conVerge - Image and Meaning

Image and Meaning - Nina Czegledy

First I would like to thank Amanda for my participation in this conference and I really would like to especially thank ANAT, Julianna and her colleagues who made my trip to Australian possible. Thank you very much.

Today I would like to talk about how artists who work with either scientifically derived images or address issues of science, especially the Biosciences. How they represent their work and what is the way they are used. I am going to focus on the Digitized Bodies, Virtual Spectacles Project, which I have been working on for several years and I would like to talk through the artists who participated in this project and show some of their work.

This is the web site of the DBP Project and I have to say right at the beginning that while there has been a touring exhibition which showed Visual Artists, there has also been a film program - an on-line exhibition, concerts, public forums, performances etc., This all illustrates the fact that today artists not only work with visual materials (in terms of installations or photo based images) they also work with interactive performance representations. Some artists are working in a purely integrated fashion with scientists, as we heard yesterday from Oron and Ionat, some use derivative techniques. In our on line exhibition and the film program, several artists are from Australia.

Going back to the on line exhibition, first I present some of Louise Wilson's work, especially her installation called 'Possessed'. The work shows magnetic resonance generated images (MRI)of the human brain which are set on a revolving platform. These images, were changing in this installation according to the recorded voice of a hypnotist. The images of the artist's sleep patterns were also included, emphasizing different areas of the brain by reproducing various colours. To quote Louise: "The hypnotic presentations in my work suggested that just as increased specialization means a greater isolation and subdivision of knowledge, the imagery of the medical industry becomes small and more remote from it's human context."

Next is a detail of Alexa Wright's Work. She has created an extensive "Phantom" series, based on the Phantom Limb Syndrome. People who have an amputated arm or leg have phantom feelings, often pain, in the non existent body part. Alexa has created a series of photographs whereby she presented people with the Phantom Limb Syndrome in classic often elegant settings. I am going to leave you a few words of hers: "I use installation and digitally manipulated photography to investigate relationships between the self and the body. I am interested in exploring the boundaries of the self particularly as effected by medical technologies. Notions of normality, complexness and closure are challenged in my work where images of surgeons show a little of breaking of the endless and total surface of the skin."

In another of her series Alexa has shown surgical images where over the surgical wound jewels were inserted. She related this to the notion of the Social Body, commenting that the sight of wealth startles people, and visibility is internalised in these images which combine surgery and jewelry. A fictional setting and sumptuous quality of the images reduces the viewer beyond feelings of repulsion.

There is such a long list of various artists' works and conferences all dealing with Art and Science that it is practically impossible to detail it all. This is the reason, why I am focusing on the artists who are involved in the Digitized Body Project. "The body," wrote Kathryn Crowston a few years ago, "is only in the after image of its parodic existence in the post modern condition. A relation of a body."

Marilouise Kroker further observed how lately the Human Body became reduced to a series of rhetorics. In view of these comments, critical discourse and visualization by artists concerned with scientific and medical issues are of extreme importance. Furthermore it became essential to raise questions regarding the body politic, objectification of the individual, ethics, the hypocrisy surrounding experimentation as well as certain technologies such as in-vitro fertilization etc., Questions are raised such as: How can we obtain precise information about ourselves? How can we decipher the truth behind the documented, the visualized "data body"? How can we preserve our individual integrity? Questions, however are not enough. A new language of effective tactics need to be established within the critical discourse.

According to Marshall McLuhan: any new technology, any extension or amplification of human faculties when given embodiment tends to create anew environment. A new environment creates new occupants and new occupations. Ironically in this new environment of digital imaging, the same software tools such as Photoshop, are used both by medical scientists for their publications and artists in their critical discourse of medical practice. The great quantity of articles published in the medical literature provide a measure of the rapid visualization of Medicine itself Notably, "artistic" scientific images produced both by medical practitioners as well as rendered by artists are widely used by manufacturers of scientific instruments, pharmaceutical companies and software manufacturers in their advertising and promotion materials. The true significance of the increased visualization of the medical sciences and the use of "artistic" scientific images by industry remains to be determined. It is also important to examine the rhetorical interplay between author and audience.

So how are these specific discourses rendered by artists? I would like to present some more work from artists participating in the Digitized Bodies project by showing the beginning of the CD ROM which has been created for this project. Seventeen Artists were participating in the various touring exhibitions in Canada, Hungary and Slovenia. I just select a few of them for you,

Nell Tenhaaf a practicing artist, based in Canada concerns herself in the interactions between science technology and the arts. Lately she has been working with artificial intelligence and artificial life, in an earlier essay Mutational Cravings -she wrote: "I am trying to make sense of contemporary science and its burgeoning technological infrastructure. As an aficionado in this domain, I feel regularly bombarded by specialized information that usually has a science fictional and even apocalyptic ring to it"

In Species of Life, Tenhaaf showed electronically manipulated scientific teaching materials, such as models of DNA strands on which handwritten philosophical quotes were inscribed. In her multimedia installation, in Machines for Evolving the images evoked biogenetic manipulations they also remained proper objects of science and served as an excellent example of the scrutiny involved in current art practices.

Eric Fong a medical practitioner, who has lately trained in visual arts, is particularly interested in the shift from a textual to a technological fragmentation of the body. Currently, he is at Goldsmidth's College in London, England getting a Masters Degree in Arts. 'Threshold One', his self standing installation, calls into question the boundaries of the self in context of mutability permeability and fluidity. The photo images of the wound point to the notion of the skin as a liminal space and a threshold of demarcation, violation and regeneration.

Luca Gobolyos is a Hungarian artist, and although she is a very beautiful young woman she is very much concerned with aging and how in both art and in especially advertising woman are mostly depicted as young and pretty, seldom old. She has created a number of works which show the aging body. In this installation the image of an aging woman's body is superimposed on a much more youthful body.

The next person I would like to talk about is Jon Baturin. Byre-positioning scientific imagery and provocatively shifting information in his photo collage: Enemies Within, John Baturin purposely manipulated the context of his work. Gestures and poses, based on Muybridge studies on locomotion, were appropriated for their emotive possibilities. Each gesture was then positioned against medical-photo representations of human anatomy. The resulting "synthesis of data" represented certain distortions which effected the "truth" - whatever the original intent, whatever the information.

Of course visualization is expressed beyond installations and photo based images, such as I have just shown - through performances, films, videos, CD ROMs and online art. Atau Tanaka's Corporeal interdisciplinary performance is such an example. The piece is a reflection of human body states, captured as bio-signals and manifested in movement, sound, and image. The micro-functions of the body are amplified to macro level media projection. Theinner space of the body is articulated into the public space of performance.

The Wired Body film and video selection curated by me for the digi-bodies project shows yet another aspect of visualization. Jennifer Bozick for example produced "Small Rooms" in order to investigate ideas about the "medical notion of the body as compared to the highly subjective view of the body in pain." Diane Nerwen produced Under the Skin, a haunting documentary about governmental policy development and use of Norplant for reproductive and social control, while8 Men Called Eugene, the fake documentary by Sue Rynard unraveled the work of eight genetic scientists.

Predictably no solution has been offered yet to the ethical problems raised by current advances in medical science including the use of enhanced visualization and imaging technologies. It remains to be seen into which direction do we proceed from this imaginary intersection between science and the arts. It is hoped, that through the in- depth investigations a fresh discourse will emerge, enabling the various occupants to effectively interact in the new territories.

Thank you.