Week 4: MedTech + Art


From my observed experiences with medical ailments, I used to only think of medical technologies as instruments being involved in the diagnostic and treatment process. After this listening to this week's lecture and combing through this week's material, I realized that medical technologies' products can be considered art. As mentioned in Professor Vesna's lecture, Wilhelm Rontgen's development of the x-ray can be consider a work of art because it takes photographs of the body, with these photographs being utilized for diagnostic purposes like when I get x-rays at the dentist's. Other technologies allow us to see what's going in the body at a microscopic level, allowing us to see the body in a truly beautiful way.


Professor Vesna also spoke in detail about how artists wanted to utilize medical technology to create art, a diametrically opposing common perception of medical technologies' purpose. She illustrated this point by talking about how Damadian wanted to build an MRI to create an artistic representation of the entire human body, solely for the purpose of art and not medical treatment. Highlighting this concept of medical technology being utilized as an artistic instrument is Orlon. Orlon went under the knife for multiple surgeries in order to acquire physical features of the most prominent paintings, like the forehead of the Mona Lisa and Venus's chin (Rose).



Finally, after examining Virgil Wong's artwork, I was moved by how Wong explored the constantly dynamic nature of human health - utilizing artwork to portray the physiological experience of someone with a particular health condition, like an epilepsy. Through the use of of color coordination, dynamic geometric representations of pain points, Wong conveys to the audience the pain and the experience of a seizure. Without having seen a seizure in real life, this piece of art helped to convey to me the nature of the experience.

http://virgilwong.com/art/


Works Cited:

Rose, Barbara. “Orlan: Is it Art? Orlan and the Transgressive Act” Art in America: Vol 81 (February 1993), pp 83-125.

TEDx Talks. “TEDxAmericanRiviera - Diane Gromala - Curative Powers of Wet, Raw Beauty” Online video clip. YouTube. 7 Dec.2011. Web. 30 Apr. 2017.

Warwick, Kevin. "Project Cyborg 2.0." Kevin Warwick. Web. 30 Apr. 2017. <http://www.kevinwarwick.com/project-cyborg-2-0/>.

Wong, Virgil. “Art Exhibited in Galleries and Museums around the World.” Art. N.p., 2012. Web. 30 Apr. 2017. <http://virgilwong.com/art/>.

Vesna, Victoria. Medicine Body Lecture. Video. 30 April 2017.

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