Eye-pparatus: Re-imagining the human eye in the nineteenth century

Okudan, Alaz. (2022). Eye-pparatus: Re-imagining the human eye in the nineteenth century. In Katerina Krtilova, Baruch Gottlieb & Ulrich Richtmeyer (Eds.), Towards technosophy (pp. 83-104). Potsdam: Potsdam University of Applied Sciences. https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-fhpotsdam/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2955

Abstract

This essay examines how optography—the practice of attempting to extract images from the retinas of deceased individuals—reveals the cultural origins of modern surveillance in the nineteenth century. Using Vilém Flusser's framework of technical images and apparatuses, the text argues that optography functioned as an "untimely apparatus" where Victorian society's imagination of the human eye as an automated recording device far exceeded the technique's actual capabilities. Despite its technical failures, the collective desire to instrumentalize the eye as a biological camera, particularly for solving murder cases in the absence of reliable forensic methods, foreshadowed the automated surveillance technologies of the 20th century. Optography thus represents a crucial moment in the genealogy of surveillance culture, demonstrating how apparatuses emerge through feedback loops between scientific possibility, cultural imagination, and societal needs for control and detection.

Funder

Federal Ministry of Education and Research
DAAD German Academic Exchange Service
Potsdam University of Applied Sciences

Publisher

Potsdam University of Applied Sciences

Rights

CC BY-NC-ND

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