Stephen Casper - Shattered Reflections

This talk explores the entangled problem of representing movement and impact through a cultural and scientific genealogy of traumatic brain injury, violence, acceleration culture, and the rise of the biomechanical approach to trauma. Anchoring this exploration is the lucite calvarium—a transparent skull cap used in experiments on a monkey to observe brain injuries—which serves as the focal point for this cultural history.

Beginning with the Futurists' avant-garde celebration of speed and mechanical violence, Casper examines how their artistic glorification of acceleration shaped public imaginaries and technological aesthetics, inadvertently influencing scientific framings of trauma. Andy Warhol’s Death in America series provides a mid-century lens on how violent collisions—whether from car crashes or interpersonal brutality—captured the ethos of acceleration while reflecting the disturbing realities of head injury.

The artists were onto something. Scientists grappling with the physics of deceleration faced similar challenges in visualizing the invisible forces of trauma—a task often reliant on artistic metaphors and representations. The lucite calvarium, with its translucent mapping of brain tissue deformation, emerges as a bridge between art and science, offering not only a tool for experimental insight but also an artifact of aesthetic and intellectual synthesis. By situating this model within the broader history of biomechanics and neuropsychology, Casper argues that it exemplifies the convergence of cultural imagination and technical mastery of movement. And stopping. Suddenly.

Stephen Casper, Professor of History at Clarkson University

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This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.

Sponsoring Organizations:

• Columbia University in the City of New York
• NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
• The Graduate Center, City University of New York
• The New York Academy of Medicine
• The New York Academy of Sciences

Host or Publisher The Center for Science and Society