Month: August 2019

4S presentation on quality, trust, and the senses

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Heading off to New Orleans next week to attend my first 4S (Society for Social Studies of Science) conference. I’m excited to be on a panel on “Technicalities of Trust and Technologies of Sensing.” Here is my abstract: “Verifying Paper Money: Quality-Control and the Materialization of Trust” This paper explores sensory moments of quality-control, specifically through the case of the bank note as a trustworthy paper. Of interest are the ways that trust becomes produced, transmitted and known by security printers, so that certain bits of paper come to be objectively perceived and circulated as authentic and valuable. Trust is explored here as intimately tied to the sensory assessment of expertise and quality. Counterfeits and forgeries are often recognized as such because they are judged as technically inaccurate or imprecise. Part of this evaluation process lies in the education of the senses and learning to discern material characteristics that are legitimate, whether through sight, touch, smell or sound. Trust is thus inscribed or embedded in a paper through specialized and recognizable techniques and materials. This …

Media, making et savoirs intermédiaires

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Ce novembre, je participerai aux Entretiens Jacques Cartier durant une journée de présentations sur le thème: Art-Science : La frontière est un lieu en soi ! Les infos ici et sur le site. Comment organiser une rencontre art-science qui soit féconde en même temps que mutuellement bénéfique ? Il s’agit d’éviter l’instrumentalisation : lorsque le scientifique utilise l’artiste ou inversement. Quel rapport entre pratique artistique et pratique scientifique ? Il s’agit de mettre en évidence la profonde similarité des gestes et des pensées des artistes et des scientifiques, au-delà des apparences. Quel parcours pour un étudiant qui se formerait à la frontière entre art et science ? Il s’agit de trouver la manière la plus juste d’inscrire un parcours transdisciplinaire dans un monde encore profondément disciplinaire. Notre réflexion distinguera la variété des expériences correspondant aux différentes modalités de l’art et de la science. C’est ainsi que nous accueillerons tous les duplets art-science possibles : musique-mathématiques, danse-technologie, performance-biologie, poésie et mathématiques… 8h15 – Accueil 8h30 – Mot accueil (intervenants à définir) 8h45 – T1 : Comment …

Don’t Copy That: Security Printing and the Making of High-Tech Paper

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Abstract Printing is not a new media technology, but it is continuously being renewed. In this sense, it is an example of novelty going largely unnoticed, woven into the quotidian and ordinary in unassuming ways. One reason for this is the incomplete way we tell the story of printed paper, which privileges narratives of readings, access, and dissemination. To complicate the way media scholars think printing, this article turns to the case of security printing, which produces objects like banknotes and passports that circulate with trust and authority. Here, printing emerges through the specific need to print securely, offering a narrative based on the need for order and protection. The work of security printing, always straddling between art and science, produces artefacts understood as authentic copies. Such a transformation of paper into valuable object relies on the technical artistry of the security printer, who sets the aesthetic and material standards of authenticity through physical features like watermarks, engravings, holographs, special substrates, threads, or inks. Drawing on a close reading of informational materials produced by the …