Week 4 Medicine + Technology + Art

This weeks reading’s really made me reflect upon my interactions with medical technologies and how they can be seen as art. My entire life I have been surrounded by advance medical technology and can now appreciate it for what it is. It is art. The abbot reading was very influential in my understanding of this weeks topic. 

A couple of years ago I attended Bodies: The Exhibit and it shows the body as a form of art. It shows the body in athletic poses and the bodies have been stripped down to the tendons and even to the veins.  This exhibit was evoking emotion from the audience and the human body is created into a piece of art by an advancement in medical technology, the chemicals that were created to help preserve and dissect these bodies in a way that has never been done before.

I have had many medical issues while I was growing up and one of these medical problems involved a brain tumor. My doctor utilized the MRI machine to capture and image of what my brain tumor would look like. This medical technology helped doctors capture what the inside of my brain would look like without any kind of invasive surgery. The video that I have linked to this blog shows an artist Angela Palmer as she shows us a journey through the human body on what an MRI machine can capture. It is beautiful and will make you realize just how far the human body has come in giving us the means to capture such amazing things.

"Bodies: The Exhibition." N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2016. <http://www.premierexhibitions.com/exhibitions/4/4/bodies-exhibition>.

Adorno30. "Angela Palmer - Artist | MRI Scan Art Video." YouTube. YouTube, 19 May 2007. Web. 24 Apr. 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn-wCiGjCeU>.

"Angela Palmer | Artist." Angela Palmer Artist RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2016. <http://www.angelaspalmer.com/>.

"Genome Research." Genome Research RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2016. <http://www.gene-sis.net/artists_fontcuberta.html/>.

"Virgil Wong | Artist and Health Cognition Researcher, Columbia University | Cofounder and Inventor, Medical Avatar." Virgil Wong. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2016. <http://virgilwong.com/>.
"Flatland." , by E. A. Abbott, 1884. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Apr. 2016. <http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/eaa/FL.HTM>.

Images:

Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://atlanticstation.s3.amazonaws.com/media/2015/01/bodies-1.jpg>.

Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.brainfacts.org/~/media/Brainfacts/Article%20Multimedia/About%20Neuroscience/Technologies/MRI_blackandwhite.ashx>.
Adorno30. "Angela Palmer - Artist | MRI Scan Art Video." YouTube. YouTube, 19 May 2007. Web. 24 Apr. 2016. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn-wCiGjCeU>.

Tony Dove's Lecture April 20th

This week I attended an event by Tony Dove, this event was a lecture on how virtual reality and advancements in technology can help push art into a new direction. Dove talked about the use of interactivity to navigate in a way that can connect you to media, the way that she accomplished this was utilizing he camera to analyze her live movements to scrub through multiple clips with her hands that can be analyzed and shown through histograms.

A clip that Dove showed was called “ArchofMothTong_VR_Excerpts”, Dove talked about how the aspect of virtual reality would trick the body into feeling like it was an out of body experience, when actually it was and in your body experience, your body extruded into the screen and your mind was tricked into being in the moment and you would feel your body for example if you were in a pond in your feet would have the sensation of feeling water. The Professor also talked about Artificial changelings and the interest in the embodied interface. After this Dove talked about a clip with the main character “Spectropia”. 

Dove talked about the dress at the end of her lecture called “the dress that eats souls”, the dress was basically robotic and when a person would stand in front of the robotic dress the dress would speak to you and tell you to move, the dress mimicked your body movement and basically the dress and a person in front of it could go back and forth. The entire experience was very interesting and I am glad that I could take part in this experience. Dove is a very good speaker and a very accomplished artist.

When Dove showed the video introducing the use of a text speech puppet it was really an impressive display of technology and art coming together. The Text Speech Puppet technique utilized a character saying various sequences to get the mouth movements that Dove could scrub through and create a dialogue with the computer, for example Dove could type in text into the computer interface and have those words translated into a speech that the computers default speech code could speak through the video. This voice that was emulated onto the screen was not the actors actual voice but an artificial one created by the program Dove used. 

Image Sources: 

D0011613.jpg. Digital image. N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.fondation-langlois.org/media/CRD/public/d00011613.jpg>.
"D00011613.jpg." N.p., n.d. Web. <http://www.fondation-langlois.org/media/CRD/public/d00011613.jpg>.