TY - JOUR
AU - Biocca, Frank
AB - PHILOSOPHY OF COMMUNICATION 32 e Sampling from the Museum of Forms: Photography and Visual Thinking in the Rise of Modern Statistics FRANK BIOCCA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill N 1857, Oliver Wendell Holmes, father of the famous jurist, lifted a stereoscope to his eyes for the first time. After the initial strain, as I the lenses forced his eyes to accommodate the different images only inches away, Holmes experienced two "visions." One emerged as the neurons were tricked into fusing two disparate scenes into one. The other was the brilliant flash of historical insight. Holmes verbalized it in a kind of Brechtian soliloquy: Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. ... There is only one Coliseum or Pan­ theon; but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed,­ representatives of billions of pictures, -since they were erected! Matter must always be fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We 
TI - Sampling from the Museum of Forms: Photography and Visual Thinking in the Rise of Modern Statistics
JF - Annals of the International Communication Association
DO - 10.1080/23808985.1987.11678669
DA - 1987-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/sampling-from-the-museum-of-forms-photography-and-visual-thinking-in-OIfWi4Hq02
SP - 684
EP - 708
VL - 10
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -