HPSC-X 320 Science in Film and Film in Science: Aesthetics, Knowledge, Values and Resources
Fall 2011
Wed. 3:30-6:00 pm, GB 107
Prof. Jordi Cat
This course examines historical and philosophical issues involving the use of moving images in science. The history of the use of pictures in science fleshes out and extends the number of philosophical questions that have been asked about images generally: Are pictures necessary? For what? How do pictures represent? How do they get their meaning? What can pictures represent or communicate? Can they equally represent facts and values? How do they work as evidence, or as tools for thinking? Science has added to the kinds of things, concepts, ideas, values and arguments associated with pictures. Equally, science has long interacted with the world of art in the use of imagery and in the creation and understanding of elements of imagery such as geometry and color. What about moving pictures, or cinematography? Do they pose new questions? This course examines some of these questions in the interaction of the history of science and the history of cinematography. Mechanical toys, trains and guns, and preoccupations with the nature of time and motion, attention, perception and memory, illusion and reality, uniqueness and mechanical reproduction, and cognition, appear with the origin and development of cinematographic imagery (and authors such as Maxwell, Claudel, Marey, Einstein, Bergson, Painlevé, Muybridge, Benjamin, Neurath, Arnheim, etc.) But how has film entered scientific practice as a tool to meet scientific goals? How is cinematographic imagery relevant and valuable to scientific research and education? How is it different from the case of still pictures? Does it introduce or enforce a different kind of attention or representation? Is scientific cinematography value-free and socially neutral? Does it reflect and partake of, as film and new media have done, changes in society, economy and culture? What is the role of emotions? How is it used in different sciences? What are the challenges it raises? Cases in astronomy, nuclear physics, microbiology, animal behavior, psychology, ethnography and anthropology raise different questions and challenges, technical, conceptual, methodological, ethical, etc. For instance, Hollywood resources were enlisted in classified work recording nuclear tests; and the use of cameras in ethnographic documentaries has challenged ideals of realism and objectivity. And realism is not all there is; computer animations and simulations blur the distinction between cinematography and science as purveyors of fiction. In addition, film is the subject matter of science -not just the application of scientific and technological developments-, for instance in the new area of neurocinematics. Finally, the course examines the way science has been portrayed in science documentaries as part of science education and, more interestingly, in movies as part of art and entertainment tracking diverse and changing attitudes towards science and technology.
