Anya Ventura “Scientific pictures are not decoration but knowledge,” declared photo historian Vicki Goldberg in the first sentence of a 2001 New York Times article on the use of imagery in scientific practice.1 In this statement, we see a prevailing logic at work: the division between subjectivity and objectivity, form and function, pleasure and utility. To decorate, we find, is to augment reality through artifice, to overlay inoperable aesthetic considerations atop what we know to be “true” and factual. It is amid such binary oppositions that the confusion over “false color” emerges in the interpretation of telescopic images of deep space, the most famous of which are images like the Eagle Nebula produced by the Hubble Telescope.2 “False color” is the term used to describe the color assigned to the invisible wavelengths picked up by the telescope’s detectors, including radio waves, infrared light, X-rays, and gamma rays.3 The process of applying color to what were originally black and white images is the source of some contention among audiences who feel “tricked” upon discovering the photographs are not the …

Leonie Cooper The sun rose as quickly as it had set. Suddenly there it was, a brilliant red in my view through the periscope. It was blinding…Suddenly I saw around the capsule a huge field of particles that looked like tiny yellow stars, there were thousands of them, like swirling fireflies.1 An astronaut appears… The Space Race of the 1960s was a “theatrics of space” cultivated by NASA from an array of screen and space technologies, and within this arena, astronauts performed a vital function for they were witness to inexplicable sights never before seen.2 Often they appeared star-struck and dumbfounded: John Glenn, for instance, was astonished by the strange luminescent phenomena that appeared during his orbital flight aboard Friendship 7 in 1962. Even though Scott Carpenter’s subsequent mission provided an explanation for these mystical “fireflies”—they were the result of ice crystals forming around the spacecraft and then drifting free of it—Glenn’s encounter remains one of the many events that have granted NASA’s astronauts an equally mystical ability to see beyond visible boundaries. Conjugating up the …

Vanessa Meikle Schulman [The wound around his eye] has been constantly open, suppurating and discharging ever since … with loss of strength and increasing blindness in the left eye which is very weak & he is less & less able each year to do any manual labor or care for himself. 1 Applying in 1882 for an increase to his Civil War pension, Private James M. Greenleaf, who received his facial wound at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, attempted to convince the government that his eye—unhealed and rapidly losing its sight—was so debilitating as to prevent him from earning a living through gainful employment. To the above statement in his pension application, Greenleaf added an “affidavit signed by 24 acquaintances stating that his wound was worse than the loss of an arm or a leg.”2 Though Greenleaf also complained of pain in his hip, it was the wound to his face, with its leaking pus, that made him “totally & permanently helpless,” as the government surgeon wrote on examining him in 1907.3 The claim that Greenleaf’s …

  Safiya Umoja Noble Introduction Google has become a central object of study for digital media scholars due to the power and impact wielded by the necessity to begin most engagements with social media via a search process, and the near-universality with which Google has been adopted and embedded into all aspects of the digital media landscape to respond to that need.1 Therefore, the near-ubiquitous use of search engines, and Google, in particular, in the United States demands a closer inspection of what values are assigned to race and gender in classification and web indexing systems and the search results they return. It also calls for explorations into the source of these kinds of representations and how they came to be so fundamental to the classification of human beings. In this research, I am interested in knowing two things: what kinds of results do Google’s search engine provide about Black girls when keyword searching, and what do the results mean in historical and social contexts? I also want to know in what ways does Google …

Alexander García Düttmann At one point in Walter Benjamin’s A Brief History of Photography, the photographic medium is defined in terms of a surplus.1 Or, to put it differently, it is this surplus that is said to account for what is “new and particular” about photography. In a photograph, Benjamin suggests, there is always a remainder that cannot be integrated into whatever it is that turns this photograph into a work of art, into an artist’s work. Whatever testifies to the art of the photographer must exclude this other element, as if photography as art were as much the result of an achievement as the result of an exclusion, of a failure to capture what it is that makes photography into photography, and as if this failure were not the fault of the artist but constitutive of photography itself. Photography appears as an art that is supplemented by something that does not, and that cannot, belong to art. But what is it that Benjamin means by “art”? The answer to this question can be sought in …

Robert Stock and Beate Ochsner I. Introduction In their book Cultural Locations of Disability, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder critically examine the Deaf-and-Blind-cycle made by Frederick Wiseman in the 1980s, and point out how the documentary filmmaker seeks to analyze the disciplinary techniques used in institutions for the blind, deaf and blind.1  The authors conceive of Wiseman’s observational “direct-cinema”-approach – that sometimes seems ambivalently voyeuristic – as a means of critique that aims at demonstrating how subjects are treated in these specific sites for the disabled and how such institutions “coerce acceptable behaviors and restrict bodily movements as their primary tactic.”2  Regarding the portrayal of the blind and deaf-blind within the institutional frame in these films, Mitchell and Snyder detect a hierarchy between the sighted and non-sighted that also surfaces in scenes addressing cane traveling. During the mobility training, individuals that have become blind are introduced to a dual discipline. For instance, a young woman “learns to maneuver a cane while also being subject to the evaluative oversight of the instructor.”3  It is a practice …

Trevor Hoag This essay is dedicated to the victims/survivors of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Connecticut (2012), and to victims/survivors of (gun) violence everywhere.1 It is not you who will speak; let the disaster speak in you, even if it be by your forgetfulness or [ . . . blindness]. — Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster2 A forgetful memory of events. The morning of September 28th, 2010, I shuffled half-asleep from the bedroom to my office intent on perusing the Web. After checking my email and the news, not a lot stood out. However, while reading Facebook posts from members of the UT-Austin community, my blood ran cold: Trish Roberts-Miller (September 28, 2010 at 8:29am): just heard there is a shooter on the UT campus, at 21st and Guadalupe.3 Trish Roberts-Miller (September 28, 2010 at 8:44am): Lots of sirens, and I’m sitting in my dark office filling out forms.4 Clay Spinuzzi (September 28, 2010 at 8:45am via @spinuzzi on Twitter): apparently campus is on lockdown due to armed shooter. i am …

Issue 19: Blind Spots (Fall 2013) Christopher Schaberg On a recent morning as I browsed through my Twitter home feed, I noticed some intriguing buzz about using the iPhone Siri function to “see which plane is flying overhead.” I’ve been thinking about this common experience lately: when you notice an airliner in the sky. But I am less interested in identifying the specific planes and their mapped lines of flight, and more curious about the feelings and sensations that such sightings produce, if only for an instant. Hiraki Sawa’s video artwork Dwelling (2002) considers this experience in uncanny ways—ways worth lingering on, if not determining precisely à la Siri. Dwelling begins outside an ordinary apartment. We approach; we enter and ascend a staircase.1 At first, upon entering, everything seems stunningly ordinary; it’s just a plain apartment. Suddenly we see airplanes on the floor. Or is it a taxiway? From the outset, Sawa plays with familiar perceptions of environment, the interior-exterior divide, spatial logic and ground. Next, we see a few planes on a small table. …