Perceptual Machines: Communication, Archiving, and Vision in Post-War American Design

This article examines historical transformations in the relationship between the image, time, and knowledge after the war. One site to investigate these changes in representation is at the locus of science, design, film and architecture in the works of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes for the Center for Advanced Visual Study at MIT and in the interests of science education. In these works, including many science education and pedagogy films, the nature of the image, the materiality of vision, and the relationship between documentation and communication were being aggressively rethought. All these projects were deeply invested in the emergent terms of cybernetics and electronic media. Ontology, documentation, and representation were seemingly replaced by discourses of communication, performance, and modularity; the world as interface for the mediation of ongoing, lively communicative exchanges. The work of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes provides evidence of a more global reformulation of the work of the document, the relationship between abstraction and materiality, and among science, aesthetics, and visuality.