I have a long-standing research interest in the material lives and cultural meaning of glass artifacts in the history of science and the history of photography, from vacuum tubes and chemical glassware to lenses and glass plate negatives. Glass is one of the dominant materials of experimental science. Its optical and physical properties mediate scientists’ interaction with the natural world. Embodied, artisanal practices around glass-making shape the hardware of experimental science, particularly in chemistry and physics, where test tubes, vacuum tubes, and other laboratory glassware have become iconic symbols of the scientific endeavor. As a photographic material, glass has had a powerful role in both forging and endangering the rhetorical “transparency” of the photographic medium–especially the fragile but powerful glass plate, the primary material for photographic negatives from around 1850 to 1925 (and in the practice of astronomy, until the 1990s). My presentation will range across these various ways that glass artifacts and glass surfaces have been implicated in debates over how we know what we know about the natural world.
GEEX talk
Dr Chitra Ramalingam
4 April 2022, 6:15pm CDT | 0015 5 April (BST)
Public access: 4 Apri- 2 May 2022
Details: https://geex.glass/programming/geextalks/dr-chitra-ramalingam/
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