Microscopes make lots of thing visible too small to be seen by the naked eye. Microscopy uses preparations to make visible the otherwise invisible. Apart from discussions by those in the field about the correct preparation of objects, the fascinating and seemingly self-evident fact is rarely questioned in microscopic practice. Viewing microscopy as a media praxis that visualizes various processes and side effects opens a new field of methodological reflection. Lina Maria Stahl is expanding the scientific perspective in media studies in her doctoral thesis. She studied biology, film, and media studies and has been a scholarship student at the DFG Research Training “Visibility and Visualization - Hybrid Forms of Pictorial Knowledge” at the University of Potsdam since 2011.
What do parasitic wasps look like, and how does their appearance differ from other wasp-like insects? Viewing them through a microscope reveals what is hardly visible with the naked eye: These tiny, biological pest controllers are gracefully built creatures with glistening wings and a long, elegant body, whose color shimmers between a warm brownish-yellow and shiny metallic black, depending on the species. Stahl was fascinated by the things she saw under the microscope while spending hours doing laboratory research on the sexual behavior of parasitic wasps for her diploma thesis. “My perception of these insects changed completely during my work at the microscope. I saw the great variety of shapes and colors. Detailed body parts and individual features of the tiny and otherwise inconspicuous animals became visible and almost seem to be little personalities,” she remembers.
Lina Maria Stahl finished her biology studies at Freien Universität Berlin in 2006, waving goodbye to her scientific lab research, and earned her MA in European Media Studies at the University of Potsdam with the thesis “Concepts and Strategies of Transgenic Art”, which was awarded Best MA Thesis of 2010. She analyzed the artwork of Eduardo Kac who uses genetic methods to create provocative artwork to draw attention to the far-reaching dimensions of genetic engineering. While artists use methods of natural science in many new art forms, natural science itself applies aesthetic, visual methods more than is generally assumed. The PhD candidate thinks that these shifts between art and science are particularly exciting. What seems at first glance an unusual change from natural science to the humanities is actually comprehensible and consistent; her new subject is actually the logical continuation of her interest in microscopic imaging in biology – just from another perspective. “The microscope is a medium of visualization,” she explains. “I want to work not only with a microscope, i.e. with natural scientific research methods, but also to pursue a broader reflective method because microscopy as media praxis has not been intensively analyzed from a scientific-historical or media perspective.”
What can a microscope make visible and how? Which methodical preconditions are necessary to visualize invisible living objects? What kind of preparation is necessary? What are the consequences of microscopic visualization for the objects and our understanding, research, and depiction of life? Stahl has been examining these and other questions since 2011 in her dissertation project as part of the DFG Research Training Center “Visibility and Visualization – Hybrid Forms of Pictorial Knowledge” at the University of Potsdam. She is investigating the development of microscopic practice from its 17th-century origins through the 19th century’s momentous changes in optical technology to the latest technologies of the 20th and 21st century.
The question of preparation, observation, and interpretation processes is as important to the doctoral candidate as analyzing scientific imaging generation in biology and resulting media formats – drawings, microphotography, and data-generated nano-images. From microscopy’s beginnings art and science have both interfered with and complemented each other. The historical development of microscopy, Stahl says, is actually a history of images and increasing demarcation of boundaries between art and natural science. The first microscopic equipment of the 16th century was not used in science but in handicraft, in the textile industry to be exact. The first examinations of biological objects in the 17th century were mainly of popular scientific interest, for example presenting enlarged projections of insects with a solar microscope at fairs or entertaining an educated audience. When scientific interest in microscopy began to grow due to technical improvements and was taken seriously as a scientific method, there was an increasing need to visually secure the objects and the results of examination. Stahl says that an object was worthless if not somehow recorded. Microscopic examinations preceded the development of photography and were consequently unthinkable without the making of drawings. “Microscopy had to be connected with artistic and technical work, and the separation of art and science was less rigid than it would become later.”
Robert Hooke (1635-1703), whose groundbreaking book “Micrographia” was published in 1665, first opened up the microscopic dimensions of flora and fauna. The description and display of plant cells and their structures leads back to him. The second example is the microscopic observations of the Dutch researcher and microscope builder Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), who, with the help of his simple but strongly magnifying apparatuses, observed biological cell material like blood, urine, semen, dental plaque, and fish scales. Without naming them, he identified “small animals” in the saliva—bacteria—as well as dots in the blood—red blood cells. The eye was sometimes ahead of knowledge or even pushed it. Artistically, however, Leeuwenhoek was a less talented and less established scientist than Hooke. To be heard and taken seriously, microscopists like him had to commission draftsmen to capture their observations in images. Nowadays drawing is part of studying biology although microscopic views are often easily recorded by cameras. “The act of drawing is still very important. You look at thing differently. It matters whether you only look or have to transfer what you have seen into a drawing,” says the former biology student. Her current research in media studies focuses on the visualization of cells that has rapidly developed since cell theory for flora and fauna was formulated in the 19th century. Examinations of the cells themselves interest her less than the microscopic practices and processes that make them visible. Transparent cells are colored or illuminated indirectly by optical methods. Cells are taken from a living organism and placed on a cleaned surface. The toxic colorants poison the cells; the lighting heats them. Such interventions cannot be disregarded, Stahl points out. The core of her project is to create awareness of a problem inherent to the preparation being a necessary component of microscopy: Observers and researchers always interfere with the object they want to observe under the microscope, and in trying to visualize it, they alter its natural, living condition. Biological objects cannot be simply extracted from their context and put under the microscope. They are too large or too thick. They are alive—that is, agile. They have to be crushed, deformed, colored, or killed. Paradoxically, biologists as researchers of life can only look at rather immovable parts, particles, and pieces of life, like the parasitic wasp: squashed between two glass plates under the microscope. The image of the object and its respective media form exemplify what has to be done to visualize it.
The Scientist
Lina Maria Stahl studied physics (intermediate examination) and biology (diploma) from 2001 to 2006. She studied film studies at Freie Universität Berlin from 2006 to 2007 and European Media Studies (MA) at the University of Potsdam from 2007 to 2010. She has been a doctoral candidate at the DFG Research Training Center “Visibility and Visualization” at the University of Potsdam since 2011 and has worked as a research associate at the Institute of Media Studies of Bayreuth University since 2014.
Contact
E-Mail: lina-maria.stahluuni-bayreuthpde
Text: Nina Weller, Online-Editing: Agnes Bressa, Translation: Susanne Voigt
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