Treffer: Objectivity and representative practices across artistic and scientific visualization

This chapter highlights the story of how artists participated in the practices of observation that Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison compellingly define as collective empiricism. It shows the history of scientific objectivity has constantly crossed paths with the history of artistic visualization, from which it has received some powerful challenges. Historicizing the category of representation also has the advantage of reinforcing its vital connection with visualizational connection that is rarely addressed in current philosophical discussions. Distinctive of twentieth-century image- making, trained judgment was a reaction to the constraints imposed by mechanical reproducibility. In the age of computerization, visualization challenges the boundaries between the artifactual and the natural: The new scientific images fulfill the purpose of manipulating the realand they do so in an aesthetically pleasing way. Callanan's artwork is a physical visualization of real-time raw scientific data.