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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Irene Brown
This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a book chapter that has been published in its final definitive form by Intellect Books, 2021.
For re-use rights please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions.
Artist Irene Brown reflects upon the conceptual and physical materials that constitute the artwork Phantasmagoria Electric, through a sequence of ten vignettes. Brown’s recent research has been into both the history of early electrical experiments, particularly those conducted in public, during the early Enlightenment; and into how those experiments are inseparable from beliefs in magical, supernatural, or extra-scientific ideas. The ten vignettes arrayed here offer a kind of pre-history of the artwork, condensing the entire range of ideas which it draws upon and makes manifest, such that the artwork is in this sense a palimpsest. Their chronological arrangement from the early modern era towards the present is not a march of progress from superstition towards enlightenment, but suggests a continuity between different forms of thought. It suggests that the scientific cast of mind can never be constituted solely of a purely instrumental reason, or aspire to universality, as sociologists of science such as Bruno Latour have long argued. Brown also suggests that the artistic imagination, in its playfulness, ability to make tangential or unexpected connections, and in its condensation of critical and creative motivations into single projects, might best be imagined as a kind of ‘partner in crime’ to the scientific imagination.
Author(s): Brown I
Editor(s): Edward Juler, Alistair Robinson
Publication type: Book Chapter
Publication status: Published
Book Title: Post-Specimen Encounters Between Art, Science and Curating: Rethinking Art Practice and Objecthood through Scientific Collections
Year: 2021
Pages: 250
Print publication date: 12/01/2021
Acceptance date: 09/03/2018
Number of Volumes: 1
Publisher: Intellect Books
Place Published: UK
URL: https://www.intellectbooks.com/post-specimen-encounters-between-art-science-and-curating
Library holdings: Search Newcastle University Library for this item
ISBN: 9781789383119
