Representing the unrepresentable, seeing the invisible

A brief drawn history of heretical scientific thought

Abstract

Heresy is the power of choice contrary to the opinion of the majority, whether shared or imposed. Heresy is the belief, supported by one's science and conscience, that a unanimously interpreted fact may have a different and more valid interpretation. Heresy is the idea, at once concrete and visionary, that an individual's thinking can project beyond common sense and authoritatively stand on the side of truth. Many great heresies in history have been supported by drawing, which had made it possible to represent what was, in fact, unrepresentable, either because it had never been described before or because it was forbidden to be defined. Anaximander's Ecumene is the first geographical map of the Earth. It heretically depicts the entire known world in a single drawing and observes it from above, looking down on the divine. The Copernican theory is expressed by drawing a series of circumferences that heretically arrange themselves concentrically around a point on which sol instead of Earth is noted for the first time. The heretical ideal political and social organisation conceived by Thomas More takes drawn form in the first representation of the island of Utopia. The legendary island of Atlantis takes on visible substance thanks to Athanasius Kircher's drawing, conjecturing its sinking was linked to its volcanic origin. The heretical and ambitious metaphor of the universal organisation of knowledge finds explicit form in the pictures of the Library of Babel conceived by Jorge Luis Borges, which unmask both its obsessive anguish and actual futility. The first model of the mobile city (Walking City) designed by the Archigram Group heretically proposes a utopian-dystopian scenario, prefiguring a disruption of established settlement patterns. The heretical hypothesis of the anthropic colonisation of space is embodied by spatial habitat projects such as the Stanford torus designed by Don Davis for the Lagrangian point L5 between the Earth and the Moon or the Mars Science City designed by BIG to settle humans on Mars. This illustrative list brings together some 'first drawings' (proto-drawings): early visual expressions that pioneeringly accompanied and supported heretical thinking, making it visible and therefore possible, reinforcing it and creating the disruptive conditions for the progress of science and society. Each of these designs is a project on the world, literally understood as an idea that projects itself forward by breaking the state of affairs. The proposed contribution intends to retrace a drawn history of heretical thought through the discussion of a selection of 'first designs' which, although heterogeneous because they come from different cultural spheres, have determined by their subversive force a radical change, becoming a watershed between epochs.