Technologies of Scientific Visualization

special section of leonardo transactions Technologies of Scientific Visualization guest editors Chris Robinson, Brigitte Nerlich and Chris Toumey During the past 15 years or so, a community of scholars Annamaria Carusi, Andrew Balmer and Brigitte Nerlich in the arts and humanities has examined issues of organized the multidisciplinary conference Images epistemology in scientific imaging of nanoscale objects and Visualisation: Imaging Technology, Truth and and explored the question: How do technology and Trust, generously supported by the European Science aesthetics affect the relationship between an atom or Foundation, to explore these issues. The conference took a molecule and an image of the atom or molecule? place at the Norrköping campus of Linköping University Recently this community reached out to scholars in Sweden, September 2012. While the conference examining other methods of scientific visualization such offered many excellent presentations, we present as images of outer space from the Hubble Telescope and here a selection of papers that illustrate the value and brain imaging. the challenges of the three most salient themes that emerged: color, scale and technology. Contents Chris Toumey, Brigitte Nerlich and Chris Robinson: Technologies of Scientific Visualization 62 Philip Moriarty: Visualizing the “Invisible” 64 Kathrin Friedrich: Achromatic Reasoning—On the Relation of Gray and Scale in Radiology 66 Liv Hausken: The Visual Culture of Brain Imaging 68 Lars Lindberg Christensen, Douglas Pierce-Price and Olivier Hainaut: Determining the Aesthetic Appeal of Astronomical Images 70 Thomas Turnbull: Scientific Visualisation in Practice: Replicating Experiments at Scale 72 Ingeborg Reichle: Images in Art and Science and the Quest for a New Image Science 74 Catherine Allamel-Raffin: Interpreting Artworks, Interpreting Scientific Images 76 Sky Gross, Shai Lavi and Edmond J. Safra: Visibly Dead: On Making Brain Death Believable 78 Gunnar E. Höst and Gustav Bohlin: Engines of Creationism? Intelligent Design, Machine Metaphors and Visual Rhetoric 80 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LEON_a_00896 by guest on 25 September 2021 TECHNOLOGIES OF less important [5]. The difference be- in Nature Nanotechnology [14]; and SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION tween modern scientific images and other papers. older scientific illustrations is that it is Chris Toumey, USC NanoCenter, A 2010 workshop in Nottingham had University of South Carolina, Columbia, impossible to say of the modern ones an anchor in the study of nano images, SC 29208 USA. Email: that, yes, this is an accurate representa- but it also emphasized that it was time <[email protected]>. tion of X, unless you have been in- for this community to articulate with volved in the complex production other cases of scientific visualization. Brigitte Nerlich, Institute for Science and process [6]. That idea led to a conference on Scien- Society, University of Nottingham, X might, for example, be too small to tific Visualization in Norrköping, Swe- Nottingham, UK NG7 2RD. Email: see with the naked eye because it is den in September 2012, organized by technologies of visualization <[email protected]>. smaller than the wavelength of visible Brigitte Nerlich, Andrew Balmer and Chris Robinson, Department of Art, light. Or X is too far away to see with Annamaria Carusi, and supported by the University of South Carolina, Columbia, the naked eye. Or X may be too com- European Science Foundation. Here SC, 29208, U.S.A.) Email: plex to see with the naked eye. To pro- scientific visualization meant a group of <[email protected]>. duce images of the invisible, an array of technologies for converting data into See <www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/leon/48/1> technologies has to be used which, un- forms that can be perceived by the sense for supplemental files associated with this issue. like photography, are not easily under- of sight for the purpose of enriching stood by non-specialists. There is then scientific understanding of a natural Submitted: 4 December 2013 an increasing distance between the im- phenomenon. Abstract age and the object, and also between the The conference embraced such topics Sophisticated technologies of scientific visualiza- image and the viewing subject. This as the history of photography, outer- tion often require a departure from the standards of distance can only be bridged by trust. space telescope images, relations be- mimetic representation. In this paper the authors introduce a set of nine papers derived from the How this can be achieved is an issue tween art and science, comparing mappa conference on scientific visualization in studied by historians of science and art, mundi with satellite imagery, brain imag- Norrköping, Sweden in September 2012, which plus science communicators and practic- ing, and other topics. explore problems of scale, color and technology in scientific visualization. These three kinds of prob- ing artists and scientists. The Norrköping meeting served as a lems are common to multiple visualization methods. A community of researchers has preliminary exploration of themes that As a result, this collection constitutes a preliminary formed around the topic of technologies might be common to different technolo- exploration of commonalities in various methods of of scientific visualization of atoms, gies of scientific visualization, and three visualization, e.g., from nanoscale images to outer- space pictures of galaxies. molecules, and other nanoscale phe- themes arose repeatedly. One was scale. nomena. After considering a three-part Technologies for imaging the nanoscale Keywords: color, scale, technology, scientific imaging, scientific visualization. relationship between a nanoscale object, are different from those of the galactic the technology for creating an image of scale. In-between scales like medical the object, and the image itself, there is imaging have unique challenges of their Imagine that scientific illustration in its reason to conclude that a picture of an own. Even so, all of these cases remind early days required a certain baseline atom or a molecule cannot possibly look one that there are complicated relation- standard, namely, mimetic representa- like the atom or the molecule. The ships between the visual features of an tion. An illustration of an object (e.g., a phrase ‘look like’ does not apply to image and the consumer’s trust of the plant, an animal, or a part of human phenomena at the quantum level [7, 8]. image. anatomy) was expected to bear a strong These are still images of reality, but of a A second theme was a consideration visual resemblance to the object, so that reality that has expanded well beyond of color. Artificial color is a component someone who was familiar with the our normal visual capacity. A parallel of many technologies of scientific visu- object could say “Yes, this illustration is line of investigation examined pictures alization, from an image of an atomic what the object looks like”. Viewers of nanobots: futuristic illustrations of surface to a Hubble Telescope image of trusted illustrations that constituted mi- tiny machines which are expected to gigantic outer-s pace formations. And metic representation. And when early operate inside peoples’ small blood color too is implicated in one’s trust in photography arrived later, it was naively vessels to clear plaque or manipulate the technology. We refer to “artificial” believed to be the epitome of mimetic blood cells [9, 10]. Here artists try to color, with neither positive nor negative representation. show what nanobots may ‘look like’, valence, but a critic of an imaging tech- But then came images from micro- but they often go beyond what science nology might say “misleading” color. If scopes, electron microscopy, scanning can achieve. In this case, making a the human eye is to interpret a scientific probe microscopy [1, 2], brain scans [3], nanobot look like something as familiar image of an object, there needs to be the Hubble Telescope [4], and other as a submarine is intended not to repre- some color, even if only black, white, technologies of scientific visualization. sent reality, but to move science into a and gray, so that light-and-shadow can As these technologies became increas- particular future through visions of what indicate three-dimensional topographies. ingly sophisticated, they indicated that this future may look like. Sometimes artificial color – not present mimesis was extraordinarily difficult to These lines of investigation resulted in in the object, but added by the visualiza- achieve. With even so-called mimetic a series of conferences and workshops tion technology – can be equivalent to representations, the images that were between 2004 and 2011, followed by misleading color. produced were based on selecting some papers in the 2004 volume Discovering The third common theme was a features over others. All images, even the Nanoscale [11]; a special issue of recognition that it is advisable to under- photographs, emphasize features or NanoEthics [12]; a special section of stand how a technology generates its relationships that are particularly im- Leonardo [13]; a series of commentaries images. In the distance between a tech- portant, at the expense of others that are nology and one’s trust in the images it 62 LEONARDO, Vol. 48, No. 1, pp. 62–63, 2015 doi:10.1162/LEON_a_00896 ©2015 ISAST Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/LEON_a_00896 by guest on 25 September

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