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Karsten Heck: George Kubler’s 'Time-Solid'
George Kubler’s 'Time-Solid'
(p. 613 – 630)

Karsten Heck

George Kubler’s 'Time-Solid'
A Visual Model of Art-Historical Time

PDF, 18 pages

  • gaze
  • physiology
  • history of science

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Karsten Heck

is a collection manager at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen’s Zentrale Kustodie and a doctoral candidate at the Institute for Art History and Visual Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin. His dissertation is entitled “Diagramme der Stilgeschichte. Elemente einer Stilgeschichte der Diagramme.”
Prior engagements include scientific assistance at Humboldt University’s Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques (2008–2013) and a fellowship at the German Center for the History of Art in Paris (2013–2014).
Michael F. Zimmermann (ed.): Vision in Motion

Vision is not mere registration of what enters, via the gateway of our eyes, from the outside world into our inner consciousness. Understanding the act of seeing as mirroring the outside world in mental images overlooks its temporal aspect. From Berkeley to Helmholtz, from Goethe to Cézanne, new discourses based on the physiology of the sense organs lead to new conceptions of vision not only conceived of as a mental process, but as a cognitive activity. Even before Freud interpreted dreams, seeing was conceived of as accompanying our life even when we sleep. However, to understand even the stream of the sensations, we have to configure them in pictures. Since the 19th century, the media reflect about the confrontation of seeing as a diachronic activity and of perception as coded in synchronic images. The contributions to the volume investigate the opposition of the stream of sensations and the configuration of time – from early illustrations of plants to the avant-gardes, from gesture to cinema, from decapitation to dance, from David Hume to Bergson and Deleuze. The main objective is a critical examination of images rendering vision in motion, without reducing them to the temporality of narrative.

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