Seminar - 'Brainwashing the Cybernetic Spectator: The Ipcress File, 1960's Cinematic Spectacle and the Sciences of Mind'

14 March 2017, 12:00 - 13:30pm, Seminar room SG2, Alison Richard Building, CRASSH

Dr Marcia Holmes (History, Birkbeck)
Discussant: Dr Dan Larsen  (History, Cambridge) 

This paper argues that the mid-1960s saw a dramatic shift in how 'brainwashing' was popularly imagined, reflecting Anglo-American developments in the sciences of mind as well as shifts in mass media culture. The 1965 British film, The Ipcress File (dir. Sidney J. Furie, starr. Michael Caine) provides a rich case for exploring these interconnections between mind control, mind science, and media, as it exemplifies the era's innovations for depicting 'brainwashing' on screen: the film's protagonist is subjected to flashing lights and electronic music, pulsating to the 'rhythm of brainwaves'. This paper describes the making of The Ipcress File's brainwashing sequence, and shows how its quest for cinematic spectacle drew on developments in cybernetic science, multimedia design and modernist architecture (developments that were also influencing the 1960s' psychedelic counterculture). I argue that often interposed between the disparate endeavours of 1960s mind control, psychological science, and media was a vision of the human mind as a 'cybernetic spectator': a subject who not only scrutinizes how media and other demands on her sensory perception can affect consciousness, but seeks to consciously participate in this mental conditioning and guide its effects.

(Dr Holmes's paper will be pre-circulated and may be read in advance. You can receive a copy by emailing lsp33@cam.ac.uk)

Talk - 'Polyphonic Minds'

Peter Pesic (St. John's College, Santa Fe)
Sunday 19 March: 1400-1500 -- Faculty of Music, Lecture Room 1

Peter Pesic is Tutor and Musician-in-Residence at St. John's College, Santa Fe. He is the author of Labyrinth: A Search for the Hidden Meaning of Science; Seeing Double: Shared Identities in Physics, Philosophy, and Literature; Abel's Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability; and Sky in a Bottle, all published by the MIT Press.

Talk - 'Climate in word and image: science and the Austrian idea'

Deborah Coen (Columbia University), History and Philosophy of Science Departmental Seminar, Thursday, 16 March at 3:30pm

One of the most urgent challenges of climate research today is that of conceptualizing interactions across scales of space and time. In her book in progress, Deborah Coen examines how this problem was addressed in the late Habsburg Monarchy, where scientists developed an unprecedented conceptual apparatus for tracking the transfer of energy from the molecular scale to the planetary. Her presentation will offer an overview of this project. The central argument is that these innovations arose in part as a solution to a problem of representation, a problem that engaged Habsburg scientists as servants of a supranational state. The problem was to represent local differences while producing a coherent overview; that is, to do justice to the vaunted diversity of the Habsburg lands while reinforcing the impression of unity. This problem was worked out at the interface between physical and human geography, and it stimulated technical innovations across a range of media, from cartography, to landscape painting, to fiction and poetry, to mathematical physics, while also shaping political discourse. In this way, Climate in Word and Image writes the history of climate science as a history of scaling: the process of mediating between different systems of measurement, formal and informal, designed to apply to different slices of the phenomenal world, in order to arrive at a common standard of proportionality. A focus on scaling emphasizes not only the cognitive work of commensuration, but also the corporeal, emotional and social effort that goes into recalibrating our sense of the near in relation to the far.

Tea and biscuits will be available from 3pm in Seminar Room 1

Seminar Location:
Seminar Room 2
Department of the History and Philosophy of Science
Free School Lane
Cambridge
CB2 3RH

Following the talk we will go to the pub, and on to dinner. All are welcome! If you would like to join dinner, please contact Richard Staley (raws1@cam.ac.uk)

Book launch - 'Astronomouse'

A launch party for the book Astronomouse, by Frances Willmoth, will be held at the Whipple Museum on Friday 17 March, 4.30-6pm. Everyone is welcome to attend.

The book describes the building of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich (1675-76) from the unique viewpoint of the local mouse population. It is beautifully illustrated with line-drawings. Further details may be found at www.astronomouse.com (RRP £8.99 - £8.00 at the launch party).

Talk - 'Fakhr al-Din al-Razi's Physics: Time, Space and Void'

Peter Adamson (Professor für spätantike und arabische Philosophie, LMU München)

Monday 13th March, 4pm, Lightfoot Room, Faculty of Divinity.

All are welcome.

Fakhr al-Din al-Razi (d. 1210) was a great Persian philosopher and theologian, famous for his lengthy, rich commentary on the Koran, for his theological works, and for his critical reception the philosophy of Avicenna (d. 1037).

Peter Adamson is a leading scholar of Arabic philosophy:

CASEBOOKS: Six contemporary artists and an extraordinary medical archive

The exhibition is accompanied by a series of events, beginning with the Private View on Thursday 16 March and the Artists and Curator Seminar on Friday 17 March. All events take place at Ambika P3 (opposite Baker Street tube). Details online and below.

 ———

CASEBOOKS: Six contemporary artists and an extraordinary medical archive
Jasmina Cibic, Federico Díaz, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Rémy Markowitsch, Lindsay Seers, Tunga

Private View: Thursday 16 March 2017, 6:30 - 8:30pm, Ambika P3, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS, Baker Street Station

Exhibition continues: 17 March - 23 April 2017

———

ARTIST & CURATOR SEMINAR

Fri 17 March 2017, 4 - 6 pm Ambika P3, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS, Baker Street Station. Book a place here.

The CASEBOOKS exhibition is one of the most collaborative projects to take place at Ambika P3. It brings together researchers on the Casebooks Project, based at the University of Cambridge, with the curatorial team at the University of Westminster. This seminar is an opportunity to explore the issues brought about by the exhibition from the perspective of the artists and the Ambika P3 curator. Artists will present their projects and a round table will be convened to discuss the following topics:

• How did the artists engage with the Casebooks Project ? 
• What are the levels at which audiences engage with the artworks and the historical and digital artefacts through the exhibition?
• Have the casebooks provided a common theme to the exhibition?
• Can a collaborative exhibition such as this create new links between art, history and science?

Participants: The panel will consist of the exhibiting artists or their representatives and Dr Michael Mazière, Curator of Ambika P3. The Seminar will be chaired by Dr Lauren Kassell, Director of the Casebooks Project.

4.00 – 4.15: Introductions Lauren Kassell Michael Mazière
4.15 – 5.15: Artists' presentations

Jasmina Cibic: Unforseen Foreseens; Federico Díaz: BIG LIGHT Space of Augmented Suggestion
; Mark Hellar: Lynn Hershman Leeson’s, Real-Fiction Botnik and Venus of the Anthropocene; Rémy Markowitsch: The Casebooks Calf; Lindsay Seers: Mental Metal
; Rana Saner: Tunga’s Me, You and the Moon

5.15 – 6.00: Round table and Q&A from the audience chaired by Lauren Kassell
6.00 – 6.30: Drinks


Visit our website for the latest updates to the Casebooks Project: A Digital Edition of Simon Forman's and Richard Napier's Medical Records.

HPS Coffee with Scientists: The Social Challenges of Lab Work

***A screening of a short documentary film on the social challenges of lab work.***

In 2015, I interviewed six early career scientists about the social difficulties they faced in lab environments. My interviewees wanted to share stories of work-place bullying, gender issues, ways of dealing with toxic individuals, and the pressures of the peer-review process. Two of them had decided to leave research.

To ensure anonymity, I asked actors to read out the transcripts of the interviews. I then rearranged that material into a 20-minute short film. My hope is that the documentary ("Social Science") will give a sense of the kinds of social difficulties behind the wider "leaky pipeline" problem, where young, talented women leave science after completing their PhDs.

In this session of "Coffee with scientists", we will screen the short film, discuss the issues raised by the interviewees, and consider ways in which HPS researchers could throw light on some of the social and political problems in the sciences using filmmaking and other media.

Hope to see many of you there.


Karoliina Pulkkinen
PhD student at HPS
kjp41@cam.ac.uk

Book your tickets for the #Cambridge #HiddenFiguresParty happening @CamPicturehouse on Mon, 6 March! https://t.co/gfYYh1W0Bq @CambridgeHPS pic.twitter.com/I1IRX390sl

— BSHS (@BSHSNews) March 3, 2017

Next Term - Water

Our aquatic reading list is coming together for next term (at the moment: Bradbury, Carson, Collins, Oswald): meanwhile, here are the scheduled dates for our meetings.

Additional links to whet (wet?) your appetite:

• An old Guardian article on rain in literature  
• 'Making Waves', an exhibition of seascapes at the Fitzwilliam Museum until 21st May 
• A water-themed playlist from the British Council 
• An old Financial Times article about 'A world without water'

Noisy Embyros

NOISY EMBRYOS

Dates: 9 – 25 March

Private View: Thursday 16 March, 5.00pm

Noisy Embryos is a multi-channel, audio-visual installation that reflects on the relationship between scientists and the animals they observe by juxtaposing videos of snail embryos generated under laboratory conditions with the 'messiness' of the natural environment and of the process of data collection in the field. It draws on interdisciplinary research carried out by artists Deborah Robinson and David Strang and biologist Simon Rundle during field trips at locations used by naturalist Carl Linnaeus and film maker Andrei Tarkovsky on the Swedish island of Gotland.

Cambridge Science Festival 2017:

Noisy Embryos: From the bane of embryology to indicators of the Anthropocene
Thursday 16 March, 6.30pm-8pm

This interdisciplinary talk links the history of variation in embryology (Nick Hopwood, Cambridge) to the current use of embryos as indicators of climate change (Simon Rundle, Plymouth) to introduce how the audio-visual exhibition Noisy Embryos (Deborah Robinson and David Strang, Plymouth) responds to the uses of embryos in scientific research.

This talk will take place in room RUS110, in the Ruskin Building, no need to book, just turn up. 

We look forward to seeing you at the Ruskin Gallery

www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskingallery