EXAMINATIONS AND DIAGRAMS: THE MEDICAL BODY

Describe your last doctor or dentist visit. That was the question--It was one of many, many questions we asked users. The responses were so diverse, so interesting... both personal and impersonal at the same time. Obviously we were interested in the live vs. the virtual body, so the medical body felt like a good way to explore that concept. While at Georgia Tech, I took a class on Biomedicine and Culture. The class got me thinking about Haraway, Latour, Foucalt--we read a lot of William Carlos Williams. It was a great class. At NYU, I was also taking a class on Artaud, whose famous body without organs had me turning in circles. Thus, our medical section was born. (Out of pure confusion.) Take a look: clip01 (1MB), clip02 (504K) clip03 (530K) clip04 (365KB) clip05 (2.09MB)

 

What were we trying to do? Well, sometimes I think I know, other times I have no idea... We wanted intrusive visualizing technologies: probes and cameras. We wanted to perform power (the ways that technologies distort, alter, and invade bodies). Even the simple act of seeing the body can medicalize it. At that time, I was obsessed with diagrams--the way a diagram alienates and complicates the body. I wasn't critical of this alienation, I was intrigued. I taped tons of diagrams to the fridge of my Brooklyn apartment. I collected old medical texts and cut them up.

Scientific and medical ideology fragment the body: take it apart, cut it up, magnify it, amplify it, blow it to bits. I got to thinking about medicalization, the process of knowledge accumulation, or knowledge-making (depending on how you look at it)-- there's a violence to this inquiry. It disrupts the implicit knowledge we have of our bodies. By implicit knowledge, I mean our body images: the picture we have of our bodies. We tenuously try to keep grips (consciously and unconsciously) on our own viscera. This is how we control our bodies, acclimate them to space, in short--live in the the world. Medicalization calls the body image into question, shakes it up, displaces it, (the inner autonomy collides with exteriority). Again, I'm not precious about this central "body image." I think it's good to shake our bodies up a bit. (I just read that last statement. Please insult me)

Take, for instance, a diagram of a female body. There's the ovaries. The glands. The lungs. The eyes. Lines pierce through the muscle tissues. Words fly around: hard-to-pronounce scientific names. The diagram's thrilling. It's forgein and benign. It's also a visceral smack in the face. The diagramed body just sprawls out: dissected, categorized, UNDERSTOOD, yet... No. Not understood. We could count every cell in our bodies, color-code them, put them in red piles and white piles and blue piles... hell, we could genetically identify every hair on our heads, armpits, and pubis and still never get it right. The body is a wet heap of scientific, political, cultural, emotional, erotic, and philosophical meanings. It's impossible. That's exactly what I wanted this doctor section to perform: the impossibility of the live body. The utter immateriality of it's materiality. I wanted to reveal this immateriality by performing the resistance we all have to the body's objecthood--our resistance to medicalization. We look at a diagram and say that is not-me, that is not-me and never will be, while feeling relief--not because the diagram assimilates our bodies-- because it destroys our bodies.