Simulations of the Unseen
In the History of Art, Science, and the Occult

The meaning of both the term and the concept of “simulation” is bound up in an oscillating tension between depiction and deception. Contemporary scientific practice relies on models and simulations to stage realities beyond the limits of our ordinary senses. Scientific simulations enable the prediction of future events and the perception of their trajectories, such as viral spreads, economic upheavals and changes in climate. Yet simulations, spanning from simple graphic illustrations to highly complex computer-generated environments, should also be met with suspicion. Jean Baudrillard famously cautioned against the destabilizing effects that simulations can have on reality. In a world oversaturated by simulacra and mass spectacle, separating fact from fiction, the signs of the real from the real, is a precarious pursuit. Simulation, he writes, entails the generation of hyperreality: the production by models of a real without origin.

This Conference is not, however, premised on Baudrillard’s diagnosis. Nor do we wish to praise simulations as instances of linear technical progress, or approach them as products of the digital era alone. Rather, we believe that the simulation, both theoretically and historically, is best understood as an ambivalent tool for revelation, yet also riddle and ruse. We seek to engage with, rather than eliminate or unmask this duality, expanding discussions to include the long nineteenth century, where simulation as a term took on manifold, often conflicting meanings.
Two pivotal nineteenth-century scientific developments contributed to destabilizing the real. First, aided by various technical apparatuses, areas such as chemistry and physics envisioned an invisible world of ethereal undulations, electrical discharges, magnetic forces and subatomic particles. Second, sense physiology showed that human sense perception had little to do with the objective world, but was rather determined by internal physiological processes. These two factors contributed to a growing distrust in the accuracy of human vision, as mechanical recording and measurement devices that registered ever subtler spheres of reality were privileged. The reality to which these devices allowed access was increasingly mediated. This process raises a series of interesting epistemological questions regarding the problem of simulation: How are hypotheses derived from a plurality of technically produced images, representing sections of the world invisible to the human eye? Crucially, how are facts distinguished from artifacts in the absence of a visible referent? How does one translate measurable facts, which are at the same time technical artifacts, into scientific fictions or robust theories?

The epistemic uncertainties arising from this multiplication of the invisible become strikingly apparent when one considers the emergence of occultism that ran parallel to this process. While many contemporaries viewed science’s venture into the unseen with despair, occultists reveled in the new possibilities that increasingly simulated worlds invited. Accessing the invisible scientifically held the promise that invisible objects which had hitherto belonged to a speculative, transcendental beyond could now be naturalized and made visible. They could be simulated as “occult knowledge” with the newly acquired methods and techniques of science.

Fin de siècle discourses on hypnosis reveal another instance in which the epistemological implications of simulations were investigated. Known as the “simulation problem,” psychologists and physicians working with hypnosis struggled to determine whether the hypnotic state could be separated from a simulated one. Psychologists questioned whether a subject could convincingly feign hypnosis, deceiving even the most experienced hypnotists. Although generally acknowledged in treatises on hypnotism of the period, the emergence and consequences of this problem were mostly downplayed, as the matter exposed the limits of the male “medical gaze,” threatening psychology’s claim to scientific objectivity.

Investigations into the simulation of hidden phenomena also interweave with art history. Art objects have historically interacted with occult paradigms to generate productive ambivalences and enchantments. Occultism has cultivated an experimental epistemic uncertainty in art – a visual vocabulary of claimed occult knowledge has continued to circulate through certain image-objects. Modern artists and esotericists have experimented with various aesthetic approaches, attempting to positivize the occult cosmologies otherwise locked in one’s mind. Occult paradigms participated in the development of art movements of the fin de siècle, for example, Belgian symbolist painting. Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921), Jean Delville (1867-1953), and Félicen Rops (1833-1898) sought to aestheticize hidden realms of experience through mystical imagery replete with arcane iconography. They rejected realism in painting, portraying a syncretic, intuitive inner life. Their works transcend the mundane to depict higher spiritual realities and incite visionary states in viewers. Aligning with the epistemological dilemmas that scientists face, artist-esotericists seek to simulate and thus enact the experience of occult illumination.

As this sweeping history reveals, the topic of simulation traverses historical subdisciplines, foregoing clear-cut boundaries between science and non-science. Scientists, artists, and occultists alike possess relevant knowledge of the ambiguity, treachery and duplicity involved in simulation; of the devices and deceptions involved in sensitive visual description. Simulations lie between the visible and the invisible, representation and the irrepresentable, idea and image, form and matter. They can be sites of illuminating microcosmic and macrocosmic visualisation, yet also beguilement, error and betrayal, which we look forward to exploring through the Simulations of the Unseen conference.

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After the registration deadline, all registered conference participants will receive information on the venues and the book of abstracts, including the full conference schedule, by e-mail.

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Organization: Chloë Sugden, Jonas Stähelin and Andreas Kilcher

Mapping the Modern Cosmos, Seen and Unseen

external pageJohn Tresch (Warburg Institute)call_made

The changing relationships between empirical sciences and occult experience have shaped and stretched modern images of the cosmos. In 1917 two major, if seemingly opposed, contributions to cosmological imagery appeared: Einstein published the first fully physical relativistic cosmology, and Jung published his definitive break from Freud, Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prozesse, in which the invisible forces of psychical investigation were grounded in the collective unconscious. To explore the significance of this (non-) meeting, we will consider distributions of the visible and the invisible in earlier cosmological images: from medieval symbolism, to the Renaissance “cosmographias” placing geography under divine authority, to the 19th century Humboldtian “Cosmos” and the uncanny mixtures of occult and exact sciences around 1900. From this long-durée perspective, how can we understand the synchrony between Einstein and Jung's formulations? As a new settlement and division between the physical and the mystical? Or as a cosmological opening to new maps of nature and mind?

Simulation of Disease: Pathology, Delinquency, or an Act of Contestation?

external pageKatrin Solhdju (University of Mons)call_made

Simulation of disease is, until today, largely understood to be an act of fraud or deliberate deception. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) describes ‘malingering’ (the simulation of disease) as the intentional production of false or grossly exaggerated physical or psychological problems, usually motivated by external incentives (e.g., avoiding military duty or work, obtaining financial compensation, etc.). However, a look at the history of the concept, the sometimes violent ‘healing’-practices, and the heated debates surrounding the latter – most notably with respect to soldiers during the two World-Wars on both sides of the Atlantic – strikingly suggest that things are much more complex. On the one hand, simulation is almost impossible to diagnose with certainty, as the psychoanalyst K.R. Eissler prominently shows; on the other hand, the stigmatization of a person once suspected to be simulating, leaves her with almost no possibility to prove things to be otherwise. Just like with the contrasting category of denial (“he/she is in denial of her serious disease or its symptoms”) – that I will draw on to clarify my argument – the one who is being labeled with this kind of profoundly disqualifying ‘diagnosis’, enters a vicious circle that is almost impossible to exit. Starting from this, I would like to ask what would happen if so-called simulators (and deniers) were to be considered as thermometers of intolerability, be it of the war, the medical, or the economic system? Wouldn't their "pathologies", rather than being considered as (dishonest) strategies of avoidance, then have to be understood and taken seriously as acts of contestation or resistance against prevailing conditions and their inherent violence?

Thelma Moss, Aura Photographer

external pageJeremy Stolow (Concordia University)call_made

This paper will present a short biography and account of the work and influence of Thelma Moss, a largely forgotten parapsychologist based at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, and a key agent of psychedelic counterculture of the 1970s. Undeterred by her professional peers, who regarded parapsychology as an illegitimate pseudoscience, Moss carved out a remarkable career as a popular lecturer on paranormal topics and a patron of countercultural intellectual exchange within and far beyond the UCLA campus. By the mid-70s, she had become a minor media celebrity, regularly appearing in nationally syndicated TV shows, documentary films, and print journalism. Her lab served as a mecca for all manner of intellectual dissidents, self-styled gurus, and even celebrities such as the rock stars George Harrison and David Bowie. And her experimental parapsychology research, despite appearing in the most obscure journals, received international attention and led to speaking invitations around the world, from Bulgaria to Brazil.

At the heart of all this attention was Moss’s pioneering role in the development and popularization of Kirlian Photography. Originally developed in the 1930s by the Soviet engineer, Simeon Kirlian, this picturing technique uses electricity, rather than natural light, as its source of illumination: generating vivid ‘auras’, aka coronas of electrical discharge, around (typically organic) objects placed in direct contact with photographic plates. Although this technique for rendering visible the normally invisible architecture of electrical discharges belongs to a much longer history, Kirlian Photography, once transplanted to the Western Hemisphere, was hailed as an unprecedented scientific instrument but more consequentially, as a wonder-making device. The images it generated pointed to a hidden cosmos of energy fields and flows that bore startling resemblance to the iconography of psychedelic counterculture, and seemed uniquely well suited to the period’s renascent interest in the mysteries of clairvoyant perception, occult imagination, and powers emanating from the spirit world. From her first trip to the Soviet Union in 1970, Moss played a key role introducing Kirlian Photography into the West and exploiting its visual possibilities across the overlapping territories of science, entertainment, spiritual practice, paranormality, and psychedelic imagination. Her work provided a conduit for heterodox uses of instruments of scientific visualization that, over the course of the 1980s and 90s, successors began to deploy in diverse realms of experimental parapsychology, alternative healthcare, art photography, and consumer culture: a thriving arena of activity that has expanded into the present-day, globally extensive New Age spiritual and wellness marketplace.

Excerpted from a longer historical study of the development of aura-picturing techniques and technologies from the late 19th century to the present day, my account of Moss’s career will provide the occasion to reflect on technical, imaginative, and epistemological dimensions of visual media, such as Kirlian Photography, that cannot be contained within the tidy binarisms of science and culture. Part cultural history, part media archaeology, this project aims to complicate dominant assumptions about technology, visible evidence, and hidden worlds.

Simulations of the “Inner Design”: Franz Junghuhn’s Volcanoes in the mid 19th century

Philip Ursprung (ETH Zurich)

In order to map the island of Java and to learn about how the earth crust was built, the German-Dutch explorer Franz Wilhelm Junghuhn (1809-1864) climbed most of Java’s volcanoes between the 1830s and 1850s. He shared his discoveries through scientific books, maps, drawings, lithographs and an anonymously published anti-colonial novel. At the intersection of art, science and entrepreneurship, Junghuhn’s simulation of the unseen inner forces of the Earth informed the image many Europeans had of the remote island of Java. During a research project in Singapore, conducted between 2015 and 2020, a group of scholars and artists followed Junghuhn’s footsteps, re-simulating his simulations from a distance of almost two centuries. What came to light and what remained unseen?

Simulation as a general form of knowledge and its relationship to artistic action today

external pageJudith Siegmund (Zurich University of the Arts)call_made

My contribution begins with thoughts on the historical situation in aesthetic theory: Benedetto Croce establishes the assumption of an emphasized inwardness in aesthetics as a theory of the long 19th century; he addresses the question of how and through which artistic act subjective intuitive cognition (as a mental work of art) achieves visibility in the material. In correspondence with this is John Dewey, who works on a relationship between inside and outside in terms of the inner and outer material of aesthetic experience.

My thesis on the aesthetics of expression (Croce) and production-aesthetic experience (Dewey) is: in the comparison of inside and outside, there is no ‘betrayal’, no seduction and no error - they are systematically unthinkable or irrelevant topics based on intuition and expressivity (Croce) and inner versus outer material (Dewey's evolutionary biology).

‘Betrayal’ only comes into play in the modernity of the 20th century, namely when a demand for truth is transferred to the arts, which means that the intentions, intuitions and expressions of the artists cannot be relevant for the definition of an art that is conceived as socially alteritarian. The artists "move into" truth, e.g. with Heidegger, they are defined by something that transcends them and their relationship to the world (as history, e.g. as utopia, etc.). In contrast, the expressivity of the individual subject is always subordinate and can be suspected of betrayal and deception, compare for example, the enigmatic character of the work of art in Adorno.

Today in late modernity (Baudrillard/Reckwitz), simulations determine our everyday life (algorithms, AI), performative practices of self-representation define the norm that (supposedly) constitutes the 'uniqueness' of subjects and collectives. How does it relate to an 'inner, intuitive'? Many artists are responding to everyday simulations, betrayals and deceptions in current work and are making real demands their own in their work: they are formulating decolonising, queerfeminist and planetary goals in and through the arts. They are critical of simulations of politics and society. They do not have an idea of an imaginary, dark interiority of subjects (as in the 19th century), but moral ideas of empathy that go beyond the production and dissemination of artistic knowledge. The epistemological gain of simulations is critically evaluated or subjected to a poietic-technical use. Simulations are perceived and used both socially (outside of art) and in the arts as mediated with reason or rationality.

Simulating Sociality in Machines

external pageSimone Natale (University of Turin)call_made

Communicating with AI applications has become an everyday experience for hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Voice assistants such as Siri or Alexa, apps such as Replika, bots and automated customer support services provide anyone with the ability to communicate with computers using the same language employed to interact with flesh-and-blood people. This presentation aims to reflect on the implications and consequences that these technologies have on our social lives. Although these technologies are usually described under the label of “artificial intelligence," I argue that we should examine them as "artificial sociality”: that is, technologies capable of simulating the mechanisms behind social exchanges and conventions that characterize our cultures. This viewpoint enables us to examine the potential, but also the risks and mystifications that characterize the public discourse and policies underlying these technologies. Drawing on histories of how people project lives onto talking things, from spiritualist seances in the Victorian era to contemporary advances in robotics, the talk will propose that the “lives” of AI have more to do with how humans perceive and relate to machines, simulating communicative behavior, than with the functioning of computing technologies in itself.

The Century of the Obscene

external pageIsabel Millar (Newcastle University)call_made

In Badiou’s The Century, he proposes to try and conceptualize the 20th century, not simply as an historical time period, nor judge it as an objective datum but rather ask how the century came to subjectivate itself. If Badiou as one of the defining philosophers of the (late) 20^th century, the Century of War, implored us to go via Lacan in order to arrive at any form of truth as event, it is in the 21^st century that we must make the same Badiouian gesture with an extra detour via Baudrillard. Since this, we could say, is the century of war by other means. What then is the war we are fighting in this century? I would propose it is a war of perpetual capture.

For Baudrillard, the concept of simulation led him ultimately to the idea of the obscenity of knowledge itself. As he saw it, this obscenity must be tempered by the seduction of the world away from total capture in the episteme of the information age. Which, 30 years on from when Baudrillard was writing about it, has proven to be just as conceptually complex and metaphysically challenging as he proposed. But as with all speculations on the future, things never feel as ‘futuristic’ as we imagined when they actually arrive. The point being, that once the predicted conditions exist, we no longer have the tools conceptually to recognize them. It is the task of philosophy to abstract us from this predicament.

In a sense, Baudrillard was continuously making the claim that there is a direct and inverse relationship between the obscenity of everyday life and the disappearance of the world. This relationship is, I believe, this century’s primary mode of administration, a situation in which one’s body and mind are subject to full transparency at all times. This is the terrain in which we must be most leisurely with our thinking in Badiou’s terms, we must reject the temptation to believe that faster or more efficient is better, and most of all be wary of anything that purports to presume how we must enjoy.

Simulation for Proof and Persuasion in the Experimental Practices of the Early Royal Society

external pageMaria Avxentevskaya (MPIWG Berlin)call_made

This paper will explore simulation as a category embracing several techniques employed in scientific experimenting and communication by the Royal Society of London. I will apply Richard Serjeantson’s distinction between proof and persuasion in early modern scientific practices (Serjeantson 2008) to analyze the role of simulation in developing experimental methods and persuasive tools in the scientific agenda of the Royal Society around 1660-1750. 

The early decades of the Society influenced many subsequent institutionalized scientific practices concerning experimentation protocols, as recorded in its archival materials, such as journal books, minutes, correspondence, and also in Thomas Sprat’s famous History (1668). The Society devised new modes of communicating scientific knowledge, primarily through its long-surviving publication venue, Philosophical Transactions. Exploring the premodern origins of scientific practices can yield a deeper understanding of science in later centuries, which my study will aim to facilitate, based on the analysis of the abovementioned sources. 

In that context, simulation comprised an ambivalent cluster of techniques. On the one hand, simulation helped obtain experimental proofs via processing recorded observational data and modeling natural phenomena in laboratory conditions or with mathematical methods. Whenever laboratory conditions and mathematical methods could not meet experimental needs, e.g., due to the extraordinarily small or large spatial or temporary scale of the natural phenomena, simulation was often taken to the next level in thought experiments. Although very different, the physical experiments, mathematical modeling, and thought experiments were all intended to fulfil the Renaissance motto mimesis naturae, “imitating nature,” and simulate natural phenomena in specific experiments. The obtained proofs could be extrapolated to the realm beyond those specific phenomena, thus contributing to understanding natural laws.

However, on the other hand, experimental protocols inevitably left much room for uncertainty, which created a demand for coping with doubt in various ways. These involved discriminating between different epistemic types of certainty, including empirical and moral certainty. The moral certainty was to be attained through other means involving good Christian life and verbal persuasion, e.g., rhetorical devices, and visual persuasion, e.g., the visual rhetoric of scientific illustrations making particular features hyper-visible to emphasize a specific point, for instance, concerning the classifications of plants and animals. Another way of coping with uncertainty could be through a fascination with occult practices, e.g., natural magic and Kabbalistic teachings, where the principles of imitating nature were often implemented according to some ancient traditions. Of course, the Royal Society formally frowned upon rhetoric and occult teachings, but recent studies have disclosed the porous boundaries between the mainstream and the marginal in premodern scientific rationality. In this regard, the simulation occurred through verbal descriptions, artistic depictions, and occult manipulations. There it was instrumental in communicating about the unseen and enhancing moral certainty through persuasion.

My lecture will problematize simulation in the context of premodern practices of scientific experimenting and communication. Starting from analyzing simulation as a technique for enhancing empirical certainty through modeling in experiments and also for enhancing moral certainty through persuasion, I will argue that these points are part of a continuum of simulation techniques linking proof and persuasion, scientific experimenting and communication, which seeks to enable a more holistic view of early scientific discourse and its later developments.

Simulation in the TV Age. “Die Welt am Draht” by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1973)

external pageMonika Dommann (University of Zurich)call_made

In 1973, Rainer Werner Fassbinder shot a two-part TV series for the “Westdeutschen Rundfunk” based on the novel Simulacron 3 by Daniel Galouye (1964). In my talk, I will address the social, technological and political situation of 1973 in Western Germany – with the rise of mainframe computers, a frozen society after 1968, where the period of National Socialism wasn’t far away, but publicly neglected. What was Fassbinder’s interest in simulation? How are reality and simulation depicted in Die “Welt am Draht?” As cinema is a vast simulation machine, the relation between the past, the present and the future becomes blurred. Fassbinder’s future contains the anxieties of the present of 1973 (e.g., cybernetics, market research, largescale planning of everyday life).