Knowledge and its Visualization

Cornelius Borck

Research in the biosciences and medical practice rely today heavily on technologies of visualization. Images can make visible what is invisible in the interiors of the body (the ultrasound image of an unborn child or the X-ray image of pneumonia). Images bring the excessively small or large to measures of recognizability. (microscope and telescope). Images can also make visible phenomena beyond the human senses (e.g. electrical activity of the human heart in an ECG) or abstract scientific constructs (e.g. activation patterns in the brain during mental processes).

Scientific visualizations are not only determined by what is to be shown on them and thus should be proven, but also by technical requirements of the methods employed. Specific technologies must be available and the technical media used format the results according to the technical specification. Often long trajectories of the development and implementation have sedimented in the imaging technologies used today resulting in specific modes of representation and habits of seeing. In this way the history of technology and the cultural contexts shape the uses of visualization procedures as, conversely, new visualization techniques impact on culture and society; one thinks, for example, of the circulation of photographic images in the present.

This makes visualization methods an important research topic at the interface of the history of science, historical epistemology and cultural studies. The book Brainwaves: A Cultural History of Electroencephalography explores the following questions based on the development of the EEG: What methodological, technical and epistemic prerequisites are incorporated into certain forms of visualization and what effects do specific visualization processes have on the knowledge gained and its dissemination?

Visualizations serve not only research, but also teaching and the dissemination of scientific knowledge. A spectacular historical example provides Fritz Kahn, a physician and medical journalist with his innovative illustrations of the construction and function of the human body for the mass audience of the Weimar Germany and which have recently become quite popular again. His images show basic anatomical-physiological knowledge in the form of sophisticated montage images that blend the human body with machines and technical structures. At first glance, they seem to visualize anonymous machine medicine. But this reading conflicts with Kahn’s humanistic attitudes, who offered sexual counseling alongside his practice in Berlin and was forced to emigrate in the US due to its Jewish ancestry: Kahn visualized the utopia of a technological explainability of biological nature.

The montage images that the Berlin Dadaists used specifically for political agitation at the same time in the Weimar Republic prove to be similarly sophisticated. Here, too, the first impression is slightly deceptive. For these images are not exhausted in the seemingly unambiguously depicted critique of technology; rather, Raoul Hausmann, for example, worked on projects of a technological overcoming of the limits of the human senses, that envisioned a fusion of vision and hearing and thus pioneered human enhancement. Hannah Höch, by contrast, his short-lived partner in those turbulent Berlin years, perfected photomontage for questioning gender and ethnic stereotypes of her times; a queer artist avant la lettre.