Call for papers 

Membranes, Surfaces and Boundaries: 
Interstices in the history of science, technology and culture

Workshop at the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
October, 7-9  2010 
organized by Mathias Grote, Laura Otis and Max Stadler

The world, more often than not, is and has been conceived in its
compactness, as stuff, things, and objects; far less so, in its
interstices. Science, technology and culture, of course, are permeated
and traversed by boundary phenomena: From the materialities of life
itself, whether cellular membranes, skin, immune-systems or ecological
habitats, to surface, separation and purification processes in chemistry
and industry to the making, processing and exhibition of photographs and
films, things coalesced at surfaces. They are palpable as well in the
history of geography and politics, of urban and private spaces, of
literature, art, psychology and the self, and certainly enough, as
interfaces, in contemporary media theory.

The workshop Membranes, Surfaces and Boundaries aims to recover and
bring together these interstices. We wish to attract contributions from
a wide range of disciplines, including the natural sciences, that cross,
straddle and make permeable these specialist divides, and that
interrogate the historical being of surfaces. We wish to focus the
workshop on the materialities of membranes, surfaces, and boundaries
themselves. Possible anchors for such an exercise are: Surfaces and
membranes as biological entities

Life as a bounded space interacting with the environment through
specific surfaces is a concept central to the biological imagination.
Notably the ‘unit of life’ itself, the cell, has been construed in these
terms, from the semipermeable membranes devised by physiological chemist
Moritz Traube in the 1860s to membrane transport mechanisms as are
studied today by biophysicists, physiologists and computer scientists.
The cell’s surfaces have loomed large almost wherever we look in the
history of biology: interventions into the cellular life such as
staining technologies - widely used for scientific and diagnostic
purposes - implicated surfaces as much as practical investigations into
drug action, toxicology, or plant nutrition; ever since the beginnings
of electrophysiology, theories of nervous action routinely have been
crafted around surfaces; today, the entire concept of the immunological
self is based on recognition processes of cell surface receptors, and so
on. And not only the cell, to be sure, is a matter of (living) surfaces.
Think of organisms veiled in skin and fur, exhibited behind glass walls,
or captured on celluloid film and microscope slides. With few
exceptions, however, these surfaces have not figured in the narratives
historians of the life sciences tell. What if they were taken into
account? It makes it imaginable, for instance, to redraw the boundaries
and connections between physiology, biochemistry, physical chemistry and
thermodynamics and the disciplinary histories we tell of these domains.
More generally even, can we imagine histories of the life sciences that
reinsert ‘life’ as surfaces into the big picture account we do have, but
which are usually told through the perspectives of heredity, evolution,
and molecular biology?


Chemical and technical phenomena at boundaries

Since the early 19th century, if not earlier, surface processes have
been central to merging endeavours at the crossroads of physics,
chemistry and engineering. These mergers have resulted in a great many
technologies and conceptual devices that range from research instruments
to manufacturing processes to consumer products. Surfaces and their
materialities are intimately entwined whether we look at aerodynamics,
bionics, or at catalysis, filtration, separation and electrophoresis
technologies. An illustrative example is provided by electrochemistry.
Beginning with the Voltaic pile, an implement which generated
electricity from an arrangement of metal discs and soaked cardboard, a
material culture of electrochemical devices has proliferated from which
have emerged electric batteries, fuel cells and measurement electrodes.
Connected with such names as Langmuir, Nernst, Haber and others, the
entrepreneurial, thing-based nature of their science is well known.
Ranging from incandescent lamps to galvanic cells, here was one of the
many origins of a world replete with membranes, boundary potentials,
phases.  In this case, the significance of material substrates
mobilized, of conceptual migration and of the fluid, transdisciplinary
character of research are particularly striking. Volta’s apparatus, for
instance, was constructed as a response to Galvani’s experiments on frog
muscles, highlighting the close connections between  electrochemistry
and biological research.

Films, photographic and otherwise, as media of projection and material
surface processes Lucretius claimed that we can perceive objects because
they throw off ‘films’, which circulate in the air and strike the sense
organs of nearby viewers. Our understanding of perception has evolved
since his time, but students of filmic objects have always been (and
are) fascinated by the precipitations of things and appearances in
two-dimensional, visual media. Still, the materiality of the medium
frequently figures in the abstract only. Today, digital technologies
have made very salient, of course, the processual nature of  images, 
but canvas, photographs or celluloid films are rarely studied as
material, epistemologically active surfaces in their own right. Our
workshop aims to include contributions on such surfaces. Emulsions,
latent images, and photochemistry, for instance, would seem to provide
ample points-of-contact between histories of chemistry, the life
sciences, and photography. Similarly so: the (re)production of
development and motion, or the preparation of items such as microscope
slides and taxidermy specimen.

We invite contributions engaging with these and other spheres and their
manifold intersections. Some illustrative questions include: In the
history of science, can we generate cultural histories of the biological
cell, a historiographically rather neglected object? Or related, of the
similarly neglected but important, huge fields such as electro-chemistry
or chemical engineering? Might we re-read through surface-objects
disciplinary histories, experimental practices or the ways science is
permeable to its social and cultural settings (and vice versa)? In film
and media studies, how can attention to the materialities of surfaces
incorporate the histories of science, technology or industry? Or again,
more philosophically, how can we bring together concepts and materials,
the abstract and concrete, metaphors and physical boundaries in
re-thinking the histories of interstices?

All submitted abstracts related to our main theme will be given careful
consideration. Abstracts of up to 300 words should include your name,
institutional affiliation, and email address. These should be submitted
by email  to Mathias Grote (mgrote@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de) and Max Stadler
(mstadler@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de).

The deadline for abstract submission is 31 January 2010.

http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/workshops/en/Membranes-Surfaces-Boundaries.html

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