Roger Whitson - Reassembling Visionary Physics: Donald Ault, Bruno Latour, and William Blake

Starting with his 1968 book Visionary Physics and continuing through his unpublished work using complex variables to map the ontological transformations depicted in The Book of Urizen, Donald Ault’s research on William Blake can be understood as so many visionary experiments on the aesthetics and ontology of scientific facts. By aesthetics, I mean not only the representation of science in art and photography, but also what the philosopher Bruno Latour calls a fact’s sceneography: a presentation or arrangement of facts that shifts “attention from the stage [of science] to the whole machinery of a theater.”
Roger Whitson is Associate Professor of English at Washington State University. His work explores media time and history in the context of British Romanticism, steampunk, and science fiction.