Figure 1: 'Echo', Kidney and Vein
Lifeworlds [Printable Version]
Renee Baert
Far from my body’s being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body.
Merleau-Ponty [1]
If we would create a new body, one no longer nearly paralysed by the alternative phallic and castrated, but a different body, our best hope, our most efficacious politics would be a practice......which we might call poetics of the body.
Jane Gallop [2]
Desire In The Field Of
Anatomy
<1> The human body has
been of primordial interest as an object of imagination, representation and
investigation across millennia, from the earliest cave drawings to the present
day mapping of the human genome. Representations of the body exterior, dressed
or undressed, are legion across cultures and times - albeit ever figured within
the representational conventions and concepts of the body of their place and
era. Renderings of the inner body and its workings are less ubiquitous and,
before the availability of knowledge gleaned from dissection, more a matter
of aphorism and learned intuition than empiricism. While the uncertain sciences
of the body’s inner composition in earlier eras have engendered anatomical
renderings that are far from accurate by today’s measure, many of these
representations retain a tremendous poetic power or metaphoric force, such as
ancient Chinese drawings in which human organs are depicted in symmetrical patterning
along the body torso as large multi-petalled flowers or the Medieval figuring
of the maternal womb bearing its homuncular foetus.
<2> It is in particular
with the revival and translation during the early Renaissance of medical texts
of the ancient Greek and Arab worlds, and the impetus this brought to the study
of anatomy, that the beginnings of an empirical knowledge of the workings of
the body’s interior emerge, born with the operations of anatomy upon the
cadaver’s body. These discoveries were in turn given form through the illustrations
of artists, who produced anatomical drawings from dissection, creating organised
visual information from this disordered body matter. [3]
<3> With Wendy Kirkup’s
‘Echo’, in which the artist has employed Sonar technology to visually
and aurally map her own body from its surface tissue through to its innermost
organs, we are very far indeed from such past illustrative conventions as the
Renaissance ecorche, the ‘flayed body’, in Mimi Cazort’s memorable
phrasing, ‘standing upright in a landscape, amiably pulling back flaps
of his own skin to reveal what lay beneath”. [4]
Today, a panoply of powerful medical technologies, from X-rays to endoscopes
to Ultrasound to Computer Axial Tomography (CAT) scans to Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (MRI) to Positron Emission Tomography (PET), and more, have enabled
science and medicine to render visible every facet of the physical body.
<4> If the earliest anatomical drawings relied on the hand and eye of the artist-illustrator to select and mediate raw and messy corporeal matter into intelligible form, the images presented by new optical and digital technologies are by no means ‘transparent’, they too usually require the intercession of a highly-trained specialist to decipher and decode the information they deliver. The new narrative of, and desire for, mastery and knowledge of the body might be said to be confounded by its reliance on interpretation - rather as the superfluous white noise speckles in the visual field of the MRI scan (so engagingly explored by Eric Laurier in an earlier essay on Echo) [5], operate an interference in the field of ‘pure’ information. Further, as the authors of the critical volume ‘The Visible Woman’ underscore,
Arguments ostensibly about the knowledge and training required to accurately read these new imaging narratives are also arguments about professional authority. Hence whatever our practical, personal responses to and experiences of these sophisticated new imaging technologies, it is crucial that we understand their performative character, that is, their role as a staging ground for struggles over agency and control. [6]
<5>Yet even as such
technologies make the body newly visible, and have evident medical and scientific
applications, what new ‘truth’ of the body is thus produced, by whose
intercession, to what effects, and in response to what desires? Artists Martha
Fleming and Lyne Lapointe raise a related point that circulates metaphorically
around the dimensionalities of life that are occluded in its specularization
and in the organised visual field of the perspectival view (also first introduced
in the Renaissance): “Let us remember that perspective is only one of many
modes of representation - and that all optical instruments function to flatten
light’s brilliant waves and particles onto a monotonous plane.” [7]
<6> Certainly the anatomical
body is not the body lived; it is object, not subject. With her translation
of ultrasound, one of these technologies, from disciplinary applications to
artistic uses, Kirkup undertakes an investigation of this technology to displace
- and disperse - it from the ‘private’ laboratory-spaces of science,
medicine and technological specialization to the public spaces of the city and
its lifeworld. In short, set against a universalized ‘body’ as object
and artifact, it is as ‘subject’ that Kirkup raises questions in this
project about our corporeal selves, and indeed about embodiment in its fuller
social frame.
MAPS, TERRITORIES AND TECHNOLOGIES
<7> The first extant
body atlases were produced during the Renaissance. These formed one of many
aspects of a recharged interest in the natural sciences, in knowing the vast
compass of the world. The body atlases of that era were also coincident with
developments in the field of cartography, and, then and later in Western history,
with imperialist discoveries, with excursions into and mappings of new, faraway
worlds.
<8> Kirkup’s ‘Echo’
was conceived and produced during her extended residency in the Dept. of Geography
and Topographic Science at Glasgow University. The siting of her investigation
is conceptually and metaphorically consonant, and resonant, with her investigation
of a technology that has its origins in topographic applications (in particular,
by the military), but whose uses have also been extended to body mapping in
the medical field. (Indeed, one might find a further correspondence between
those initial explorations of the ocean floor - the ‘soft tissue’
of the earth’s ‘crust’ - and ultrasound’s investigations
of the soft tissue of the human body).[8]
<9> From the atlases of the Renaissance to those of the 21st century, the varying techniques of ‘surveying’ the body across more than four centuries can be said to be subtended not only by curiosity but by an instrumental drive, and indeed a libidinal desire, to penetrate its mysteries, to explore and measure and master it. Not coincidentally, both body and space are figures of the feminine, and the project of body mapping is not without its corollaries to imperial histories through which other kinds of ‘territories’ have been penetrated, mapped and colonised.
<10> Indeed, with the
powerful magnification properties of new visualizing technologies, the body
itself has become a space, a ‘bioscape’, [9]
a territory to be made visible, knowable. As Elizabeth Grosz observes, “it
is as if men are unable to resist the temptation to colonize, to appropriate,
to measure, to control, to instrumentalize all that they survey...”[10]
<11> Whether terrestrial or corporeal, a map figures the boundaries, contours and features of the territory it designates, not the character of dwelling. The very act of mapping implies a distance between the knower and the object of knowledge, an objective, even dominating, stance. What is the subject-position of the cartographer? Kathleen Kirby notes:
The space that mapping propagates is an immutable space organised by invariable boundaries, an a-temporal, objective, transparent space. Not coincidentally, the same physical qualities characterize the kind of subjectivity that we would name, variously, Cartesian monadism, Enlightenment individualism or autonomous egotism. [11]
<11> In today’s
ambitions towards producing a universal body atlas, the illustrator’s hand
is displaced by advanced optical and digital technologies, the human cadaver
by the digital corpse and molecular operations. The dominant initiatives in
this regard are the Visible Human Project, initiated by the US National Library
of Medicine (NLM), to create a digital atlas of the human body [12]
and the Human Genome Project, a race between public and private interests to
produce - to copyright - a complete encoding of the twenty-three paired human
chromosome that constitute DNA, the genetic map of human life. [13]
The impact of such developments extends well beyond scientific and medical uses
into the realm of popular culture. Thus, the NLM website advertises a Visualisation
Toolkit, ‘Make Your Own Visible Woman’, which enables users to make
and render surface models of the Visible Woman. In fact, the explosion of images,
information and interest that follows upon the advent of electronic imaging
has generated an ever-expanding field of CD-ROM and other mass media-based anatomical
diversions and entertainments. Cultural theorist Kim Sawchuck characterizes
these developments as the promulgation of a new facet of subjectivity, “biotourism”,
an activity through which the inner body is spatialized and given geographic
contours - is made a biospace for the spectator’s traverse - in a resuscitated
trope of the sublime.[14]
<12> The ubiquity fo
such images, the seeming neutrality or transparency of these anatomical representations,
masks the fact that these imaging technologies are also staging grounds for
contestation, conflict and critical interpretations that extend well beyond
the confines of the laboratory. For instance, the impact of fetal imaging with
ultrasound has social effects over and above its ostensibly positive purposes
of ascertaining foetal well-being or in promoting maternal (indeed, parental)
bonding. Among the effects of this technology is its externalization (for patient
and doctor alike) of the pregnant women’s sensory ‘experience’
of the developing foetus to the ‘sight’ on the monitor, its potential
to underwrite a new eugenics, and the assimilation of the magnified image of
the foetus, floating as if independent of its maternal host, to anti-abortion
strategies.
<13> If technicians
and technologies have displaced the earlier role of artists in visualising the
strata of the inner body, artists have by no means surrendered the field of
interpretation to this arena of specialised knowledge, for it is one in which
critical issues circulate around bodies, technology, representation, subjectivity,
knowledge and power. Women in particular have a special stake in wresting discourses
of the body and its imaging protocols from the colonising history of Western
science, technology and medicine. Nell Tenhaaf, Reva Stone, Alexa Wright, Louise
K. Wilson, Mona Hatoum, Catherine Richards, Cheryl Sourkes, Jane Prophet and
Lynn Hershmann are among the many women artists who have employed medical and
scientific technology or imagery to interrogate its uses and effects to advance
critical investigations of our ways of ‘knowing’, to explore from
other perspectives the meaning potentials they may embed, or to wrest the investigatory
agenda from its specialised domains. Like ‘Echo’, these are also projects
that utilise or turn upon new technologies as critical tools to speak to issues
around subjectivity and embodiment. Echo, as in the work of these other artists,
and as in other earlier projects by Kirkup, is more than an intervention into
a singular subject, such the imagery and discourses of anatomy and medicine.
The work operates across several vectors, of bodies, technologies and public
space, each of which warrants a fuller elaboration.
REFIGURING BODIES: MORPHOLOGICAL
IMAGINARIES.
<14> What does the spectator,
standing beneath the large projection screens on which Echo is presented, see
and hear and experience? What kind of theatre of the body is being staged in
this work, for the projection is indeed a spectacle on a rather large scale.
What ‘perspective’ has been construed?
<15> The body scan unfolds
over a period of 22 minutes across a 30 x 40 foot screen set on scaffolding.
It proceeds in a series of striking frames that combine the multiple vantages
of the original pictures, as recorded by the transducers with the dramatic cuts,
wipes, stills and pans through which the artist has edited the sequencing for
pace, ‘narrative’ structure and visual power. The projection constructs
a progression from the outer tissues fo the artist’s body into her innermost
interior, journeying from the surface of the skin through muscle, organs and,
beneath the solid body matter, to circulating blood. [15]
The projection begins in grainy black and white, but vibrant colours begin to
appear as the scan goes past the surface tissues of the body.
<16> The opening view
is one selected by the artist for its resemblance to the earth’s surface
as recorded by the same satellite technology through which the image is now
being delivered. It presents a large frame set within the overall picture, both
images of churning body matter, seemingly indeterminate, through clearly ‘of’
something. Can we take as a clue the pair of throbbing oval shapes to understand
these as cross- sections of arteries, for the images are in fact a ‘slice’
through neck tissue, the internal frame a closer look at the movement of blood.
In these segments, vivid colours are occasionally dropped into the black and
white field to highlight features of the pulsing arteries. Following this overture,
we find ourselves in a completely different and dramatic scene as a denuded
eye appears, a round, moving, black hole, commanding the dark screen, a disconcerting
‘sight’ which seems to cast about and even return the look of the
audience; at the same time, this dark aperture also suggests an orifice, a keyhole,
a passageway into some other part of the body. As the itinerary proceeds, the
surface of limbs is revealed in a striking sequence of broad, curving, panoramic
bands that describe tissue and bones: a series that particularly ‘echoes’
the sonographer’s sweep of the transducer over living flesh. These images
at times resemble grainy furrowed fields or tree trunks, yet move like thick,
rippling rivers, and are brought to travel the screen in a brilliantly structured,
circuitous flow. Deeper into the projection, with the advent of the heart, comes
decided colour imagery; red as the blood travels in one direction through the
valves, blue as it traverses the other. We travel on toward the kidneys and,
in flashes of flamboyant colour, their arterial flows, viewed, like the more
recognisable heart, inside the sweeping frame of an inverted wedge. This iconography,
set in the black space, is most familiar to us though ultrasound fetal monitoring,
and we stir at our recognition - of this sight. Non of these - or any other
- sequences are hurried, but rather linger on specific body areas, yet within
each segment there is tremendous movement and shift and disorientation as the
body pulsates, the transducers migrate, and the screen is a field of dissolves,
wipes and rotations. A wedge of tissue is introduced and slowly spins and turns
about, transparent, blue, three-dimensional, boxy form in the black, empty space.
Suddenly the entire screen is occupied by a syncopating field of blood-orange.
In this way, the images unfold, a strange field of resplendent colours and mysterious
forms and floating objects and frames encasing vivid pulsations until, against
a black backdrop, we are presented with a sequence of three-dimensional views
of the blood as it flows through organs and veins. Queer shapes, their colours
fluctuating from green to orange, yellow, blue, like floating sea life splaying
thin tentacles, circle and spin and turn across the screen in a graceful dance,
until there remains but a single form drifting slowly in the centre of the black
surround, displaying its oscillating colours. It is on this arresting image
that the projection fades.
<17> The projection
is not only a ‘sight’, however, for the sonar reading is not a visual
and an aural scan - the images themselves derive from a sonar tracking, while
the sound we hear is a translation through the technology of the body’s
inner sounds. As the visualisation of the body undergoes shifts and reframings,
so too does the character and concatenation of the sound. The ultrasound records
the flow of blood through veins and arteries, so it seems to echo the pulse
of the heartbeat. It is a visceral din, at times reminiscent of a battlefield
sort of sound - loud, layered, sharp, alarming, barking, bursting - at others
a waterous, sea-stirred noise, or a strange staccato ringing, or a thudding
beat or a high-pitched electronic alarm, but it is not really like anything
familiar. It is a shattering, irregular sequence of noises, yet somehow strange
and thrilling. Played at high volume, the sound enters and spreads beyond the
spectatorial zone and throughout the surrounding streets, penetrating ears and
skin to the very bone, as if a call from body to body. But his body, the sight
and sound of which encompass the spectator, is not ‘a’ body, or ‘any’
body. It is a specific body, a female body, the artists body. One of the central
criticisms directed against these proliferating imaging technologies is their
exacerbation of the objectification of the corporeal, the turning of bodies
into bits and pieces (of pathology); into data and information, into parts and
commodifiable ‘segments’. [16]
Kirkup’s body-as-subject is not a ‘part’: significantly, and
unlike medical usages, it is a body shown whole. It is not ‘information’
but a fundament of subjectivity. And it is revealed to us through an art practice
of a kind that, as Carol Laing describes, ‘exists to recover the experience
of a life grounded in a feeling body’. [17]
<18> Yet if it is a
female body, how can we, the spectators, know it as such? For there is not familiar
morphological ground. To a visuality that conventionally foregrounds the sexually
differentiated body, Kirkup counterposes a corporeality in terms that defy such
a literal mapping of sex, gender, or even anatomy. Rather, the work disorients
and destabilises any viewing through those familiar signs. Indeed, with this
powerful haptic and aural dimensions, it dethrones the classic dominion of ‘sight’
(with its correlatives of omniscience and surveillance). Rather than a ‘difference’
that circulates around the phallic sign, with its stable poles of plenitude
and lack, we experience a vital, pulsing, mortal, corporeal being, a rendering
of specific embodiment and alterity. Its poetics of indeterminacy dissolves
centres and borders and instantiates a refigured poetics of the body. Via this
unbounded body, we encounter flows and vibrations and pulsations and undulations
and strange sounds and indeterminable sights. We have lost ‘perspective’.
THE SPACE OF THE BODY,
THE BODY IN SPACE.
<19> Just as the body
in Echo is not ‘any’ body, the simultaneous projections do not occur
‘anywhere’. They are, in this inaugural installation, very specifically
sited, and their social placement is fundamental to the project and the critical
meanings it puts into circulation.[18] If
we can identify Kirkup’s intervention into the cultural imaginary of the
female body and into powerful ‘masculine’ technologies, the work is
no less an intervention into questions of women and public space.
<20> Elizabeth Grosz,
drawing upon the writings of Luce Irigaray, argues that public space has been
historically conceived in ways that “have always functioned to either contain
women or to obliterate them”. [19]
This point is articulated from another angle by Rosalyn Deutsch, who argues
for a deepening and extension of our notions of public space beyond its conception
as a de-corporealized ‘impartial’ realm for a ‘universal’
subject which “achieves completion by mastering and ultimately negating
plurality and difference”. [20] From
still another angle, we might also consider the overturning of common sense
notions of ‘space’ as empty, inert, a mere backdrop for the events
that fill it, to an understanding of the spatial; in dynamic terms such as those
advanced by Doreen Massey, as “social relations ‘stretched out’”.[
21]
<21>‘Echo’ is projected, via satellite, to occupy the portals of two significant public buildings, and the scale of the project - together with its siting - ensures that it produces a dynamic experience of space/time. Further, it places a woman’s body, and the question of embodiment, and corporeality tout court, into the heart of that ‘matter’. And in doing so, the work addresses questions about boundaries from several angles; about the boundaries between public and private, between inside and outside, between nature and culture; about the boundaries we set on our own powers of imagination and experience.
<22> In Glasgow, the
projection occurred in the grounds of the University of Glasgow, the location
from which Kirkup conducted her year-long research, at the entrance to the Hunterian
Museum and Art Gallery. The Hunterian, founded as Glasgow’s first public
museum in 1807, is named after William Hunter, a distinguished 18th century
physician and obstetrician, who bequeathed its founding collection of art and
artefacts. During his years of medical practice, Hunter assembled a large collection
of anatomical and pathological specimens related to his work. As the Hunterian’s
website helpfully explains to prospective viewers, the branches of pathology
and obstetrics “were more closely linked in those days”.
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<23> Hunter’s investigations
of the feminine reproductive system and its ‘pathologies’ included
his commissioning of a series of drawings and copper plates of the pregnant
body, ‘Anatomy fo the Human Gravid Uterus’, a prized object of the
collection and an important inspiration in the genesis of ‘Echo’.
The Hunterian also houses an art gallery whose exhibitions feature both historical
and contemporary work, a secondary ‘echo’ of the field of art, whose
own history of representation of women’s bodies, its apotheosis the female
nude, is by now a well - rehearsed topic in feminist discourse.
<24>While Kirkup’s
ultrasound does not highlight her uterus (bearing, at the time, her unborn daughter),
the most well known application of this technology is indissolubly associated
with the female womb. (One might even be tempted to flippantly suggest that
Kirkup ‘releases’ the very technology itself beyond its routine task).
Historically, an overwhelming proportion of anatomical illustrations are based
on male models, while, as with the ‘Gravid Uterus’, women are represented
chiefly in the specifics of their sexed and reproductive difference. It is only
in recent years - and with no particular acknowledgement of the feminist social
activism that has put women’s health issues on the public agenda - that
modern medical science has begun to move beyond this norm in considering, in
conceding, women’s specificity, rather than extrapolating (with often incorrect
and even dangerous results) from male studies and samples.
<25> This second site of the projection was the International Centre for Life in Newcastle upon Tyne, a science museum and genetic research facility. If the Hunterian and Anatomical Museum houses the archives of the past, the axis of the Centre is tipped towards the future. But in the projects and approaches of genetic research, too, we find grounds for critical feminist analysis. From a burgeoning field, the words of Catherine Waldby will stand as instance:
The biotechnical manipulation of genetic codes treats organic bodies as fields of simulation. They become objects for technical forms of replication, doubling, segmentation, hybridization and morphing......., whose reproduction can be rerouted away from the uncertainties and resistances of feminine sexuality and maternity and towards the reliable procedures of the laboratory.[22]
In Genetic research, the age-old
debt to the maternal body, ever, as Irigaray has underscored, a debt elided
in the conceptual and material universes that men build upon that very erasure.[23]
can potentially be dispensed with altogether, as the ‘gestation’ of
life is transposed from bodies to laboratories. It is apposite to note that,
within a year of Kirkup’s installation, Britain became the first Western
nation to approve human cloning.[24]
<26> The two sites in
Glasgow and Newcastle were ‘joined’ through a satellite transmission,
which projected ‘Echo’ simultaneously in both venues. This project
this weds the technologies of science to those of communications, via this technology
that also makes available to close view every single inch of the surface of
the globe. In this way, Kirkup appropriates another technology for artistic
uses rather than its more usual military, state, commercial and related institutional
applications, and further extends the reach of the many questions that circulate
in this work around maps, power, images, technology, embodiment and subjectivity.
<27> In ‘Echo’,
the buildings that host the projections are metaphorically turned ‘inside
out’, as if their matter is made flesh.They become spaces of alterity,
sites for the proposal - the enactment - of alternative imaginaries of social
space, wedded to the questioning of our modes and means of embodied existence.
If language ‘makes’ the body as a socio-cultural entity, shapes its
power and potentials, ‘Echo’ conjures a surface disturbance within
signification, a semiosis within and through the ‘body’ of art.
WONDERING IN THE CITY.
<28> In her critique
of “biotourism”, Kim Sawchuk defines the sublime - its dominant discursive
“key” - as “wonder and awe at the universe beyond our human competency
to comprehend it rationally”. [25]
Yet if ‘Echo’ can also be said, like the biotouristic journeys Sawchuk
describes, to produce a magnified bodyscape for the traverse of a viewer, one
would need to search for another ‘key’ by which to better situate
an understanding of this work, its import and its effects. And perhaps a shared
word, “wonder”, might provide such a key. For ‘Echo’ puts
into circulation a different category of wonder than the type of stupefaction
before the large unknown that Sawchuk describes. Wonder is both an noun and
a verb, and each of these is apropos to the ‘revelations’ Kirkup presents
us with. A wonder is something that is out of the ordinary and everyday, that
is strange and astonishing and surprising, and certainly that is the case with
the body ‘echoes’ of this tremendous work. Wonder as a state of feeling
is characterised as one of “mingled surprise and curiosity”(OED),
and this quality of awakened inquiry is a bridge to wonder in its active form
as verb, with its correlate meaning of to think, doubt, and question.
<29> Kirkup structures a double move, at once marvellous and critical, exciting and analytical, experimental and speculative. ‘Echo’ is a work that leads us to wonder.
NOTES
[1] Merleau
Ponty, M. 'The Phenomonology of Perception', Routledge, 1962 p. 102^
[2] Gallop,J.,
“The body politic” in ‘Thinking Through the Body’, Columbia
University Press, 1988. p. 99.^
[3] The exhibition
catalogue, ‘The Ingenious Machine of Nature. Four Centuries of Art and
Anatomy’ is a particular treasure trove of information and of historical
prints and drawings of human anatomical imagery beginning with the early Renaissance.
National Gallery of Canada,1996.^
[4] Cazort,M.,
“The Theatre of the Body” in ‘The Ingenious Machine of Nature’.
op.cit.p. 27.^
[5] Laurier,E.,
“Ultrasound, Art and Geography, or On the difficulties of taking pictures
of the insides of your body”, in ‘Curious, Artists Research Within
Expert Culture’, Visual Arts Projects 1999.^
[6] Treichler,
P.A, Cartwright,L and Penley,C., eds, ‘The Visible Woman, Imaging Technologies,
Gender and Science’, New York University Press, 1998. p.5^
[7] Fleming,M.
and Lapointe, L., in ‘Bioapparatus, documents from the Virtual Seminar
on the Bioapparatus’, The Banff Centre for the Arts, 1991, p. 38^
[8] I thank
Oliver Botar for this felicitous observation.^
[9] Sawchuk,K.,
“Biotourism, Fantastic Voyage and sublime inner space” in K.Sawchuk
and J. Marchessault, eds. ‘Wild Science, Reading Feminism, Medicine and
the Media’, Routledge, 2000. p. 11.^
[10] Grosz,
E., “Women, Chora, Dwelling”, ‘Space, Time and Perversion’,
Routledge, 1995 p. 122.^
[11] Kirby,
K., “Cartographic Vision and the limits of politics”, in N. Duncan,
ed., ‘Bodyspace, destabilising geographies of gender and sexuality’,
Routledge, 1996. p. 47.^
[12] Already
achieved with the Visible Man and the Visible Woman, with a soon-to-be Visible
Fetus planned, for a virtual nuclear family.^
[13] Already
well advanced with the first complete sketch announced in 2000.^
[14] Sawchuk,K.,
op cit. p. 1.^
[15] Ultrasound
doesn't picture the body in the way photography does, as surface, but rather
presents the body in slices (often colloquially characterised as analogous to
taking a slice out of the middle of a slice of bread). The image is not perspectival,
and may be square, triangular, three dimensional. In SONAR technology, a sound
frequency is sent from the transducer into the tissue of the body, where the
‘beam’ hits dense matter (fibroid, bone etc) it returns the signal
to the transducer as an echo of the frequency. As with the itinerary of the
projection, the scan moves progressively deeper into the body. The depth of
matter is determined by measuring the length of time it takes the signal to
‘echo’ back. Different parts and depths of the body are imaged using
differing ultrasound frequencies, thus transducers in varying quantity and shape
may be attached to any one machine (some are more appropriate for surface tissue,
others for organs etc). These in turn produce the differing shapes of image
so striking in “Echo’. I thank Wendy Kirkup for her clarification
of these processes.^
[16] This
point is particularly developed by Catherine Waldby in “The Visible Human
Project: Data into Flesh, Flesh into Data”, ‘Wild Science’, op
cit., p. 36. ^
[17] Laing,C.,
“(K)ein Vergleich: Different, and the Same”, (K)ein Vergleich(catalogue),
Lethbridge: Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 1996, p. 11.^
[18] The
specificity of these sites does not mitigate against other subsequent venues
for the exhibition of this work, but these are particularly chosen and charged
public locations.^
[19] Grosz,E.,
op cit. p. 120.^
[20] Deutsch,
R., “Agoraphobia”, ‘Evictions, Art and Spatial Politics’,
MIT Press, 1996, p.310.^
[21] Massey,
D., ‘Space, Place and Gender’, University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
p. 2.^
[22] Waldby,
C., op cit., p 36.^
[23] Irigaray,
L., ‘An Ethics of Sexual Difference’, trans. C. Burke and G.C Gill,
Cornell University Press, 1993.^
[24] In January,
2001, scientists in Britain received parliamentary approval to create human
embryos through cloning for research purposes. Regulations specify they must
be destroyed after 14 days. Yet the possibility of reproducing human beings
in the near future is widely viewed, both popularly and within the scientific
field as less a matter of ‘whether’ for ‘how’ than of ‘who’
will breach the remaining moral and ethical barriers, and how soon.^
[25] Sawchuk,K., op cit, p. 19.^