Nous avons le plaisir d’annoncer que le projet présenté par Anne-Valérie Dulac (porteuse du projet) et intitulé « IRIS: Capturing Irridescence (16th-19th C.) » a été distingué par un financement EMERGENCE !
Toutes nos félicitations à toutes l’équipe!
Descriptif du projet:
IRIS: Capturing Iridescence (16th-19h c.): Bioinspiration & the Humanities
Team members:
– Professor Vanessa Alayrac-Fielding (History & material culture, 18th c. Europe/China), Université de Lille.
– Olivia Dill (art history & physics: Dutch and English prints & watercolours of American insects, long 17th century), doctoral candidate at Northwestern University /Moore Curatorial Fellow, Drawings and Prints, The Morgan Library & Museum, NY, USA
– Dr. Arnaud Dubois (anthropology, industrial France & Europe), chargé de recherche CNRS/Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.
– Dr. Anne-Valérie Dulac (drama, poetry and visual culture in early modern England and France), MCF Sorbonne Université. Project leader
– Dr. Bérénice Gaillemin (ethnology & translation/linguistic studies, 16th/17th c. Europe/Hispanic world), post-doc Warsaw University / ERC Toetl.
– Prof. Charlotte Ribeyrol (art history & 19th c. UK poetry) Sorbonne Université, PI ERC Chromotope (2020-2025).
– Dr. Sophie Rhodes (art history, early modern England), tutor at Edinburgh University.
– Cecilia Rönnerstam MA RCA (conservation & research, early modern miniatures and technical literature), Nationalmuseum Stockholm, conservatrice / chargée de recherche.
– Dr. Giulia Simonini (history of science, European history of colour 16th-19th c.), post-doc., Technische Universität Berlin.
Objectives: Through the study of the representation of iridescence in the arts and literature from the 16th to the 19th century, the IRIS project aims to bring the humanities into the field of biomimetics. The project brings together an interdisciplinary team of 9 researchers (anthropology, art history, history of science, literature, drama, translation studies, history, conservation) from 6 different countries.
Rationale: « Iridescence » a term evoking Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, was first coined in most European languages in the early 19th century. Its first recorded instances in print point to the English language, via the work of mineralogists and geologists. That the word should have first appeared in the natural sciences comes as no surprise, given that nature has retained a “monopoly on this metallic-like, colored effect” (Parker 2016, 58) until the 21st century, when nanoscience allowed the advent of iridescence-inducing technologies such as pearlescent flakes (Schenk et al. 2013). Our project will look into the work of artists & authors as they experimented with iridescence before it was even understood or named.
While focusing on European art forms and techniques, our project contends that the history of western representations of iridescence between the 16th and 19th century cannot be disconnected from a global history of international negotiations. Although trade, travel and exchange were nothing new in the 16th century, « the trade in goods across distances moved a significant step towards becoming truly globe-encompassing [f]rom the late sixteenth century onwards » (Gerritsen & Riello 2021, 4). Following those same routes, plants, animals, men and women, pictures and books circulated in hitherto unheard-of numbers. In addition to increasing the number of iridescent specimens which were brought to the attention of the European audience, the discovery of new forms of natural iridescence, which oftentimes could not be shown first hand, led to the development of a booming visual and textual culture of reportage through which artists and authors tried to render these new natural wonders.
Since iridescence represented a major mimetic challenge, namely the reproduction of something that could not be explained any more than it could be named, artists and authors had to innovate to reproduce its appearance and effects. This methodological premise ties in with the field of « bioinspiration »: this emerging domain, defined by the Biomimetics Committee of the International Organization for Standardization in 2015 as “a creative approach based on the observation of biological systems”, has up to now been mostly concerned with industrial or architectural developments (Raskin & Molina 2018; Camborde 2018; Pawlyn 2019; Boeuf 2022; Chayaamoor-Heil 2023; Fernandes 2024). Similarly, courses or programmes introducing biomimesis are overwhelmingly offered outside humanities departments (see the available programmes & resources on the CEEBIOS website, https://ceebios.com/formations-enseignement/). In his 2024’s Introduction to Biomimetics and Bioinspiration, Bharat Bhushan includes a chapter on “Biomimetics in Arts and Architecture ». Although he acknowledges that « artists and architects strive to derive [nature-inspired] properties and incorporate this organization into their work” (21), the chapter is mostly concerned with the creation of new materials and structures. It overlooks textual creation altogether and, to a lesser extent, visual arts. While literature is not given any single mention, visual arts are presented as demonstrating « a fascination with representing landscape and living nature, but without adaptation or use of functions derived from the natural world » (18).
Breaking away from such dominant perspective, we want to show how poetic, dramatic, literary and pictorial designs were never intended as « mere copies of living nature » but work instead to « extract a principle (or principles) from nature, seek to understand that principle, and incorporate the principle into a new medium, design, or other applications » (23), thereby staging new forms of ecological interactions between humans and their environment. The IRIS project will show how emerging discussions of “biomorphism” and “eco-aesthetics” (Romand et. al 2023) lead us to reassess the place of humanities within the ongoing institutionalisation of biomimetics as a field.
Main steps:
Members of the project will convene for biannual seminars (3 of them online, 1 in-person) devoted to an iridescent object or species (re)discovered by Europeans between the 16th and 19th century. Seminars will include guest speakers from the fields of STEM, industry and/or design. They will lead to the identification of key objects in the history of the capture of iridescence which will feature in a virtual museum of iridescence (see description below). Our seminars will thus be conceived of as workshops designed to discuss and plan the overall design of the gallery (scenography, number and scope of virtual rooms, audience research & interpretive writing policy). They will enable us to identify questions and avenues (or dead ends, for that matter) that will guide the drafting of a CFP for an international and interdisciplinary conference. This conference will be designed as a series of workshops bringing together specialists from different disciplines around the same objects. The workshops will be divided by category (e.g. shells, birds, insects, stones, meteorological phenomena, etc.) and will result in the production of multi-authored articles for publication. To this day, no biomimesis-related publication or event has gathered experts from all disciplines featured in our project: while biologists & designers are key actors in biomimesis we want to show that some « biologically inspired solutions to human challenges » may come from areas of the humanities which have not yet taken part in the « effective communication between many disciplines » (Lecointre & al. 2023).
Our gallery, designed as a cabinet of curiosities, will feature a selection of representations of iridescence dating from our reference period. For each, visitors will be able to access an explanatory note produced by several specialists, as well as other historical, artistic and literary references which will illuminate their meaning. These cards (distinct from the aforementioned academic articles) will be conceived of as museum labels meant for visitors to grasp the importance of interdisciplinarity in capturing the meaning of these objects and the innovations they attest to. Additionally, we would like to provide family-friendly interpretation so that even younger audiences, such as schoolchildren, could engage with our content in age-appropriate ways.
Working Hypotheses: below is a provisional list of questions/topics to address
* Techniques of iridescence
– Appropriation: techniques of « appropriation » included attempts at rendering iridescence by collecting the material straight from the animal/mineral/vegetal (Mandrij & Simonini 2023). The term « capture », which features in the title of our project, condenses the ambivalence of such techniques, by underlining their potentially predatory and unethical aspect.
– Innovation: the rendition of iridescence which so occupied authors and artists alike also led to technical (visual) and generic innovations (visual & textual), as well as innovative taxonomy or translations. How have naming & describing iridescence before it was named impacted its interpretation?
* Functions of iridescence: much in the way iridescence serves functional purposes in the natural world (such as camouflaging or signalling), we will investigate the functions of iridescence over the periods and areas covered by our project.
– Production of knowledge: how did artists and authors contribute to the apprehension of iridescence? This includes the official employment of artists by scientists (Kusukawa 2019) as well as the circulation ofconcepts and tropes between literature (including technical) and science, or across genres and linguistic areas.
– Historicising physical phenomena: this will include a study of the changing function of iridescence depending on a « period eye » (Eaton 2016, McMahon 2017). We will here look more closely into the (geo)politics of iridescence as well as into its philosophical and epistemological use in order to historicise the very idea of biomimesis.
* Effects of iridescence: the history of captures of iridescence will allow us to complicate the very notion of « mimesis » which « biomimesis » rests upon, which we will show is far more confrontational and dialectical than merely representational.
– How did iridescence affect the mediums through which artists and writers tried to capture it? As a mimetic challenge in itself, iridescence questions the very limits of representation and pushes artists and authors to experiment and fail, sometimes. This part will include discussions of the conservation and obsolescence of iridescence in visual arts (the degradation of materials making it sometimes impossible to sustain iridescence). It will also deal with iridescence’s loss of poetic and dramatic efficacy over time: how can we reactivate and not miss the puissance and polysemy of iridescence from our own historical position which now sees it as mostly « innocuous » or hackneyed? (McMahon 2017, 3). How and why did poets and playwrights strive to recreate the effect of iridescence upon their readers/viewers, and what does it teach us about the history of the « material perception » (Nordén et al., 2023; Fleming, 2017) of structural colours?
– How did iridescence affect human engagement with the natural world? We will here explore issues related to early forms of ecological sensitivity and sense of “biomimethics” (Delannoy 2021) and how they transpire through the capture of iridescent subjects by artists and writers.
Not only does the IRIS project aim to be part of the emerging field of bionspiration, it will also enable the whole spectrum of the humanities to find their place within it, at a time in their history when it seems more crucial than ever to demonstrate their social relevance.
The IRIS project aims to only explore works predating the conceptualisation of both « biomimesis » and « iridescence ». The works we will look into are thus inherently experimental, and the same applies to our methodology. Our seminars and conference are directed towards our main output, the opening of an online gallery of iridescence. Our gallery is conceived of as an experiment in interdisciplinarity, hence as a pedagogical tool in itself. It will feature practical examples of interdisciplinary readings of iridescent objects with the aim of showcasing the way humanities (including those fields whose creative output does not involve any material/object-oriented production) may contribute to a biomimetic reading of creative practices and become a reservoir of ideas for today and tomorrow. Hence the production of multi-level labels & texts aimed at targeting the widest possible range of audiences. Our gallery will thus offer the first ever online resource to stage the dialogue between humanities & STEM subjects around a natural phenomenon with biomimetic application.
