Talia Shabtay

In my project, I examine visual practices across the American arts and sciences that emerged from the continual quest to see better, bigger, and deeper—an ambition made even more urgent under the conditions of the Cold War. In particular, I consider the work of visual practitioners who forged new ways of seeing that were structured and scaled according to a new kind of human-machine interface. These include artists such as György Kepes, Berenice Abbott, and Charles and Ray Eames; mathematicians Norbert Wiener and Benoit Mandelbrot; and the engineer-photographer Harold Edgerton. The world made newly visible by image technologies such as rocket photography, electron microscopy, and reconnaissance satellites marked the beginning of the organized rapid expansion of the effort to see the imperceptible—the world beyond the limits of the unarmed human eye—and the urgent military, industrial, and aesthetic drive to represent that world. I conclude with conjectures on the legacy of Cold War visual practices in our contemporary moment via an analysis of the work of artist Trevor Paglen.

In my research, I ask the following questions: What kinds of extra-human visual processes emerged after World War II, and how did postwar American practitioners in both the arts and sciences begin to engage them? What can their work tell us about vision in America in a time of invisible war? By answering these questions, my goal is to trace a historical genealogy of the problem of seeing the imperceptible, and begin to locate the aesthetic dimensions of this problem.