Thus far the volume has mostly addressed the mimesis of visible materials. But how does one imitate materials that cannot – or can no longer – be observed by the human eye? While this is an epistemological problem besetting forms of mediated replication and modelling over a long period, particularly in the natural sciences, new forms of replication accompanying the digital age throw out new kinds of questions about the consequences of digitisation for both what and how we know, and these profoundly affect both the power relations governing access to ‘knowledge’, and understandings of the self. Indeed, digitisation goes beyond this to disturb settled boundaries between the material and the ideal, the object and its replication: it can reshape the form of knowledge and the manner of production of knowledge objects such as images or books (e.g. Sassoon 2004; Owen 2006; Thylstrup 2018; Walther 2019).Traffic to and fro between the virtual and material worlds seems to blur the distinction between fact and fiction, reality and artifice, in new and often troubling ways, but it also offers new prospects for material replication. One of the greatest challenges for material mimesis lies in visualising the quantities, characters, or symbols stored in and transmitted by computers: data. Data can be visualized through material mimetic practices for all kinds of applications and on many different scales. To assist with heart surgery, for instance, surgeons sometimes use imaging data to 3D–print exact replicas of the organ that is to be repaired. To be able to study the heart and its defect through an exact replica before the surgery takes place helps to orient the surgeon during the procedure. But while the defective heart requires imitation because it is hidden inside the human body, in other instances, it is the scale of the materials or matter we seek to imitate that poses special challenges. On the smallest of scales, synthetic drugs mimic the chemical structure of natural neurotransmitters in the body, while is biomimetic nanoparticles mimic some of the membrane functions of the cells of our bodies to help treat certain conditions, including cancer. Such attempts at replication on the molecular scale are central to CADD (Computer Aided Drug Design), a set of techniques involving computerised extrapolation from molecular structure to predicted physiological effects that is currently provoking debate over the relation between resemblance and efficacy in fields including pharmacology, psychology and philosophy. Conversely, on the largest of scales, as Skulberg, Sparre and Veel show in their contribution to this volume, humans have never even directly experienced some 95% of the matter of which the universe is composed. Their chapter discusses a project that seeks to replicate the entire material cosmos in digital form: Illustris, a set of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations produced using scientific data. Skulberg et al. argue that the visual simulations produced on the basis of this data raise a fundamental question: How do we represent the universe we inhabit, both the matter we can directly experience and that we cannot?
As Kromholz discusses in her chapter, conservators of contemporary art have to deal with the practice of material mimesis in relation to invisibility in yet another manner. Her essay investigates which mimetic practices are most appropriate for dealing with material loss when caring for an artwork. From art made from highly perishable doughnuts, to a melting piece made of ice or sculptures that were meant to be eaten, Kromholz argues that the engagement with the material language of the artwork is crucial for the development of effective decision-making strategies for their long-term preservation. The “meaning” of the ephemeral artwork must endure over time, in spite of its essential (indeed, definitional) impermanence which leads to the loss of the original matter. As with medieval saints, something beyond “the thing” continues.
Bibliography
Owen, John Mackenzie, The scientific article in the age of digitization, Dordrecht 2006.
Sassoon, Joanna, ‘Photographic materiality in the age of digital reproduction’, 186–202, in: Photographs objects histories: On the materiality of images (E. Edwards & J. Hart, eds.), London & New York 2004.
Thylstrup, Nanna Bonde, The politics of mass digitization, Cambridge, Mass. 2018.
Walther, Franziska, ‘Shifting authorship: The illustrator’s role in contemporary book illustration: Decision-making with depictive, augmenting, and appropriational strategies: Illustration: Concept of diffusion vs. innovation’, 305–329, in: A companion to illustration (A. Male, ed.), Hoboken & Chichester 2019.