The Visual Culture of Medicine

Tumultuous carnality carries us to the thresholds of our physical capacities to engage with the world, an embodiment that often brings into sharp focus the promises and limitations of the most sophisticated of medical procedures. In the post war period a plethora of devices, such as ultrasound, endoscopy, and magnetic resonance imaging have been added to the biomedical arsenal to diagnose and assist in the treatment of what ails. (Kevles) In so doing, the medical gaze opens up new vistas traveling beneath the surface of the skin without cutting open the epidermal layer, revealing what is both most intimate and most distant: the biomatic substrata, a dimension which can be insistently present, particularly when we are ill, yet on a daily basis lies enigmatically beneath the surface of our skin. Inseparable from this dynamic lived body, the body we take for granted except in moments of crisis, is the medical record that officially documents our somatic disorders. These dossiers constitute a veritable archive of statistical accumulations of data: blood pressure, temperature, pulse rates and collections of visually fleeting somatic traces. The data generated by the body can now be digitally encoded and thus connected into a wider network of information that affects how we live our lives– and who lives.

The two projects that I have been working on in this area examine bio-medicine as it enters into public culture. The latest project on the biomatrix is focused on Canadian artists who explore this terrain. The earliest project, Biotourism, specifically examined the fantasy of inner body travel within popular culture.

Medicine and the Media Arts in Canada- exploring the biomatrix

This project documents the intersection of art and biomedicine in Canada. A significant number of contemporary Canadian media artists have appropriated both images and technologies from medicine to augment their “palette.” Here I include media artists working with a range of new technologies –computer imaging, digital photography, web arts, interactive installations, videos and video installations. Biomedicine is the focus of the creative work of nationally and internationally renowned Canadians such as Theodore Wan, Nell Tenhaaf, Catherine Richards, Frances Leeming, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Laiwan Chung, Jennifer Willet, Biotecknica (Willet and Shawn Bailey), John Baturin, and Annie Thibault to name only a few. The goal of this project is to document artists working at this juncture and to study, in depth, the practices of selected individual artists: all of this, to comprehend the contemporary rendition of the historic relationship between the arts and the sciences, particularly human biology.