This course introduces the history of material cultures of the visual through a broad range of research in the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), visual studies, and cultural history. Each week illuminates the politics of vision and machines, visual practices, and image-making by centering on a particular keyword, including worldmaking, attention and surveillance, epistemologies of the eye, grams, performance, para-empiricisms, interface, techno-mysticism, macrographics & micrographics, infrastructure, imperial optics, and computer vision.

Each session combines the discussion of secondary literature and historical texts and artifacts with considerations of method and craft, including practical research skills, narrative techniques, and theoretical reflections. The conversation will focus on the questions scholars of visual technologies and visual practices in the sciences ask, the conversations they get into, the tools and evidence they use to answer those questions, and the form of their narratives and interpretation. We will ask how and why scholars working with visual STS choose to examine their subjects the way they do, and what the ramifications of those choices are for knowledge production.