It’s a Match! Sietske Fransen and Gloria Chan Sook Kim
on Visualizations as Conduits of Knowledge

Sietske Fransen studies the role of visualizations for the practice of science. She studies images thus not only as representations of an event or object but the process of making images as the intrinsic part of doing science or making knowledge. One of her methodologies is historical re-enactment to better understand the role of experience that is left out of descriptions in the sources, due to its obvious nature at the time. Through the re-enactment of seventeenth-century microscopic experiments as described in word and image by protagonists, Fransen studies, together with an interdisciplinary team of scientists, (art-)historians and artists, the practices around observations. These seventeenth microscopic observations stand central to Fransen’s questions about the role of images in understanding the previously invisible. The making of images, she argues, is a way to make the observed concrete and discussable. The invisible becomes visible within its own context, meaning that these images carry the biases of their own time and place.

Gloria Chan Sook Kim analyzes how the emerging futures of microbes are transformed into objects of global science and security. We are told that microbes will forever appear in ways that are globally catastrophic and inevitable. Yet when, where, and how they might surface is unknowable. These factors have made emerging microbes important to bring into view as scientific knowledge objects, but that are inimical to vision and visualization. How can unpredictable and incalculable microbial futures be converted into forms that can be studied, felt, and experimented with? This, Kim contends, is not a problematic of representation, or of seeing the invisible. Instead she uses resolution as an optic and analytic to understand the visualization processes through which emerging microbes are coaxed out of discourse and transmuted as operable objects in the world. Exploring data-driven techniques and technologies developed to see unforeseeable microbial futures, she considers how a novel mode of non-optical visualization -- one rooted in a flourishing of numeracy, computing, calculations, and quantifications -- has surfaced at that impasse. How has the inability to see ever-emergent microbial futures formed the basis for new modes of seeing, sensing, and knowing?

Biographical notes

Sietske Fransen is Max Planck Research Group Leader of the group “Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions” at the Bibliotheca Hertziana - MPI for Art History in Rome and interim PI of the NWO-funded project “Visualizing the Unknown: Scientific Observation, Representation and Communication in 17th-century Science and Society” (Huygens Institute, Amsterdam). She holds a PhD from the Warburg Institute in London, on the use of language by seventeenth-century physicians in Europe. She held postdoctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, and at the University of Cambridge. In her research she currently focuses on the role of image-making as an integral part of the process of knowledge production. As a case study for this investigation she investigates image-making and image-makers in the context of early modern microscopy.

Gloria Chan Sook Kim is Associate Professor of Media and Culture at the University of California-Riverside. Her research works across the areas of computation and culture, environmental humanities, and visual culture. Kim is the author of Microbial Resolution: Visualization and Security in the Era of Emerging Microbes (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Her other publications appear in journals such as ASAP Journal, Discourse, and Configurations. Her current research examines machine learning systems working in the context of extreme environments. She has received research fellowships from organizations including the American Council of Learned Societies, The Mellon Foundation, and the Society for Humanities at Cornell University.