Overexposed: Art, Technology, and the Body

Mine (2009)

Liz Magic Laser

Laser worked with a surgeon to direct the da Vinci Surgical System robot to perform a series of surgical maneuvers on her purse. The video shows miniature robotic hands digging through her belongings, identity cards, money and makeup. The invasive procedures both expose and destroy the contents of her purse, leaving a disorganized pile that recalls an abstract expressionist assemblage. Displaying the vandalized purse alongside the video, Laser creates a self-portrait that reduces individual identity to its paraphernalia.
single-channel video, 22 minutes. Produced via the da Vinci Surgical System.

Le squelette joyeux (1897)

Louis Lumière Auguste Lumière

A skeleton dances joyously, often collapsing into a heap of bones and quickly putting itself back together
Film Lumiere #831

De Humani Corporis Fabrica

Véréna Paravel Lucien Castaing-Taylor

An examination of the human body as an extraordinary landscape that is also otherworldly and harrowing, from five hospitals in northern Paris neighbourhoods.

in ocula oculorum

Anna Kipervaser

in ocula oculorum interrogates the unknown and the internal, in both subject matter and experience. Dealing with the contemporary state of perpetual doom, the film contemplates various stages of life and death from the point of view of our human bodies and perceptual systems. It explores beta movement and phi phenomenon, pushing the limits of intermittence and persistence of vision, playing with our innate desire for continuity and cohesion by forcing image slip.

Sanctus (1990)

Barbara Hammer

Sanctus is a film of the rephotographed moving x-rays originally shot by Dr. James Sibley Watson and his colleagues. Making the invisible visible, the film reveals the skeletal structure of the human body as it protects the hidden fragility of interior organ systems.
16mm film, Color & B/W, Sound by Neil B. Rolnick, 19 min.

X-ray (1975)

Ana Mendieta

The Cuban artist Ana Mendieta is known especially for her "Earth-body works," ritually motivated works performed in private and on camera. In these works, Mendieta covered her naked body with flowers and soil, outlined her silhouette using rocks, grasses, and vines, or exposed herself to the elements.
The radiographic film X-ray utilizes a slightly different strategy. It shows Mendieta's skull from various angles, while she repeats the same meaningless series of vowels and consonants over and over again. Fluoroscopy, the continuous recording and viewing of an x-ray image, was commonly used in medicine to diagnose speech disorders.
Transferring this medical imagery into the context of art evokes various associations. It is an obvious continuation of the tradition of self-portraiture, although the x-ray images undermine the usual paradigm of resemblance. The usual portrayal of character, emotion, and other meaningful attributes is missing. Mendieta shows herself, while also disappearing from view. The technology enables a procedure that was equally definitive of her "Earth-body works." The artist understood her dissolution in a medium as a continuation of mystical practice, which is also expressed in her glossolalia (speaking in tongues). As such, it should come as no surprise that Mendieta called herself a "neolithic shaman" – a visionary with a firm commitment to the earth and its flora.
Courtesy of The Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection, LLC; Galerie Lelong & Co.
16 mm film transferred to video, b/w, sound, 01:36 min., looped

The Inside View

Edward Poulter

An illustration of the medical advances taking place which allow us to look inside the human body. There are various methods all operable by way of the computer and the film shows us a few of them; an image of a living foetus inside the womb can be recreated on the computer screen, early heart trouble can be detected, early cancer growth can be found by means of the X-ray and can then be killed by radiation beams.

Superman: The Mechanical Monsters

Dave Fleischer

Röntgenstrahlen (Moving X-rays)

Martin Rikli

Taking the "X" out of X-Rays

General Electric

"Taking the X out of X-Rays" is a 1940s General Electric film, featuring Dr. William D. Coolidge, that explains the invention and operation of the hot-cathode X-ray tube. This innovation removed the "unknown" (X) variable from earlier, unstable cold-cathode tubes, allowing for safe, predictable, and precise medical imaging, say Wikipedia and Columbia University Department of Surgery.
Sponsored by General Electric, this is a short film featuring Dr. William Coolidge (circa 1940), the inventor of the Coolidge X-ray tube, also called hot cathode tube. He discusses medical imaging and demystifies X-rays.
Courtesy of Prelinger Archives

The Third Body (2007)

Peggy Ahwesh

An appropriated film, portraying the arrival of Adam and Eve to an exotic Eden, is intercut with appropriated videos of virtual reality demonstrations, among them a human hand shadowed by a computer-generated rendering, medical robots conducting a virtual surgery, and people dressed in bulky headgear navigating virtual spaces. As the title suggests, cyberspace adds to the Genesis legend a third possibility, a virtual existence that challenges natural and social definitions of gender and morality.
Ahwesh writes, "The tropes of the garden, the originary moment of self knowledge and gendered awareness of the body (what is traditionally called sin) is mimicked in the early experiments with virtual reality. The metaphors used in our cutting edge future are restagings of our cultural memory of the garden. Wonderment regarding the self in space, boundaries of the body at the edge of consciousness and the inside and outside skin of perceptual knowledge."
Music: Morton Feldman.

Opera Medica

Giulia Mucci

In this work, the artist assumes the role of doctor—master of the robotic surgical system—to deconstruct a transhuman body of her own creation. Performing surgery becomes a means of excising the pain associated with gender-confirmation surgery and reclaiming agency from the powerless position of patient. Questionmark's filmic performance also invokes the history of surgery as a spectacle once performed for audiences in operating theaters. Three synchronized channels present the operation, the patient's perspective, and the view from an endoscopic camera. (text from Museum of the Moving Image)
three-channel video installation, color/sound

Strange Space

Leslie Thornton Ron Vawter

This collaborative work, created specifically for the 1992 Day Without Art/AIDS Awareness Day, addresses what Thornton terms "the relationship between the medicalization of the body and the personal." While the actor Ron Vawter reads aloud from a poem by Rilke, a doctor is heard discussing Vawter's medical condition. Medical photographs of internal organs and images of the moon's surface create landscapes of inner and outer space. This haunting rumination suggests the disparity between medical interpretations and personal experiences of physicality and mortality.

Autoicon

Donald RodneyGeoff CoxMike PhillipsVirginia NimarkohRichard HyltonKeith Piper

Autoicon is a dynamic internet work and CD-ROM that simulates both the physical presence and elements of the creative personality of the artist Donald Rodney who died from sickle-cell anaemia. The project builds on Donald Rodney's artistic practice in his later years, when he increasingly began to delegate key roles in the organisation and production of his artwork. Making reference to this working process, AUTOICON is developed by a close group of friends and artists (his partner Diane Symons, Eddie Chambers, Richard Hylton, Virginia Nimarkoh, and Keith Piper) (ironically described as 'Donald Rodney plc' who have acted as an advisory and editorial board in the artist's absence, and who specified the rules by which the 'automated' aspects of the project operate. http://www.iniva.org/autoicon/

IT in health

Anthony Wilkinson

One of a series of twelve programmes explaining the uses of informational technology to different aspects of everyday life. This episode focuses on IT in healthcare, and the benefits to doctors and patients are shown, including computerised patient information databases, diagnostic equipment, organic chemistry software, information services, non-invasive imaging software and computerised pacemakers. Future developments and possibilities are also discussed.

Visible Woman (1997)

Visible Human Project

The Visible Human Project began with the Visible Man. This video is about the Visible Woman, an unidentified caucasian woman who died at 59 of a heart attack. Dr. Victor Spitzer of the University of Colorado, the project director, accepted the cadaver and filmed it with a 3-D MRI. The body was then frozen and sliced into 5,189 paper-thin layers as compared to 1,878 layers for the Visibile Man. The result is a virtual 3-D human. Dr. Michael Ackerman, project liaison for the National Library of Medicine, describes how the project originated and its purpose. A high school teacher in Colorado explains how he uses the Visible Human in class, and his students report on their impressions. Greg Andorfer, Director of the Maryland Science Center, wants to set up an exhibit on the Visible Woman to accompany that of the Visible Man at the Science Center.

The Beginning of Life

Lars Wallen

Report on fetal development, from sperm to the newborn, based on Lennart Nilsson's photo suite.

Grandmamauntsistercat

Zuza Banasińska

An emotive portrait of a multispecies matriarchal family composed using found footage from communist Poland.

The Skeleton Dance (1929)

Walt Disney

Étienne-Jules Marey: Films Chronophotographiques 1890-1904 (Films Chronophotographiques)

Etienne-Jules Marey

A film initiated by the Cinémathèque Française (France - 2007).The Cinémathèque Française digitized, restored and reanimated more than 400 fragile cellulose nitrate films of Etienne-Jules Marey's work. These 400 incunables are presented for the first time in this film: a monument!

Macintyre’s X-Ray Film

John Macintyre

Macintyre's X-Ray Film (1896) is an early medical imaging film by Scottish physician John Macintyre and among the first moving-image experiments in radiography. The work presents X-ray views of a frog's knee joint and of an adult human torso, revealing the motion of the heart and digestive tract through contrast imaging. Produced at the dawn of both cinema and X-ray technology, the film demonstrates how moving radiographic images could transform the observation of internal bodily processes and aid in the diagnosis of bones, joints, and organ function.

Dr. Macintyre’s X-Ray Cabinet

John MacIntyre

Single shot of a man behind an x-ray screen on which his x-ray is clearly visible and moving. Another man sits on a chair to the right of the screen. The x-ray image that appears on screen is same as seen in last sequence Dr. Macintyre's X-Ray Film.