ICONOCLASH

Iconoclash. Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, is a critical volume that investigates the status of the image across disciplines and domains. Published in conjunction with the 2002 exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe, the book assembles contributions from scholars and artists to examine practices of image production, destruction, and circulation—particularly in contexts where the image becomes a site of conflict or ambiguity.

One of the central contributions to the volume is Peter Galison’s essay, “Images Scatter into Data, Data Gather into Images.” Galison, a historian of science, explores the epistemic and operational shifts in the role of scientific imagery. His analysis foregrounds a transformation from direct visual representation to the computational reconstruction of visual forms from dispersed data.

Galison outlines a historical trajectory in which scientific images—once grounded in analog techniques and optical evidence—are increasingly produced through processes of simulation, statistical modeling, and algorithmic assembly. In this context, images are no longer captured but constructed, emerging not from a singular viewpoint but from distributed data points and machine processing. As Galison notes, “images no longer spring from a point of view but from a point of calculation.”

This shift has significant implications for the epistemology of scientific practice. The distinction between observation and simulation becomes blurred, and the authority of the image is increasingly tied to its technical and procedural lineage rather than its indexical relationship to a referent. Galison’s analysis contributes to the broader theme of Iconoclash: the instability of images, their contested functions, and their capacity to provoke both belief and skepticism.

By framing the image as both fragmentable and recomposable, Galison situates scientific visualization within a larger discourse on the materiality of knowledge and the infrastructures of perception. His essay offers a critical perspective on the ways in which data and images are entangled, and how this entanglement redefines what it means to see, represent, and understand.