There has been substantial work done on visual culture and machinery in the past decade, and the field is spreading in multiple directions. Blieprints, but also operating instructions, postcards, advertising, clothing, etc… have been identified as means used to reflect the machine age in its various manifestations. The following panel suggests three facets pertaining to this growing field of scholarship.

The proposed panel offers to review examples of the expression if technology in visual culture. Through three separate approaches, it seeks to demonstrate that the variety of messages communicated in the public realm go beyond advertising the importance of tools and machines to embody separate messages.

David Wittner focuses on labels in the Japanese silk industry and the nationalist messages that became associated with their design for the purpose of showing how successful Japan had become in the late Meiji era. He finds a correlation in the evolving pictures, which also reflect Japan’s victory of Russia in 1905, and thus the need to accept the new direction the nation had taken over the course of half-a-century since opening to the West.

Suzanne Fischer also focuses on pictures of tools, but her interest, in this case medical syringes in advertising, displays a message of professionalization in the medical field. To the public, the use of such instruments became a point of easy reference to figure out whom to trust. Quacks were deemed unknowing of such tools, and popular culture shifted its attitude partly in response to such visual cues.

Ann Schoenfeld offers a counterpoint and uses her expertise as a design historian to consider the do-it-yourself community and its use of of schematics. The “tools of mass construction” she identifies are a source of empowerment constantly self-renewing as she traces current expressions of the trend back to 1950s publications: the consumer of the picture is no longer invited to accept the message alone, but to become part of the message itself by participating in its design and, implicitly in the design of the tool represented.

Jennifer Alexander will act as commentator, while Guillaume de Syon, the panel organizer, will serve as chair/moderator.