Talk:

Nehemiah Grew was one of the earliest people to conduct a detailed exploration of plant life with the use of a microscope. The things he discovered had he had no language to describe. Many of the engravings that accompanied Grew’s publications were necessarily abstract, resembling less the tradition of botanical illustration than a series of maps or mathematical diagrams. In this talk, Pamela Mackenzie will trace the visual form of Grew’s illustrations through the tradition of cartography and consider the implications of this way of imagining the microscopic world geographically – as a place to be surveyed and conquered.

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About Pamela:

Pamela Mackenzie is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory supported through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). She is currently at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in a predoctoral position in the research group "Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions" lead by Sietske Fransen. While at the Hertziana, she is working towards the completion of her dissertation, “Microscope/Macrocosm: Early Modern Technology, Visualization and Representations of Nature.” Her work explores visual epistemology and technologies of vision in seventeenth-century scientific illustrations..

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The Convergence Sci-Art/Art-Sci Conferences is a series focused on the crossover of disciplines with science, especially arts and communication. The talks cover subjects like the influence of media on modern science, the public perception of the scientific method, neuroscience popular misconceptions, neuroscience and technology in the medical practice, or science immersed artistic practice.

The Convergence Initiative is an independent nonprofit initiative developed in partnership with the Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience (BRaIN) Program of the RI-MUHC, Concordia Faculty of Fine Arts, and Visual Voice Gallery. It is supported by the Canadian Association for Neuroscience, the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, The Integrated Program in Neuroscience of McGill University, and the Montreal General Hospital Foundation.