Wind Tunnel Bulletin #11

<p>In the last couple of weeks public space has been filled with measurings. We find calibration marks of social distance everywhere on the ground, 2 m in Europe, 1.83 m in the US. A good moment to take this practice into view: The art of measurement has epitomized scientific research ever since Francis Bacon published his <em>Novum Organum</em> (1620). Quantifying experience is widely seen as the self-evident opposite of the arts, to which qualitative assessment is subordinated in turn. As always, clichés fall far short of the mark. Thus, this issue of our <em>Wind Tunnel Bulletin</em> explores the artistic measurement of the world, which, among others, is negotiated using scientific instruments, manuals, proportions, rhythmizations, and formatting. We give particular attention to the metric photograph, also because it carries to extremes an apparently plausible subdivision of the natural sciences, postulated by Peter Galison in 1997 as the opposition between an “image machine” and a “counting machine.” This metric photograph, as the basis of photogrammetry, has a tremendous presence today: since the camera, computer, and internet have become integrated into the smartphone, all of us are protagonists of the visual measurement of the world. And yet, it is no longer merely the individual image, which had to be calibrated against a graticule, that counts. Images themselves are now normalizing each other. So keep your eyes peeled!</p>