Practices of Looking: Chapter 9 - Scientific Looking, Looking at Science

Scientific Looking, Looking at Science

• Scientific images and looking practices are dependent on cultural context and culturally informed interpretations 
• depends on social, political, and cultural meanings 
• Science images as integral to productions and meanings of images in pop culture, ads, etc
• X-rays - advances but also visually pleasing
• Origins of photography for scientific medical imaging methods
• Worldwide shift toward visual means of representing knowledge and evidence in science and growth
• the microscope and methods like dissection 
• "Seeing the Unseen" - reoccurring motif throughout science now with digital imaging involved at end of 20th century
• Ultrasound imaging - sound waves to measure the boundaries of interior soft-tissue structures translated into moving images
• Paradox - what we look at in scientific and medical imaging is not what is normally in the world of the visual
• Visualization encompass acoustic and tactile world with increased visibility of digital rendering
• Nikolas Rose - "we know life through a biomedical paradigm... experience our bodies at the scale of the molecular ... genetic code."
• life is something that can be managed and lived at this level
• understanding of diseases
• nanotechnology - life can be organized and managed on an everyday basis
• understanding the body through a network of metaphors
• The body within a framework of digital - something that can be modified, reworked, and transformed at a cellular level
• A multiplicity of tiny units in a network that can be changed through drugs
• Science and culture are always mutually engaged

The Theater of Science

• Erwin Panofsky wrote that the rise of anatomy was integral to Renaissance art
• Da Vinci - became icons of science 
• Vitruvian Man - geometry to ideal human proportions, the body is a microcosm of the universe within a the circle and the material realm the square
• Fascination with anatomy through imaging of Xray, CT scan, and MRI instead of dissection
• Anatomy Theaters - a form of spectacle through which anatomists attempted not only to educate but to entertain
• Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp in 1632 - utilizes the gaze on the book as well as the corpse; observation as pleasure
• Used composite imagery
• Wax replicas of human bodies
• Thomas Eankins's The Gross Clinic (1875) - revulsion and fascination of the body
• Visible Human Project (VHP) U.S government took 2 human bodies and sliced them, turned them into digital representations for education and mass produced it
• Body Worlds exhibition medical display of dead bodies after plastination

Images as Evidence: Cataloguing the Body

• Mechanical and electronic image-producing systems - photography, film, television, computer graphics, and digital photography bear positivism
• Positivism - belief that true and valued knowledge of the world is derived from the scientific method; advanced by Auguste Comte
• Broader ideology in thinkers questioned validity of subjective reasoning and soundless of philosophical and spiritual metaphysics as understanding the world
• Informed law, medicine, journalism, and social sciences which practitioners favor objective study 
• The camera is positivist view useful tool for mechanically observing and measuring the world that could check, balance or correct subjective human perception
• Photographic truth - camera is an objective device for capturing reality 
• photography was integrated into existing practices - documentation, preform diagnoses and see farther and better
• the body exterior is now a means of classification
• Classification 
• Linnaeus - dual system for animals that taxonomists built onto to add family, class, subspecies to the already generic and species names
• ranked according to evolution and development
• evolutionary history (phylogeny)
• could be used as a form of social organization and control or bio-power
• classification of people based on their features
• ex. prisions - fingerprinting, scanning, mugshots
• craniology - outward physical human body, the cranium mostly, could be read for signs of temperament, moral capacity, and intelligence
• claims of superiority against ethnic groups
• physiognomy - interpreting the outward appearance and configuration of the body
• used photography as a toll to refine the classification of everyday life
• modernist interpretation - pseudosciences, not true science
• post-modernist interpretation - all science, including the most advanced are no less informed by cultural ideologies
• Craniology and physiognomy is related to the science of eugenics - devoted to the practice of studying and controlling human reproduction to improve the human race
• ex. the study of criminality in people and the similar traits they were believed to share by Alphonse Bertillion
• organization of people in medical practices to compare was is normal and abnormal
• The meanings we assign to that which is visible and measurable change, but we nonetheless rely on these meanings to make claims about universal facts concerning bodies and abilities to perceive them

Imaging the Body's Interior: Biomedical Personhood

• Science promotes the concept of images seeing truths beyond the human eye giving humankind insight into the mysteries of the body
• New clinical meanings that shape the body and the understanding of it
• X-ray - relatively clear depiction of the skeleton; brings on fantasies of x-ray vision
• Ultrasound - foundation was military sonar device to record an objects location and density in a space. Also used in obstetrics and the understanding of the fetal body 
• The sonogram serves purpose beyond medicine- creates an image of the baby that adds to the social role of motherhood ex - showing others the baby as it develops
• adds to the mothers nature of wanting to protect the baby
• awards the fetus a state of personhood

Vision and Truth

• The body's interior tension between the idea that truth is self - evident in the surface appearance of things and contrast the idea that truth lies hidden in internal structures of the body that science can uncover
• looking inside to the see the "true" identity
• vision is primary avenue of knowledge and takes precedence over other senses
• ex a sonogram image is more reliable over how the woman feels
• crucially linked other activities to sight; experimenting, measuring, analyzing, and ordering
• Paradox - clinical gaze and its legacy is that vision may predominate but its nonetheless reliant on other sensory cognitive processes
• Through the imaging of the body, it is constructed through aesthetic choices
• the images of the interior evoke the idea of the sublime - think scale
• ex. colored scans of the brain

 Imaging Genetics

• The body represented in slices of imagery shows the body is transformable and malleable
• The Human Genome Project (HGP) - "map" of the human genome
• clues to the origins of everything
• paradigm through which the human body is imagined - genetics
• Genetic science isn't just about the chromosome, but identifying diseases linked genes, behavior, physical appearance etc
• now a new marker of cultural difference
• the genetic body is an accessible map 
• to identify genes but also change them is a growing field of research
• not just for diseases but for physical as well

The Digital Body

• the idea of morphing, makes it difficult to distinguish between people, collapsing boundaries between bodies
• amalgamation of race to embrace a more multicultural society, idealized
• through this stereotypes remain in place as attractive and idealized
•  Nancy Burson created portraits that can age, now used to help find missing children
• she created a series where she changed the skin color of a face that was the same 
• the growth of the idea of a cyborg
• Cyborg - an entity that is part technology and part organism
• Cybernetics - the fusion of humans with technology
• breaking down traditions of the human body - post-human
• Donna Haraway - body-technology relationship filled with potential for imagining and building new worlds both liberator and threatening

Visualizing Pharmaceuticals

• Advertising is a major way for people to receive information about medicine
• DTC, direct to consumer, - marketing that speaks directly to the consumer even though they purchase medicine through a doctor
• ethics are challenged through this promotion
• most medical professionals feel the motivation is positive
• Purpose of ad's is to continue the sales of drugs for use, need of chemical modification outside of the norm
• demanding that they get access to it
• DTC images do not show images of people getting treatments, but of happy people
• medicated citizen has become the norm