ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

« Le sens du beau chez les bêtes »: Creative Evolution and Early Experimental Image Media

• In Event: Evolutionary Histories 1

English Abstract

Recognition of non-human actors in the history of science have greatly expanded media approaches beyond the disciplinary regimes of visual technology. As such, histories of media connected to the life sciences are also animal histories, (Marey’s chronophotography of animal motion or Jean Comandon’s time lapse cinematography of microbes for example), revealing how other bodies and subjectivities were very much tied to our own.
Exploring the intersection between experimental culture, living organisms and developments in media technologies, this paper asks how investigations on the colour sense in animals were central to debates on vision, cognition and theories of Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution in 19th century France; in turn, I ask how such research into non-human colour perception and behaviour was intertwined with developments in microscopy and early photo media in the fields of physiology, zoology and microbiology. I argue these imaging technologies went well beyond empirical, mimetic concerns by intervening into the very world of the organisms being observed through new staining techniques, new colour filters and new photo emulsions – opening sensory boundaries beyond the human into what Adolf Portmann calls “a second world-view”. True, the implications of colour and "Le sens du beau chez les bêtes" (that animals too have creative faculty) generated great anxiety about man’s evolutionary “superiority”; however, it is this very rupture of the human animal divide that freed biologists and image makers to approach experimentation as a “creative act” in line with Bergson’s and Canguilhem’s understanding of adaptation and evolution by even the lowest organism.

Author

• Nicole Liao, University of Toronto