Tresch, John

Profile Picture
Email Address
ORCID
Disciplines
Continental Philosophy
Cultural History
Film and Media Studies
French and Francophone Literature
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
Intellectual History
Science and Technology Studies
Social and Cultural Anthropology
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Position
Associate Professor
Introduction
Research Interests

Filters

71
2007 - 200922010 - 20135
7
61
Reset filters

Settings

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
  • Publication
  • Publication
    The Prophet and the Pendulum: Sensational Science and Audiovisual Phantasmagoria Around 1848
    (2011-05-26) Tresch, John
    During the French Second Republic—the volatile period between the 1848 Revolution and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s 1851 coup d’état—two striking performances fired the imaginations of Parisian audiences. The first, in 1849, was a return: after more than a decade, the master of the Parisian grand opera, Giacomo Meyerbeer, launched Le prophète, whose complex instrumentation and astounding visuals—including the unprecedented use of electric lighting—surpassed even his own previous innovations in sound and vision. The second, in 1851, was a debut: the installation of Foucault’s pendulum in the Panthéon. The installation marked the first public exposure of one of the most celebrated demonstrations in the history of science. A heavy copper ball suspended from the former cathedral’s copula, once set in motion, swung in a plane that slowly traced a circle on the marble floor, demonstrating the rotation of the earth.
  • Publication
    Toward a New Organology: Instruments of Music and Science
    (2013-01-01) Tresch, John
    The Renaissance genre of organological treatises inventoried the forms and functions of musical instruments. This article proposes an update and expansion of the organological tradition, examining the discourses and practices surrounding both musical and scientifi c instruments. Drawing on examples from many periods and genres, we aim to capture instruments’ diverse ways of life. To that end we propose and describe a comparative “ethics of instruments”: an analysis of instruments’ material configurations, social and institutional locations, degrees of freedom, and teleologies. This perspective makes it possible to trace the intersecting and at times divergent histories of science and music: their shared material practices, aesthetic commitments, and attitudes toward technology, as well as their impact on understandings of human agency and the order of nature.
  • Publication
    Introduction: Audio/Visual
    (2011-05-26) Mills, Mara; Tresch, John
    “A/V” seems to belong to the always-already obsolete. Even at the height of the craze for “audiovisual aids” in the mid-twentieth century, its association with the humble schoolroom and the “A/V geek” gave the acronym an air of the outmoded. Overtaken, in quick succession, by “multimedia” and “new media” at the end of the century, the audiovisual seems all the more rudimentary, remedial rather than remediated, or simply a minor component of larger media systems.
  • Publication
    Technological World-Pictures: Cosmic Things and Cosmograms
    (2007-03-01) Tresch, John
    Martin Heidegger’s notion of things as gatherings that disclose a world conveys the “thickness” of everyday objects. This essay extends his discussion of things—part of a sustained criticism of modern technology—to technological objects as well. As a corrective to his totalizing, even totalitarian, generalizations about “enframing” and “the age of the world‐picture,” and to a more widespread tendency among critics of modernity to present technology in only the most dystopian, uniform, and claustrophobic terms, this essay explores two species of technical object: cosmic things and cosmograms. The first suggests how an ordinary object may contain an entire cosmos, the second how a cosmos may be treated as just another thing. These notions are proposed as a basis for comparison and connection between “the industrial world” and other modes of ordering the universe.
  • Publication
    La « Technesthétique » : Répétition, Habitude et Dispositif Technique Dans Les Arts Romantiques
    (2010-01-01) Tresch, John
    Français En 1843, le physicien André-Marie Ampère décrit une nouvelle science, la « technesthétique », qui porte sur les « moyens par lesquels l’homme agit sur l’intelligence ou la volonté des autres hommes ». Cette nouvelle science correspond à la recherche des artistes romantiques pour des nouveaux effets et à leur fascination pour la puissance transformatrice de l’industrie. Comme une traduction théorique de ces obsessions, les lecteurs « mineurs » du philosophe Maine de Biran – y compris Ampère, Alexandre Bertrand, Moreau du Tours et Félix Ravaisson – ont avancé des analyses des interactions dynamiques entre le mouvement et la pensée, la matière et l’esprit. Leur intérêt pour les modifications des perceptions par l’habitude, par la répétition et par la technique entrecroise et éclaircit la « technesthétique » des arts romantiques. English In 1843 the physicist André-Marie Ampère announced a new science, "Techno-aesthetics", which dealt with "the means by which man acts on the intelligence or the will of other men." This new science corresponds with romantic artists’ search for new, striking effects and their fascination with the transformative power of industry. A theoretical mirror for these obsessions can be found in the works of the "minor" readers of the philosopher Maine de Biran – a group that includes Ampère, Alexandre Bertrand, Moreau de Tours and Félix Ravaisson – who advanced subtle analyses of the dynamic interactions between movement and thought, between matter and mind. Their interest in the modifications brought to perception by habit, by repetition and by technology intersects and illuminates the "technaesthetics" of the romantic arts.
  • Publication