220080 What’s the Danger When Covid-19 is Red? Image and Color in Over Hundred Years of Scientific Virus History. (K) (SoSe 2021)

Many international visualizations of the corona-virus (Covid-19) show it with red spikes, even though the only opportunities to visually assess the virus is with black and white imaging in electron microscopy. But is it really a good idea to set a virus in the prototypical alarm color? What are the suppositions and implications? Similar questions arise for covid-information webpages that come in yellow and therewith subtly transport racializing connotations of the often wrongly dubbed “Chinese virus”.
This course intersects the history of science (of the virus), of media and of color: Images are essential scientific tools, be it within science or in the interaction of science with the so called public. The example of the virus will serve us in an ideal way to study the changeful history of the scientific image on the basis of classic history of science and media study texts.
The virus was invisible for most of its lifetime as a scientific object. The more important were images that reflect and co-construct human relationships with the virus and its carriers over time from the first known influenza viruses to HIV and Covid-19. Color plays a salient role in these and any images produced in a scientific context. Still, while any other epistemic tool in science is standardized, there is no standardization of color in the different scientific fields and little discussion of the inescapable cultural color symbolism. In this course we therefore study the ambivalent relationship between science and color, starting from the historical early cultural opposition of science as masculine and the exclusion of color on the basis of its exotization and feminization, to implicit fixations of traditions in color use in the sciences and medicine up to today.