Innovation with Words and Visuals. A Baroque Sensibility,

Throughout history Man has tried to control his environment. Discovery and invention have ensured that mankind developed. Through drawings, and later writing, Man was able to pass accumulated knowledge on to generations that followed. Even today, the image and the word are the most important carriers of our knowledge. For the most part we owe thanksfor a lot of our knowledge of technology to innovators who were also skilled illustrators.

2009

The "New Science" of Galileo, Kepler, Harvey, Descartes, Boyle, Steno, etc., and the Baroque in visual arts and literature, are two conspicuous aspects of seventeenth-century European elite culture. If standard historiography of science can be relied upon, the former of the two was not affected by the latter. The lecture asks whether this is a "fact of history" or an artefact of historiography. A delimitation of the "Baroque" going beyond the commonplaces of overloading and contortion concentrates on the acceptance of ambiguity and the appurtenance to a "representative public sphere", contrasting with the quest for clarity and the argument-based public sphere of the new science, suggesting that Baroque and New Science were indeed incompatible currents. A close-up looks at Juan Caramuel y Lobkowitz, who was a major Baroque theoretician but also wrote much on mathematics, finding even within his mathematics love for ambiguity. The way his mathematics is spoken about in the Oldenburg correspondence shows that the mainstream of the New Science saw no interest in this.

Metascience, 2000

1991

“Docet parva pictura, quod multae scripturae non dicunt.” Frontispieces, their Functions and their Audiences in Seventeenth-Century Mathematical Sciences, in: Kusukawa, Sachiko/Maclean, Ian (eds.): Transmitting Knowledge: Words, Images and Instruments in Early Modern Europe, London/Oxford 2006, 239-270

2015

How does the book-object in early modernity participate in the representation of scientific knowledge? How was the reader meant to approach the book and to comprehend its contents? This project starts from the contention that scientific knowledge is not a product simply to be deposited into unmarked containers and transmitted unproblematically. On the contrary, the book, whether literary or scientific, actively shapes and invents objects of scientific knowledge. Sensory, affective and cognitive ways in which the reader is expected to approach the book and its contents are implicit in its formatting of text and image, not to mention margins, presentational material and indices. This project draws from literary and natural scientific traditions of the French and Italian Renaissance in order to study how the early-modern book forms and performs scientific knowledge in various ways. Compelling the reader to interrupt his or her reading and to explore the book's text and images as if they were objects in their own right, the book-object strives to imitate the experience and method of scientific discovery for the early-modern reader. To this end, touch, appetition, and bodily awareness become as important as sight and critical reasoning in a procedural approach and apprehension of knowledge in and of the bookobject. An "aesthetics of discovery", formed by the book and performed by the reader, is implicit in the book's careful articulations of text and image. Chapter 3 "'The Workshop of my Imagination': Mise-en-Page and the pp. 106-156 Embodiment of Discovery in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Songe de Poliphile." Chapter 4 "Aesthetics of Discovery: Pierre Belon's Histoire Naturelle pp. 157-213 des Estranges Poissons Marins (1551)" Chapter 5 "Observing the Objects of Nature in Belon's Histoire pp. 214-269 naturelle and Observations de plusieurs singularitez (1553)" Conclusion pp. 270-285

2009

This work seeks to open possibilities for rhetorical invention, or perhaps more accurately, to indicate how changes in technology (and the essences of technology) are opening radical possibilities not just for rhetorical invention but also for how we speak, how we think, or even how we live in our worlds. It traces shifts in rhetorical invention: beginning from primary oral cultures, which made linkages via a process of "AND" or divine inspiration, represented by the +, to literate cultures (or print-cultures), which predominantly invent via analogy and discovery, represented by the =, and to electronic cultures, which revel in the avant-garde art technique of juxtaposition as inventive strategy, represented by the /. Working then with this / as guiding inventional strategy, and turning to Gregory L. Ulmer's conductive logic, puncepts, and choragraphy as / possibilities, this work attempts to re-envision classical rhetoric concepts logos, ethos, and pathos in order to open new considerations and complexities for rhetoric (and for the university) as we move out of 19th century academic traditions and unfold into the 21st century possibilities. More specifically, using the / as inventional process, and working with Ulmer's corpus, this work attempts to open radical possibilities for rhetorical invention by seeking to move it out of restrictive economies that limit inventive potential and into more generative (general) economies of possibilities. In doing so, it opens the conversation to issues of absence and "absencing" (in counter-distinction to Martin Heidegger's notions of presencing), to unstable electrate schizo-nomadic "sub/ject" possibilities (which become generative, in nomadic/tourism fashion), and to the catastrophic (introducing radical possibilities for restrictive economies). iii Additionally, what this work does, aside from reconstituting rhetorical invention as a mix of Ulmer's conductive logic, Lyotard's paralogy, and Leibniz-Borges-Deleuze's vicediction, is that it works with an inventive methodology. This print-culture product sits on one side of the slash, and an/other, an alternative, rendered in the electronic assemblage platform Sophie2, sits on the other side of the slash. In their juxtaposition, this dissertation and its digital/electronic other, they perform the very possibilities of rhetorical invention being critically offered in this work. Chapter I Exigence: Naming/Inventing the Problem I In April 2006, the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article called "Digital Dust Up," written by Peter Monaghan. In the article, Monaghan discusses the troubles Virginia Kuhn encountered in trying to get her successfully defended dissertation published through the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee system. 1 The issues Kuhn kept running into revolved not around content, which is often the holdup with doctoral work, but around form (even format): her dissertation was "digital," but far more than just an Adobe (pdf) version of a print-based document. Her work, constructed in TK3, 2 used images (moving and still), hyperlinks, pop-up boxes, and so on and introduced possibilities and functions more in keeping with digital media than the traditional print-culture associated with the dissertation. In the article, Kuhn is quoted as saying, "As I did my research, I became convinced that I had to put it in this digital format, because the subject is what happens to writing, now, in this digital age. I couldn't make the argument without the digital format" (A42). The digital format was not only integral but necessary for her work on multimodal literacy: it had to be done in a medium that allowed for things not possible in print-literacy media. But Kuhn's work is not the first to transgress or push the print-literacy boundaries of doctoral scholarship. focus on persuasion-and even a move from the "new" rhetoric-Kenneth Burke's influence with a focus on identification-and instead a drifting in Jean François Lyotard's paralogism, with a focus on instabilities, marginalia (marginals), de/stabilization and dis/placements, among other (sub/verting or perverting) connections. We must, then, as Jacques Derrida tells us in "Psyche: Inventing the Other," 22 work to "unsettle the givens," to subvert the anticipated conventions 23 of this work: It is certainly expected of a discourse on invention that it should fulfill its own promise or honor its contract: it will deal with invention. But it is also hoped (the letter of the contract implies this) that it will put forth something brand new-in terms of words or things, in its utterance or its enunciation-on the subject of invention [….] To however limited an extent, in order not to disappoint its audience, it ought to invent. We expect that it state the unexpected. (315) But we must also keep in mind that we are not only pursuing a discourse on invention but also that we are (or should be) working in terms of invention-that is, the occurrence of invention-with the singular (unique) structure of an event that seems to produce itself by speaking of itself, by the fact of speaking of itself, once it has begun to invent on the subject of invention, paving the way for it, inaugurating or signing its uniqueness, bringing it about, as it were, at the same moment as it also names and describes the generality of its

2006

This ‘viewpoint’ is a reflective exploration of the typological process as developed by Saverio Muratori, Gianfranco Caniggia, Gian Luigi Maffei, Giancarlo Cataldi and others.1 Out of that exploration comes an argument about the language of tradition and innovation. The germ of my argument lies in a combination of experiences. The first was helping with the translation of Gianfranco Caniggia’s and Gian Luigi Maffei’s Lettura dell’edilizia di base, published in English as Interpreting basic building.2 The other experience was editing a selection of contemporary architectural writing. While working on the translation of Lettura, a draft was circulated for comments and I was struck by two distinctly different responses to the language (the parole) emerging from the translation of Caniggia’s and Maffei’s text. One was surprise at what appeared to that person to be the obscure nature of some of the language, rendering parts of the text incomprehensible. The other response was one of enth...

Technology and Culture, 1998