Silvia Casini
Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture, University of Aberdeen (UK)
Silvia Casini is Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen (UK) where she teaches courses to students in the humanities and in the life sciences, besides coordinating the intercalated medical humanities degree. Her main research strand focuses on the aesthetic, epistemological and societal implications of scientific visualization, particularly in the case of emerging technologies. She deploys visual culture, science and technology studies (STS) and aesthetics to explore how (still and moving) images and perception work within systems of knowledge.
Her research, supported by grants coming from, among others, The Leverhulme Trust, the AHRC and the Carnegie Trust features in international journals such as Configurations, Leonardo, Contemporary Aesthetics, Nuncius: Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, Studi di Estetica, The Senses and Society. In her curatorial work to date, she is committed to study art-science fertilization projects in their material environments (museums, laboratories, cities) to assess how the reconfigure existing forms of visibility, thinking and agency.
Latest Publications:
Monographs:
Giving Bodies back to Data. Image-makers, Data and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology (MIT Press), pp. 312 with colour plates, 2021.
Il ritratto scansione. Immaginare il cervello tra neuroscienza e arte (Mimesis Edizioni), pp. 260 with colour plates, 2016.
Recent peer-reviewed articles and book chapters:
“A Missed Encounter between Species: the Interplay of Scientific Realism and Aesthetics in Painlevé’s Cinematographic Experiments on the Octopus”, Studi di Estetica Journal 25(4) 2022.
“Images, Data-Visualization and the Narratives they Create: The Narrative Function of Images in Fostering MRI Innovation” in Scientific Visual Representations in History (eds. Valleriani, Giannini and Giannetto), Springer Nature, pp. 238-261, 2022
“The Space between Bodies: Exploring Contagion without Contact from Cohl’s Animated Cephaloscope (1910) to Feuerstein’s Borgy & Bes (2018)” in Art in the Age of Ubiquitous Media, eds. Cubitt and Catricalà, VCS. Visual Culture Studies, 2022
“What Counts as Data and for Whom? The Role of the Modest Witness in Art-Science Collaboration” in The Routledge Handbook of Art, Science and Technology Studies, (eds. Rogers, Halpern, Vignone), 2021.
“Phantasmata of Dance: Time and Memory within Choreographic Constraints”, Forum for Modern Language Studies (Oxford University Press), vol. 55(3), 2019, pp. 325-338.
“Beyond the Neuro-Realism Fallacy: From John R. Mallard’s Hand-painted MRI Image of a Mouse to BioArt Scenarios”. Special Number on material and visual aspects of neuroscience in the 20th century. Nuncius. Journal of the Material and Visual History of Science, vol 32(2), 2017, pp. 440-471.
“Synaesthesia, transformation and synthesis: toward a multi-sensory pedagogy of the image”. The Senses and Society, vol 12(1), 2017, pp. 1-17
Edited special numbers:
“The Representation and Care of Illness. Trauma, Visual Culture, and the Medical Humanities” special number (eds. Casini, Cati and Toschi), Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal, 2022.
“Nuove cartografie corporee. Dal molare al molecolare, dal corpo trasparente a quello potenziale”, special number (co-edited) “Trasparenze”, Elephant & Castle Journal, vol. 22, pp. 4-26, 2019.