Project (2018)

Experiment, Gestural Knowledge, and Scientific Change in the Age of Precision

Scientific change is not necessarily a revolutionary moment; more often it emerges incrementally. Experimentation, therefore, plays a central role because it involves a working knowledge most often unrecognized in the literary tradition of the past. The historiographic approach of historically investigating local sites of knowledge production includes their materiality combined with a long-term investigation of scientific development. Particularly due to the various technical breakdowns and failures when enacting experiments, these trials became the site of acquiring an embodied knowledge that provides a new understanding of scientific change that acknowledges the experimenter’s singularity while also stresses the role of working gestures and their related gestural knowledge as historically embodied and constitutive for establishing this new scientific knowledge.