Workshop 'Matter, Media, Milieu: Ecologies of Writing and Making from Early Modernity to the Digital Age'
Credit: Textiles: tapestry weaving, two close-up views of hands weaving. Engraving by R. Benard after Radel. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection
Convened by Jenny Oliver (Harvard University) & Marie Thébaud-Sorger (Centre Alexandre Koyré)
A day of interdisciplinary round-table discussions organised by the Writing Technologies Network
A one-day interdisciplinary workshop exploring the interrelation of literary, artistic-technical, and scientific experimentation in the early modern period, and the entanglement that persists today between technical innovation and questions of writing today, at the borders between the human, the digital, and the environment. The early modern histories of textual and technical innovation are fundamentally intertwined; from Ortelius’sTheatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570) to Pluche’s Spectacle of Nature (1740) and the many early modern ‘theatres of machines’ in between, hundreds of artefacts (written, drawn, printed and modelled) mediated new understandings of the ‘scales’ of the cosmos at micro and macro levels, alongside — and sometimes in tension with — the feats of human ingenuity manifested in investigations and manipulations of nature. Three themed sessions will map the emergence of the paradigms for the relationship between humans and nature that we have inherited, bringing to the surface the materialities of writerly technologies whose traces we still find in digital assemblages today.
Download the programme here.
10.20: Landscapes of Knowledge
Understanding the material and intellectual milieux of knowledge creation: exploring hand(i)work and the ‘mindful hand’; the conception of material and narrative ‘models’; technologies and epistemes; the force and agency of metaphors and analogies.
Discussants: Tina Asmussen, Amelia Hutchinson, Michael Drolet, Caroline Callard
12.00: Lunch
13.00: Bodies at Scale
Resituating the human body – so often the default unit of measurement in our histories – at multiple scales; from the senses, via early modern understandings of the elements, to cosmologies; overlapping ontologies, the Anthropocene in the early modern, the integration of body/technology and environment.
Discussants:: Yelda Nasifoglu, Leonardo Carrio, Matthew Landrus, Viktoria von Hoffmann
14.30: Tea break
14.45: Re-materialising the Digital Considering the long history of the ‘digital’ in the context of other writing technologies; evaluating the impacts of digital and material archives and objects on new knowledge-making about the past, and in catalysing new approaches and methods.
Discussants: Simon Dumas-Primbault, Jennifer Oliver
