MRI trials

MRI
TRIALS

I began my investigation by taking part in MRI trials at the Cancer Centre in 2018 with Dr Heather Fitzke. MRI images confront us with the fact that our bodily materiality acts beyond us and that medical technology shapes our sense of self.

Seeing my organs autonomously pulsing on the monitor in the control room had a pronounced impact on me. It was like looking into a rockpool within my own body. The affecting power of MRI (its power to change our emotions) is in its potential to reveal autonomic bodily functions and diseases which are beyond our control. The data on the screen revealed my autonomous self: peristalsis, bowel movements, digestion, heartbeats and respiration. Through MRI, anatomy is seen as embedded and relational.

I felt a deep sense of fascination with how my organs moved and worked. Haraway’s situated biopolitics argues for an account of the body as an environment, in a state of simultaneous dissolution and formation which I notice in my data. My organs seemed like invertebrates in a rockpool: a squishy pulsing ecosystem. Organs do not operate in isolation but are interconnected. Their autonomous pulsing and motion seemed creaturely and strange in contrast to my numerous encounters with preserved cadavers in the dissecting room. My organs keep me alive yet I have no conscious sense of their functioning. They function beyond me.

Being the subject of MRI was an opportunity to experience how to interface or interact with it. One of my research aims concerns the materialisation of data processes in the MRI system that are not visible or accessible to the subject. The ‘hidden’ processes at the body-machine interface concern the interaction of corporeal matter with nuclear magnetic resonance phenomena (NMR).

Selecting the correct materials to make phantoms was the first step in interacting with the body-machine (interface). I would refer back to my data sculpture and cross-sectional projections from my scans with Dr Fitzke.

Anatomy as a rockpool

MRI
TRIALS