at which we perceive all that we cannot perceive we become aware at the centre of nature of a beating human heart this human presence is both mysterious literally shrouded in mystery and everywhere we look on this world in the instance our glimpse of the human comes into focus and coheres we see that we can never know what makes its heart beat perspective works differently here the closer we get the more the world withdraws revealing simply ourselves at the same time this vision of the forest is filled with other than human dynamism movement and life we cohere into the landscape only to be separated from it the leaves sharp points rebutt us so that the leaf itself appears like an uncanny organic artifact of a planet of which we are and are not apart from a 21st century perspective the way this climactic passage from a manual about naturalistic drawing discovers the human everywhere amidst the other than human might seem grossly arrogant even complicit in the anthropocentrism which has had such fatal consequences for the environments of this planet however I think this passage actually takes us deep into the paradigms of truly ecological thinking at this point of real human communion with nature distinctions seem to vanish subject disappears into object only to reappear as subject self becomes world nothing less than a new perspective on the world and our relations with it is accessed the close demanding watchfulness is loving in spite of the leaf's rebuttal stem and trunk pulse to the beat of loving human witness the full implication of this passage's collapse of categorical distinctions is that the fuzzy boundaries of human knowledge must be observed as well they might so that the integrity of the world beyond knowledge may be respected the mysterious other than human life allowed to live unencumbered according to its own laws at the same time everything is miraculously and completely bound together forest and man blood and sap near and far love and fear real communion between human beings cannot happen but the discovery of this impossibility which is the essence of art not to mention politics happens in the leaf's very veins the status of the body here is obviously extremely interesting the body crosses between the human and other than human becoming a quality of observer and leaf man and forest like we are made to think of fundamental bodily realities arteries veins and hearts physical experience is grounded and intensified in this encounter with the other than human at the same time of course with the jumbling of near and far subject and object just as the reader is made aware of Ruskin's body or perhaps of our own body as a reader and viewer of landscape we are also impressed with the sense of the distance of other bodies from our own of other hearts being so far away from our heart filling this space is the forest the earth this is ecstatic and it is extremely sad it is entirely typical of Ruskin that the significant and inwrought passage I have quoted is left as it is and in a sense the final ambivalence in Ruskin is always between author and reader or between drasman and viewer you get bossed about there is profuse detail but also a lot goes almost unsaid or obscured in shadow beneath some leaves in rocks and ferns in a wooded cross mount Perthshire 1847 everything is change, difference day mystery and darkness yet the places where light space and matter seem jumbled like around the leaves of the ferns in the foreground centre which bend the space they inhabit or are pressed against the surface of the paper like torn shapes or where detail is obscured and the lines are broken into mysterious colour as in the brown and teal areas to the right of these ferns and the trees these areas of obscurity nevertheless retain a degree of integrity somehow and do not disturb or alter the composition utterly do not disintegrate into formlessness or abstraction and of course the lustrous flawless surface of the trunk of the leftmost silver birch is the opposite of the passages of depth, jumbling and obscurity it rises as a coherent majestic form a roundness and solidity upon which line, tone and colour cohere to describe a world that extends beyond this spot of entanglement where up and down are indistinct leading up to the sky the foreground trunk allows us to get our bearings and anchors us like one of its roots the trees counterpart the right in shadow the less pretty of the couple sounds notes of companionship and individuality everywhere the description of life is imprinted with the energy of keen observation and quick thought it is as though in this drawing chaos and order movement and stillness human and other than human coexist in the same forms the one within the other the twigs sticking out of the mound of brown earth just top left the trees for instance very much like arteries we can imagine the central twig bending back pulsing a ultralike with a hot thick flow of human blood and yet these other than human objects are entirely that too other than human at the point of acknowledging the closeness of the visual analogy with human forms the drawn object the twig reasserts itself and all the while our attention is being drawn away to the neighbouring leaf or stem which we think we can see out of the corner of our eye quivering and glistening with you so this is somewhat abrupt conclusion but what I've been trying to show is that Ruskin was continually weaving an utter entanglement out of the questions of human knowledge vision the body and I think the body the issue of the body in Ruskin has been gravely underplayed the body's passions and sensations and other than human life thank you Thomas thank you so much it was really wonderful and this idea of loving human witness as well as this idea of the rawness of perception and almost like a kind of marvellous in Ruskin and the kind of life of the inanimate object there's so much there and thank you so much it will be great to talk about that when we get to our Q&A it's a pearl of light here hopefully you can still see me but um radiant I will move on to introduce Evelyn so Evelyn Morrell Campbell is a PhD student in the centre for film and screen studies at the University of Cambridge she is the recipient of an honorary vice-chancellors award and an AHRC OOC DTP studentship Evelyn's thesis is concerned with tracing alternative reproductive genealogies through the work of feminist and or queer video artists from the 1980s to the present her writing has also played in various publications including fdbn fictions and another gaze and Evelyn's title today is Horizontality and Beholding in Charlotte Projes Bridget 2016 thank you over to you thank you thanks everyone for coming and thank you to the Paul Mellon Centre for hosting a wonderful panel and a wonderful series of events over the past months, few weeks so if we were in person I would have probably shown a clip of Charlotte Projes film but I found that with kind of poor my poor wifi probably wouldn't come through and do the work justice so hopefully if you saw the film when it was shown in the Turner Prize exhibition several years ago you might this talk might spark memories and if not hopefully the images and the talk will kind of increasingly wash over you and produce new thoughts as well so in an interview for the Guardian the Scottish artist Charlotte Projes referred to her iPhone the device on which the entirety of her Turner Prize winning film Bridget was shot as quote a filthy format smeared and grubby in this quotation Projes describes the organic materiality of an object more typically fetishised for its smooth surfaces and clean lines presenting instead the unsightly reality of its contaminating encounter with a grimy human body Projes own identity immediately implements attention to the way such statements are filled equally adhere to the queer body a heteronormative smear against deviance reclaimed as a practice of resistance and transgression this paper will attend to the filthy slippage between the iPhone and body as an opening onto the particularly queer ecology explored in Projes Bridget in mobilising the horizontality and handheld format of the iPhone this paper explores the ways in which Bridget embodies a present of human and non-human coexistence based upon a queer axis of common creatureliness a fragile present of coexistence which offers the only possible path to our shared ecological crisis filmed in Projes flat in Scotland's forests and on its seas Bridget navigates the entwined relationships between queer bodies of ecology, language, technology and time the film's episodic structure explores Projes own queer identity in relation to various temporalities Neolithic prehistory, biography and the embodied present sections from Projes own diaries alongside other texts such as Julian Cope's The Modern Antiquarian and Sandy Stone's The War of Desire and Technology of the close of the mechanical age are read aloud by the artists and close friends these voices narrate a journey through the body as Projes leaves and returns to consciousness under the effects of anaesthetic following surgery a journey which also moves through various states both belonging to Projes her teenage years in Aberdeenshire the bed in the recovery ward the end of a long day in her studio and those belonging to others tracing a multiplicity akin to the changing names of the titular Neolithic deity Bridget this loose narrative thread that we use across time and lingers in moments of bodily vulnerability opens onto the fragile connections between all life human and non-human yet despite these ecologically minded encounters the limited critical reception of Projes work has tended to ignore its radical materiality instead returning to metaphors drawn from the British tradition of landscape painting yet in the same way that Projes hand and words dirty the smooth surface of the iPhone Bridget does not so much slip over as sticks in intimate moments of the encounter between humans and non-humans after several seconds of silent darkness Bridget opens onto the interior of a room a pair of trainer-clad feet are visible crossed against the plastic laminated wood of an armrest that protrudes into the frame beyond the trainers is the bay window its white wood paneling echoing the rectangular bright light of the window pane set on a wooden box and alcove are two potted plants out of focus and blurred at their tops where the white light swallows the waxy surface of their leaves the low angle of the camera and proximity to the trainers suggest its placement on the stomach of a reclining body off-screen a gentle up and down motion indexes the fragile life and aliveness of this body the rising and falling of its diaphragm this opening image is comprised of multiple horizons the horizontal format of the footage replicates the orientation of the iPhone on which it was filmed the rectangular phone also finds a mirror in the horizontality of the wooden box the armrest and the axis provided by the reclining body Bridget is a film stretched out by horizons the horizontal movement of a red lorry along its road to the camera the horizon of sea and sky behind the seaborn trawler the deck of the ferry moving in the swell project began making Bridget during her recovery from elective hysterectomy an unnamed procedure which grounds the film project's limited mobility conditions these static horizontal shots the iPhone held close to the body as it lies in a state of rest this perspectival reorientation destabilizes heteronormative visions of the world reappropriating a colloquial slur such horizontality recalls being bent the immoral inclinations of deviant sexuality in this alignment the queer person is placed on the same low ground as creaturely life an upright posture and moral rectitude being that which sets the male heterosexual subject apart from animals however Bridget explores how if the queer is bent in the direction of animal life this slur can be reclaimed for an ecologically minded ethics the shot that follows this opening scene is of a small, wooded area the camera of a rain stationery is an almost imperceptible breeze blows through russet thrones of heather a voice project's own begins interweaving an autobiographical narration of her late teenage years in quote the austere agricultural landscape of rural Aberdeenshire and contemplaneous writing of Julian Cope during his repeated visits to the stone circles of project's childhood region project lists, copes, feminized names for the neolithic sites and quotes bang in the middle of the great mother's heart he writes that's how it feels to stand in a sacred Aberdeenshire landscape the maternal is repeatedly invoked the heart a conspicuous proxy for the mother's womb yet the accompanying image of the trees little in the way of a maternal embrace its planarity in the absence of a clear central vanishing point works to flatten the depth of field aided by the obscuring veil of fog so too is the womb its verical envelope laid flat as Cope's words are cut off by project's own narration and her quote obliviousness to his august Aberdeenshire experience this feminizing of the landscape inhabits both the monumental and cyclical temporalities which Julia Kristave identifies as women's time Cope's earth mothers are simultaneously the sedimentary giant tessers of rock and soil and fertile wombs incubating the cycle of the seasons and reproduction of new life project's horizontality a direct result of the removal of her own womb stages an alternative temporal landscape cycles of reproduction are laid flat in project's fallow time Bridget is composed entirely of slow almost completely static shots which spill outside the time of the voice narration the film theorist Carl Schoonover the quote aberrant temporality of the long take is equated with quote refuse useless activity and unproductive labour in an ambivalent relationship to the capitolry woman due to her queerness and hysterectomy project herself is laid to waste under the economy of heterosexual reproduction both materially and metaphorically emptied out of any utility she is fallow her body flattened in its state of rest and her removal of and from the matter and temporality of reproduction project's horizontality is non-productive presentness her body reorientated away from the never-ceasing cycle of an always future time of production her body's fallowness reclaims the unsone field as a site of ecological awareness the fallow field exists in a state of rest prior to its reuse but to reclaim the state of fallowness in itself is to see it not as a means to a future end of production and the exploitation of ecological resources but to emphasise its present state of being it is from this present state that a queer kinship is inaugurated as Bridget indexes project standing amongst the heather down the Voha house plants she is also literalising Elizabeth Freeman's queer bending of belonging into quote being long project is stretched out in body but more importantly stretched in time from the precarious present towards the future of renewal not based in reproduction but in a queer kinship of belonging or longing for proximity and intimacy yet crucially this longing is embodied and so passes more accurately into a form of beholding centred in the erotic materiality of sight the project does not only lie in the landscape but joins with non-human others in queer corporeal couplings project's body is tangible and vulnerable in her film even though her presence is only ever glimpsed as feet or fingers peek into the frame this refusal to depict directly can be understood as a refusal to fix the body within a singular identity rigid traces of fluidity of being through the changing identities of its namesake the neolithic goddess who as the narration tells us has gone by many names Bride, Bride, Brig Briseau of Delos, the Manx Bresci the Cretan Britomatis and Brie this stream of names marking identity as fluid, contingent and changeable is set alongside moments that index the violence of categorical fixity on the film's voice over project narrates past journal entries documenting moments of gender misrecognition where the non-conforming body is fixed under a suspicious gaze January 28 I'm on a shift at the bar where I work as a DJ I put on a long record and run to the toilet there's lots of people milling around and there chatting one girl sees me in the queue and shouts there's a boy in the girl's toilets the queer body generates a categorical confusion something the gaze of others attempt to fix yet Bridget proposes a different way of looking which avoids the problematics of fixity a way of looking which is tactile a beholding which is also about holding the object of one's gaze shadowing the entirety of the film is a state of bodily peril projects surgical opening and one of only a few direct a few moments of direct reference to the procedure project's voice describes the delivery of anaesthetic prior to surgery they've got me sat on a trolley hunched over she says so she can get between my vertebrae she's behind me can you feel that going down your legs and the other is right next to me touching my hand stroking it there's maybe something going into it this is an intensely tactile description project's narration is firmly embodied recalling the positioning of her body the touch of the nurses as they arrange her limbs and hold her hand even as this body loses consciousness materiality is primary the voice over continues recounting the last thing project sees before slipping under I think about a field I've got it in my mind's eye but it's not quite right can't get the right field so I keep changing it now this field now that one like slides I never settled on one and that slide show searching for the right field was the last content before nothing project searching is overlay with desire as she longs for the field with the right fit calling them up in their singularity now this field now that one to explore their different topographic contours these fields exist only for project we as spectators are watching the slow transition of shades from black through brown into yellow on screen however these colours it recalls the obstinacy of soil material rather than transcendental approximate to such fields of project's vision as the colours flicker and fade they point to the material condition of the filmic medium and the tactile qualities of the gaze necessary to behold them animals during project in her recovery from surgery following this description of anaesthetisation of the image filmed in project's flat a black cat is captured playing with a desk lamp its fur is lit up in the bulb's bright glow each hair in invitation to reach out and stroke the feline companion the cat's proximity to the camera lens strengthens this desire to touch to be in the warm familiar presence of another creature such proximity and desire recall Laura Marx's description of the haptic image under Marx's definition of the haptic image and spectator get in meshed held together in an embodied intersubjectivity which overcomes the distance and objectification associated with sight the stickiness of the haptic image and the ecological potential of Marx's argument is easy to draw out she states quote in a haptic relationship ourselves rushes up to the surface to interact with another surface we become amoeba like lacking a centre changing as a surface to which we cling changes project's film literalizes Marx's sticky amoeba as the cat becomes our partner with whom we want closeness an animal who is lovingly rented as an individual subject before the camera this moment of intimacy occurring in the privacy of the bedroom reaches into new possibilities of to use the words of Donna Haraway a queer kinship beyond heteronormative reproductive couplings around two-thirds of the way through Bridget a black screen suddenly floods with a bright red colour the red is not flat but it is instead a screen of vibrating pixels caused by project's own finger pressed over the camera as she films a screen of her laptop close-up indexed through the glimpse of a hard drive name on the desktop in a reflection in her laptop we see project's fingers wrap themselves around the entire edge of the phone and in seeing the reflection of the entire edge of the phone and in seeing the dirt and dust on the laptop screen we can imagine her hand transferring sweat oil and particles of dead skin to the phone's surfaces and orifices like the surgery this relationship is one of openness driven by material and epidermal contact project's body is exposed as an assemblage of parts brought into correspondence needle poking hand hand touching iPhone assemblages project enters into are intensely intimate the transfer of skin cells to the phone and her grasp, the flow of anaesthetic from needle into hand if one considers the potential pleasure of these corporeal coupleings the assemblage may be thought of as an erotic relation querying its challenge to heteronormative definitions of sexual desire Elizabeth Freeman finds that erotics quote traffic less in belief than in encounter less in damaged holes and intersections of body parts less in loss than a novel possibility will this part fit into that one the materiality of this erotic fitting into turns towards the stickiness of the encounter stickiness is broadly invoked here suggesting both an inescapable materiality coated in connotations of dirty secretions and loneliness and an adhesive force joins and transfers it is also used to raise a shadow of difficulty and friction in the building of human and non-human relations to recall the common axis of brutality upon which the empathy between queer bodies and non-human bodies are founded the traversal of boundaries in Bridget does not equate to their obliteration but rather cause attention to what either Hayward describes as the conditions of correspondence to the very interactability of the material differences between one human and other humans and non-humans differences which must be recognised in order to be bridged in acts of ecological empathy these multiple associations are all suspended over a shop midway through Bridget the lens is pointed upwards to an overhanging canopy of blossom covered branches which cross the screen in a forking v a form mirrored by a fake fur-rimmed hood at the bottom of the frame as midship fur and flowers recall their associative amalgam burrs these small seeds covered in spine-like teeth stick to the fibres of hair fur and clothing their proximity a form of intimate co-mingling a sticky transference there is a vulnerable exposure at the heart of this intimacy the burdock plant from which birds are produced is known to cause deaths among small birds unable to free themselves from entanglement the fake fur in Bridget raises its own sticky history of violent relations between the human and non-human its status as clothing also recalling the irony of an anthropocentric culture that devalues animal life whilst commodifying certain objects of human animal mimesis the process referenced again in another domestic shot in Bridget the artist's lion t-shirt drying over the radiator Bridget's ecological practice pursued through an erotic mode of relation draws attention to the intersecting intimacies and difficulties of interrelation these difficulties serve as warnings against abstraction in the face of an all-to-material state of climate crisis Bridget recognises the shared precarity and codependency of all life held amassed in each other's embrace a recognition which comes with an awareness of one's responsibility to all and any human and non-human life forms facing violence this responsibility is enacted by the individual boundaries where stickiness reminds us of the materiality of these meeting points that bring us into relation with non-human others this is a call for urgent social as well as environmental justice as project autobiographical accounts of misgendering recall the alienation faced by queer bodies under heteronormativity the system of humanism debases both animal and queer bodies through association we cannot achieve one form of justice the potential of the artwork that project can sound such calls for future liberation and reorientation visual art allows for the creation of alternative ways of experiencing and relating to one's environment whilst film expressly enables project to enact the very relation of the holding she promotes as its essential temporality and materiality permit her to linger in the physical presence of another forever suspended in the present moment of the encounter rigid literalizes the lozengatari's advice that quote sometimes it is necessary to lie down on the earth like the painter does in order to get to the percept rigid finds in this place of horizontality the seeds for future assistance thank you very much for listening thank you so much Helen that was really wonderful the great intimacy of your descriptions and analyses which really echo the work and thank you for it and I was really struck by the kind of the role in the last two papers and actually with Laura's paper and beyond of the kind of centrality of the human body and the human figure I was thinking about Thomas's kind of description of Ruskin which is very clearly sort of on the side of the human and then also in Evelyn's work this sense of the human and this sort of kind of cushing and pulling between some sense of what nature might be and I wondered about a sort of kind of indication here of a move from a sort of a sense when we've talked around ecology and ideas of the Anthropocene about movement from idea of culpability of the human to a kind of agency of the human and one of the texts and talking about the Anthropocene that was really struck me was this Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin text that talks about the reflexivity of the human that the human is simply one kind of natural force so to speak but it is the only reflexive natural force and it struck me that in both papers that was really that was something that was being tussled with. I wondered if you could comment on that and that sense of agency within this kind of ecological scenarios that we're talking about and Evelyn perhaps you'd like to answer that. Yeah sure, I think it's a really interesting question because I think the agency or the idea of human agency is something that has been behind the privileging of the human and a kind of anthropocentric narrative especially this idea of reflexivity maybe tending towards the kind of Cartesian dualism of this mind body but I think that there is a need to recognise or something that maybe happens in the production of artworks is an idea of thinking through different forms of agency in which human agency is wonderful but there's also like material agency so thinking through the agency of the, so in my paper the agency of the filmic medium and how that constrains what can be represented or the ways in which it's represented and also thinking more broadly into systems of industrial capitalism and the material transfer of that and following the agencies of specific materials so in a similar way to Sean's paper there's been work on that in relation to cinema Nadia Bozak's the cinematic footprint traces the history of oil as one of the central materials in celluloid and links that to the extractive logic of cinema in general is producing images from the natural world talking about Nanook of the north so I think there's a really interesting but as you characterize this kind of tussle with ideas of human agency in relation to non-human agency there's definitely there's no question of this sense of material agency and the life of the inanimate object and all of that which is so rich in this panel and I'm curious about the ultimate grounding which for Thomas and Ruskin is very much still with the kind of sense of human human belonging but Thomas could you respond to that question at all? Yeah sure thank you I think what you said definitely resonates a lot with Ruskin and where he sees human agency that's where morality is and responsibility but he's also interested in the limits of human agency and they're indefinable, they're shifting all the time but kind of but heeding those shifting limits of agency is the real moral task I think in Ruskin and by moral I mean ethical we would say ethical but what I would also say is that I think your language was really helpful Anna because it also fluctuates in Ruskin so one of the things floating around here is God and the human is in many ways the the apex of creation in Ruskin and it seems to vary to me whether he at points he you know he would he would prefer the earth to go on without us being here and at other points that's a completely unthinkable scenario and again so again it's about these he's often always holding these two contradictory ideas in his head at the time and maybe that's the fundamental ecology in Ruskin so does that answer your question? Yes it does thank you we have a question from Alicia Weisberg Roberts she'd like to ask both speakers to comment on the way in which medium underpins or enables the relationship of the subject to nature in the works that they are discussing it seems to me that portability transparency and gestural economy could describe the water colour box as well as the iPhone so these compact technologies allow their users to become conceptually as well as physically close to human or in human nature I hope that was clear enough Thomas would you like to go first? Oh sorry was that a question for me I thought it was from sorry would you mind repeating it or a summary of it sorry It's great it's to both speakers so let me read again to comment on the way in which medium underpins or enables the relationship of the subject to nature in the works that they are discussing it seems to me that portability transparency and gestural economy could describe the water colour box as well as the iPhone do these compact technologies allow their users to become conceptually as well as physically close to human or in human nature? That's a really interesting question there are lots of it's provoking lots of ideas Ruskin really drew with pencil and watercolour he couldn't really do oil painting or at least you know it's so challenging that I think it would have taken up too much time and he wouldn't have been able to do any writing and there's a freedom with the water colour but what the question makes me think of is the whole issue of Ruskin and photography because he's initially very enthusiastic user of the daguerreotype or gets his servants to use them for him but he judges his mind and decides that photography is this in a way cuts off human agency in nature and watercolour is a way of sustaining and perpetuating and energising the agency of your encounter with the other than him so what I would say is yes and that's consistent throughout his whole life watercolour and pencil what I don't know is anything about the materiality of the watercolours that he used and where these materials come from I've had a question about that before and I think that would be really interesting if he made particular choices as to which pigments he used and how they were manufactured and where they came from so I think that could be really interesting too Evelyn would you like to respond to that one? Yeah I think that's really interesting because I had similar thoughts when you were talking Thomas about the watercolour I was thinking about that as a material and the portability of the material in a similar way to the iPhone I think there's something in the way that project theorises the approaches using the iPhone was part of a longer trajectory in their work which is to do with the material investigation of various media formats in film but the iPhone itself project talks about in terms of its prosthetic quality so there's something to do with the proximate that I was trying to get to in the talk that the iPhone itself is embedded in the human and non-human relations because the artwork is produced by a relation to this non-human material or medium but on a kind of more basic level it just allows for various different shots that are incredibly easy to film and creates images that are more searching for vividly or more keenly demonstrate the human body behind the camera in the handheld format of it even if it's held in hand or placed on the body in the opening shot I didn't show the clip but you can see the frame clearly moving up and down in relation to the breath so there's a kind of intermingling or demonstration of the close relation between human and non-human life that I think is able to be achieved via the prosthetic quality of the iPhone but thank you for your question it was really interesting we have another question for Eleanor Newman for Thomas Hughes thank you for your fantastic paper have you found any connection between Ruskin's thoughts on printmaking and the particularities of different printed lines which he articulated in his Ariadna Florentina and your reading of his elements of drawing given the mediation of the drawn line and shade through the medium of print thank you for that question which is really interesting because the answer to that is I don't know but I'm going to look into it it's interesting because as has also been written about Ruskin after the elements of drawing changes of mind again and reincorporates line as a fundamental basis of art and so back tracks on the elevation of colour over outline and actually maybe there might be continuities or ways of problematising that by looking at Ariadna Florentina and resonances between that and the elements of drawing I suspect I haven't even claimed that that might be the case and so maybe these values with which Ruskin is charging colour in elements of drawing find later expression in his descriptions of particular engraving effects that would be really interesting thank you I'd like to encourage everybody to pose their questions and also to raise their hands Dani, do we have any raised hands at the moment or are we still up here? We've got a question from Emma Barker Hi Amy you're unmuted Can you hear me? Yes Hello Thomas thank you for your paper I was just wondering if Ruskin was in his statement about the blind man was consciously aware of engaging with the whole tradition of talking about how the blind man who suddenly can see sees the world which is very much part of the debates among empirical philosophers from Locke onwards and certainly part of that debate is that they would see the world not as lines and objects but as colours it's just something I've recently written about in an essay that I just published in the Oxford Art Journal in which I say that implicitly you can imagine the blind man seeing in a way I link it with interest in Rembrandt with a kind of world of colour but that apart I was just thinking about Ruskin's own philosophical commitments and how he might have been building on that empirical debate Oh thank you very much that's really interesting I would say yes definitely is Ruskin an empiricist I'm not so sure though No I'm sure not but presumably aware of Yeah definitely aware of and I think that's probably, thank you for that because I think that's probably a direct illusion Ruskin is drawing and that whole as I said that whole innocence of the eye passage is interesting because it's this footnote that's not essential to the instruction it's a kind of theoretical you know add-on but it's been taken as this kind of manifesto statement of Ruskin's and it isn't it's this very somewhat kind of a scant look the other thing he says about the blind man which is interesting is he says all great artists are like they sustain a vision analogous to the blind man who has just had his sight restored to the whole of their lives that they are able to see the world fresh every day and that the trick is to try and learn that freshness of vision Yeah so thank you very much and also the way Anna used the word the rawness of vision I think it's about that for Ruskin as well like I said you know is Ruskin empiricist is Ruskin alluding to Locke definitely but fundamentally it feels like an instinctive argument to me it isn't really made in logical terms but is a whole amalgam of all of these all of these kinds of sentences that I can try and to unpick but I will look into the Locke so thank you and your article of course Thank you so much and we'll take up further questions for Evelyn and Thomas after the next paper and in the final discussions and I would like to introduce our final speaker and so I'd like to introduce Luca Basil an art historian historian of science and computer programmer working on historic and contemporary instances of immersive media visual technology and mediated reality he is a PhD candidate not history at Frey University Berlin as part of the focus program the digital image by the German research foundation past affiliations include the Cone Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin in January 2020 he was a participant in the MIT reality hackathon at the MIT Media Lab and Luca's paper is titled As Nature Herself Might Do Were Her Such Intent the form giving forces of nature and their simulation in British pictures landscape art circa 1770 to 1820 Thanks for the kind introduction and thanks for the opportunity to participate in what has been a fascinating and very inspiring series and I'm humbled to give the final talk in the series maybe it might correspond nicely with a couple of things that we heard in the other panels and also with today's panel maybe also bridging between the watercolor and the iPhone as we heard in the comments and this sort of split practice between art history and software development opens sometimes new perspectives and facilitates a certain attention for the more computational moments in the history of art and in this case it leads me to the quite intimidating situation of being a German and presenting at the PMC a couple of ideas on what David Watkin called the major English contribution to European aesthetics namely the picturesque movement and I think the picturesque is a very intriguing episode in European cultural history David Marshall calls it a complex and at times paradoxical moment of contemporary attitudes about art, nature and aesthetic experience and it's so difficult to unravel the picturesque for the contemporaries and later scholars alike because it's so entangled between art, science the perception of nature but then also optical media and I feel that in this respect there's the strong relevance of the picturesque to some aspects of contemporary visual culture of the digital age in the way that there's a commonality in which immediate experience is sort of transposed with a sort of mediated reality and that images are structuring the experience and today we wouldn't paint watercolors in the lake district so much as we would upload a picture to social media and we would not marvel at or we don't find the fascination in the moving pictures of the Ido Fusicon by Lutabur in Leicester Square but maybe by the lifelikeness of artificial worlds in a virtual reality headset and in both periods the late 18th century and today's period we find an sort of amazement of spectators for the blurring of boundaries between the artificial and the natural and I feel that this sort of understanding of the picturesque as a transhistorical mode of vision that's a mode of vision is what Richard Payne Knight calls the picturesque allows us to re-address what Marshall sums up as the problem of the picturesque namely the difficulty of delineating a hybrid that seems to embody both nature and art, model and copy reality and representation and to find an entry point we can come back to the beautiful topic of cloud studies we had a great panel on meteorology with a focus on the 19th century and maybe this can serve as a bit of a backdrop I have never succeeded in drawing a cumulus John Ruskin famously complains its divisions of surface are grotesque and endless as those of a mountain perfectly defined brilliant beyond all power of color and transitory as a dream but even before cumulus clouds were even known as such just before their systematization by Luke Howard in the heyday of the picturesque movement clouds were a fascinating subject to study because they displayed the certain roughness that contemporaries deemed the key characteristic of the picturesque in a mountain scene what composition could arise what composition could arise from the corner of a smooth knoll coming forward on one side intersected by a smooth knoll on the other with a smooth plane perhaps in the middle and a smooth mountain in the distance the very idea is disgusting writes William Gilpin picturesque composition consists in uniting in one whole a variety of parts and these parts can only be obtained from rough objects so the picturesque on a formal level is perceived as this certain type of alignment geometry which is sought for in paintings and the natural landscape alike and in this sort of juxtaposition that we find in this period also here in Richard Paine Knight we can see that to transform a landscape garden from the style that was popular in the middle of the century to the more picturesque style we almost have to conduct some type of geometrical transformation that we need to kind of subdivide this Hogarthian line of beauty the smooth and curved line and we need to break it until there is no smooth contour left in the picture and here we see a sketch by Alexander Cosens trying to wrap his head around the outline of a cloud in its characteristic being both perfectly irregular but then also having some sort of regularity and today we call this the self similarity of the cloud meaning the property that in several levels of scaling of magnification we find the same pattern repeating all over again but under the notion of roughness it is understood by the artists of the picturesque like Cosens as a sort of common principle in the design of the natural things and in studies like these they reflect on such morphological processes of roughness in nature in a painting like this by Luther Buch we almost see or we see this common principle as a sort of cloud like structure that unifies all natural things and 200 years later Mandelbrot would continue the same sort of inquiry into those forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless to investigate the morphology of the amorphous and he would coin the term fractal geometry and obviously the landscape painting in the century has no concept of fractal geometry but it would have made things easier because the contemporaries are really struggling to define this sort of grotesque formal language of nature here we find a quote from the landscape magazine a treatise for the amateur artist where it says that the shadow of clouds as being of all forms are of no form and this quote speaks for a fascination for what is at the same time an excess of natural form giving but then also an absence of form or what in German would be called Gestalt all together and on a side note it would be interesting to link this sort of transitoriness or instability of form to this genre of the sublime landscape because especially with the landscape paintings by Luther Buch it seems that the sublime horror comes really from this monstrosity of this natural geometry that nature's power to disorganize or disintegrate is reflected on a very formal level by this sort of amorphous noisy chaos that we find in the picture but to come back to the landscape magazine it continues that accidents of light and shadow are usually caused by flying clouds whose form and density being reduced to no fixed principles as they produce are very beyond calculation and then it continues these effects art seizes and applies to her own purposes and I take this as a sort of program in a sort of programmatic way that natural accidents as the landscape magazine calls it are understood as being this type of emergent phenomena that emerged from a set of underlying processes of natural form giving and for art to shed its artificiality and become more natural it needs to likewise be derived from such processes here we have an example by German painter Hakkat and I would like to argue that picturesque painters study nature in order to get an understanding of this sort of regularity in order to quite literally put it in the picture it requires very intimate acquaintance with the natural objects and natural principles the landscape magazine writes in order to accurately to arrange them as nature herself might do for her such intent so a proximity to nature and naturalness is achieved not by a likeness or similarity in the appearance of the objects but painterly creations are authenticated as natural by incorporating this type of natural process wellity and I think this is a central feature of the picturesque movement which we also find in the approach of William Gilpin who would provide a sort of dictionary of picturesque objects and also give or look for what he calls little rules to rearrange them so Gilpin, Gilpin is approaching this sort of a grammar of nature and this grammatical approach is also satirized then famously in William Combe's satirical counterpart to Gilpin called Dr. Syntax and it's also said that capability Brown the industrious garden architect used a sort of what we could call a semi-algorithmic way of designing a landscape he would gallop through the gardens of his clients and quote now there said he pointing his finger I make a comma and they are pointing to another part a parenthesis now a full stop and then I begin another subject and I also find a similarity in some practices of Thomas Gainsborough most famously his use of miniature models composed of broccoli and lumps of coal that he used to design his landscapes and I think in landscapes like this one we find something measure less stays in the painting that we can trace back to the sort of self similarity that we find in the lump of coal or in the broccoli and I find it interesting that by averting his gaze from existing observed landscape by distancing himself from nature Gainsborough through the model still approaches some type of naturalness that is derived by this proportionality to nature from the miniature model and to give this approach a certain conceptual framework I would like to explore this term procedural generation it's a term from computer graphics and computer aided design and it's become quite the important new approach or paradigm in which a material or texture like the one we see below is not the design of a human creator but not it's also not taken from photography as we might think but it's the result of stacked computational procedures for example layers of white noise and we can see such an algorithm in the background and this is interesting for many reasons the most important one being that we're not dealing with one single artistic design in the very classical sense here but an infinite amount of possible outcomes from this sort of system so the role of the artist shifts from having to come up with the artistic design to laying out the procedures and the parameters of which the designs are then outcomes and we can go back to the 18th century I think this corresponds very nicely to the various undertakings of Alexander Kozens who is this fascinating figure and I think that his endeavors in the systematization of trees, of faces, of clouds, of landscape compositions shouldn't so much be understood as a mere taxonomical endeavor an urge to categorize and restricting himself from the observable effects but in the juxtaposition of natural variety the individual specimens are sort of extrapolated from and led back to a common rule set that guides their design his pupil, William Thomas Backford called him famously almost as full of systems as the universe and Kozens is a champion of this approach in which conventional artistic modes of invention and imitation are expanded by a sort of synthetic approach Kozens dissects the visible world and then turns it into the system from which he then derives his designs most famously and then the individual designs are then studied for their let's say aesthetic qualities and this most famously this happens in his inkblots Kozens really maximizes what he calls a production of chance with a small degree of design and making use of a method that we might call procedural so Kozens what he does here is he provides an artistic solution to one of the central aesthetic issues of the picturesque namely how to overcome the sort of human aesthetic decision making in designing nature and approaching this certain grotesque quality of natural morphology and I think this brings us back nicely to this panel and the question of human agency and I like the term of a simulation here because it brings us back to what Marshall calls the problem of the picturesque the difficulty of delineating this hybrid of human body both nature and art model and copy reality and representation and I think the term simulation of nature is helpful because it helps to reframe this problem of the picturesque and readdress this coalescence of the natural and the artificial into a new mode of representation so in some ways the procedural origin of these artifacts of the picturesque period they're not longer mere fiction or imaginary objects but they are then kind of extrapolated from nature and this produces there let's call it the reality effect Kozens writes that composing landscapes by invention is not the art of imitating individual nature it is more it is forming artificial representations of landscape on the general principles of nature and in the landscape magazine we read that art must expect applause in proportion to imitation of nature and from nature must procure all her materials her highest glory is to produce in the mind the same sensations as the original objects themselves might produce if actually present and so this the sort of procedural or simulated origin of those objects are then the reason for this substitution of immediate experience and the sort of mediated experience of nature and as a good German I want to close my talk with a reference to Goethe because in his reflections on the prime audio plant I see a strong correspondence to this sort of simulated mode of existence of the artificial objects Goethe was looking for the prime audio plant and we have to understand this as a mixture between a sort of counter counterpoint to linear and botanical systematization but also a thought experiment in fictionality and Goethe writes that the prime audio plant will be the most wondrous creation of the world for which nature should envy me with this model and the key to it one can invent infinite plants that have to be consequent this means that even if they don't exist they could exist and are not painterly or poetic shadows or illusions but have an inner truth and necessity. Thank you very much and very much looking forward for the discussion. Thank you, Luca, that was hugely interesting and incredible reading of what you seem to be proposing and the kind of almost algorithmic sense of the natural and the kind of ideas of chance and contingency that come in with that as well as order and design and those kind of dualisms we haven't got a huge amount of time left so what I'd really like to do is open out to the rest of the panelists and also to our audience to open for some further conversation and perhaps we could go back to this notion that came up right at the beginning in Chauvin's paper around these ideas of mediation and this kind of highly charged and kind of nervous system charged sense of mediation where we have these wonderful sinotypes and these tentacular formations I wonder if we could go back to that and have a think about that theme of mediation and how we might draw comparisons across the different technologies that we've talked around from computer procedural generation and computer graphics to the iPhone computer to the kind of photographic surface but anybody like to comment on those themes of mediation that have come up currently okay well let's go back to audience question I think it would be good to go back to Laura there is a question which touches on what I was talking about to some extent I rather thought about sound wave propagation while looking at Layton's painting and how the bodily experience of them would you relate the acoustics from the perspective of physics to this painting yeah that's a really really good question so I mean yes in short yes there's absolutely the direction that my research is going in and there's certainly the direction that I want to take the chapter forward in I think in order to do that with this painting you would need to have more of a shored up sound presence within it so I'm actually more currently I'm actually more concerned and more interested in working on the way like yeah the propagation of sound waves from the perspective of physics within some of Layton's works where there is more of a literal depiction of sound so he's got these two really interesting freezes one called music and one called dance and they're sort of abstract in terms of the fact that they're trying to present an abstract concept via figurative means and I'm quite interested in looking at the ways in which there's a literal propagation of media and medium throughout the work and how the sound always is to travel from right to left or from left to right so yeah I mean that's very much how I'd want to approach that moving forward if I answered the question and I'd like to go back to Evelyn and you know this the title of this panel was The Boundaries and it was great for you to take us back to this idea of the Cartesian dualism that you know is really kind of something that is working you know these papers are kind of dealing with against trying to think out of thinking out of these dualisms and recognising ecological forms of thought and art making and do you think that is there a sense that there is a success in doing that but this is a real possibility um okay I'm going to try and answer that question um maybe I can bring in some thoughts I had in reference to your question about mediation because potentially that can help understand this dualism because I think how mediation might have figured actually all of the papers in this panel is a way it's like a passage or a channel out of this dualistic model and also is a kind of way of complicating that binary um because if you have mediation it's kind of crossing over um in some senses and I think that's especially how it features in Bridget because the mediation of the iPhone is literally complicating the boundaries of the body and this this distinction between mind and body maybe as well um I think the question of whether it's possible to move to challenge it is something that is actually kind of worth going back to because I think a lot of contemporary theory um at least um that I've read kind of assumes that we're doing that work and doesn't maybe think about um is it ever possible like is there a limit to that but I think that it's worth doing and especially in connection to decolonising that dualism which I think is something that Siobhan mentioned as well the the Cartesian dualism is central to Western understandings of nature and culture I think was in Siobhan's paper but also in relation to um modes of thought and um a sense of like disciplining bodies and um in relation to my paper but could be thought more broadly across other marginalised subjects is this idea of being closer to the animal or closer to the embodied state I suppose as being closer to the animal and therefore less human and therefore a subject of well a subject of subjugation and um of discipline and of marginality so I think it's um it's something that we should always look it should be into as is and all of our papers was integrated into it this kind of like epistemological challenge um but I think it's really worth continually going back to are we actually are we simply reinforcing that in language and kind of creating those um uh like are we recreating a different binary in the work that we're doing if that kind of answers your question but I think it's yeah it's really interesting that was that was a tough question to pose anything else we'd like to answer or add to what Siobhan you were nodding I know you've got something to say yeah Evelyn thank you for that it's a really kind of thoughtful summation I think you raise a kind of couple really important points like one is that um you know there's all of this amazing scholarship coming out but you know in our history as a discipline and in many of our like trainings and cultural backgrounds you know we don't really have language that allows us to expand our ontologies and epistemologies and there are you know ways of being in the world that don't rely on these dualisms the indigenous epistemologies points to these other ways forward um but it's not as simple as just like adopting them as a framework and putting them into our own research right like these are kind of um I think ongoing ways of like learning and unlearning and you know in some ways um trying to move closer towards decolonizing methodologies while still being you know careful about the limitations of that within the structures of our discipline and the structures of our work so um it's a big question I think that we all kind of have to be like continually refining I guess I think we're drawing towards a close and it's been a little bit of a marathon session so I'm very grateful for everybody for everybody sticking with the two and a half hours and um and our audience I would you know if they're already hands raised am I right? Natalia Bosco had her hand raised if we have time for her question Well we can certainly have a last question from Natalia if she would like to ask her Hi Hi Natalia Thank you for un-muting me um uh thanks Laura for answering my question I still have a question to Luca uh so if I understand you correctly you see the um say algorithmic thinking in nato philosophical um in the application of the ideas of nato nato philosophy in art that's from what you what you told us um it's it's tough to to to see the origin of something in something but I would say that this is a sort of a computational moment in industry of art thank you in which the sort of in in which there is this I mean it would be very interesting to really like link it to to developments in mathematics but I'm I'm just diving into the subject and also into the history of early history of computing which develops around the same time but this is maybe for the for the future research yeah that's interesting thank you I would like to thank everybody hugely for their contributions which have been so interesting today and and just to encourage um all of our panelists and audience to join us on Thursday for our final panel discussion where we'll be talking about the issues that have been raised today and many others as well and that is at 12 30 on Thursday so please do sign up and join us and thank you all very much