Every Body is an Archive has is a long-term research project about the body as a medical image. A collaboration with Prof Steve Halligan, and funded by the Wellcome Trust, it has been produced as a book, a performance and an exhibition, and is comprised of photographs, text, data visualisations, and image appropriations. Images have…
Every Body is an Archive has is a long-term research project about the body as a medical image. A collaboration with Prof Steve Halligan, and funded by the Wellcome Trust, it has been produced as a book, a performance and an exhibition, and is comprised of photographs, text, data visualisations, and image appropriations.
Images have been central to medicine for centuries – documenting, monitoring, and measuring the body. Imaging has become the most important diagnostic tool in medicine, so being a patient today increasingly means becoming an image. Every Body Is an Archive explores this radiographic body, as a subject/object and as a flow of data.
This project was based on observation, collaboration with patients and clinicians, and appropriation. It explores how the body is enframed by medicine, and cut and isolated for/by the image, a geometric regime laid bare.
How do we mediate between the experiences of the patient, who is often physically and emotionally vulnerable, and the radiographer, upon whose technical precision the image is dependent? The moments of stillness, during which patients become images, are highly regulated and rarely exposed to non-clinical inquiry.
Removed from their original context, stripped off clinical annotation, the photographs reveal something of medicine’s relationship with surrealism, comedy, pornography and even fashion. We see the how the body is enframed by medicine:
Newer medical imaging technologies extend the clinical gaze. As mathematical code, bodies undergo extensive automated processing, becoming full of potential images, a stratigraphy of layers that can be restacked to create the body’s form and volume. These mathematical bodies are visualisations based on chains of algorithmic interpretation. Without gravity or shadows, the imaged body becomes a 3D space for navigation and calculation.
I trained myself to use professional radiology software, in an attempt to occupy a radiologic position, and make visible the computational gaze. Working with patient data, shared with me by UCLH using an ethically approved consent process, I explore the potential forms of the algorithmic body. Refusing the traditional clinical desire to go inside the body, I [mis-]use the software to render the body’s surface. This might be understood as an attempt to recover a sense of the patient’s identity. Ultimately this fails though, revealing more about the software itself than any individual body. The digital surface is a sampling of skin, fat, hair, tissue, blood, water and air. This new digital materiality is heavily artefactual, an amalgamated surface that has no correlate in the biological body. This is captured through a series of screengrabs which further flattens the dimensional body into a surface.
