Learning to See: Science, the Public, and the Avant-Garde in Fin-de-siècle Germany

Thomas Haakenson (California College of the Arts)

From so-called anti-vaxxers to climate change deniers, scientific knowledge in the 21st-century seems to be experiencing a crisis in public confidence. But challenges to scientific knowledge are neither altogether new nor altogether bad. Thomas Haakenson examines in his talk the lessons to be found in the critical engagements with scientific knowledge offered by avant-garde artists in the Germany of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Can we all “learn to see” scientifically? Should we?

See german.uic.edu for Zoom details.