Art, Scientific Discovery, and Visual Imagination

Tucker, co-ed. with Simon Schaffer & David Serlin. Radical History Review 127: “Political Histories of Technoscience” (Winter 2017).

Tucker, co-ed. with Simon Schaffer & David Serlin. Radical History Review 127: “Political Histories of Technoscience” (Winter 2017). This special issue offers case studies of technoscience engaged both with the interdisciplinary tools of science and technology studies and with the enduring legacies of radical political critique. Drawing on a wide Read more…

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Boston Globe: How Facial Recognition Technology Came to Be

I write about the FBI’s use of state-of-the-art facial recognition technology in its Next Generation Identification System, the world’s biggest biometric database. The new system has come under fire from privacy rights advocates who fear that federal databases will eventually be cross-referenced against other data, connecting faces to medical, financial, Read more…

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“Marvels to Spectacles: Photographic Exploration and ‘The First Glimpse’,” Aperture 21: Curiosity (Summer 2013).

“In a time when the world and its phenomena have been photographed many times over, what can we learn by revisiting the early days of photography, when strange, dramatic, and novel images served as both evidence and entertainment?” The article may be accessed through Aperture’s Archive here.

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Boston Globe: What Our Most Famous Evolutionary Cartoon Gets Wrong

Writing in the Boston Globe’s Sunday Ideas section, I examine the strange and extraordinary history of the iconic “monkey-to-man” evolution illustration—one of the most intriguing and misleading drawings in the modern history of science. Though the image fails to accurately illustrate Darwinian evolutionary theory, it has been hugely successful as Read more…

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“The Hidden World of Science: Nature as Art in 1930’s American Print Advertising,” Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science 6:1 (Fall 2012): 90-105.

Tucker, “The Hidden World of Science: Nature as Art in 1930’s American Print Advertising,” Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science 6:1 (Fall 2012): 90-105. Pdf available here. Abstract: “Photographs deployed in scientific investigation also are circulated and consumed in popular culture. Examination of the work Read more…

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