ABSTRACT
Corporeal matter as perceived by MRI straddles definitions of substance, organism, subject and object. MRI interacts with the body through nuclear magnetic resonance and electrodynamics, bringing us into contact with the body as a person, as an assemblage of biochemical reactions, as a patient and a cellular, molecular, atomic and subatomically composed entity.
This research project and exhibition use artistic processes as a method for investigating MRI and what it means to be a body as defined by MRI. The artworks exhibited were created as part of a process of interacting with the physics of MRI and making art objects as scientific devices.
Being largely isolated from how computational technologies work, there is an increasing incentive to make their internal processes visible. Particularly in a broader context where so much of the gig economy is exploitative and obscures the labour that produces electronics and services alike. The environmental, human and inter-species cost is also concealed behind the apparent seamlessness of big tech, AI and user experience design (see Anatomy of an AI). The lives lost in mines, extraction processes, factories and distribution hubs needs to be a central concern. How we communicate and exchange our ideas and feelings is also being shaped by these technologies, this is also a form of unpaid labour.
This exhibition begins with MRI and MRI data. The sculptural, woven, drawn and painted work exhibited draws on the mathematical and physical processes of MRI. The artwork exhibited makes use of scientific information and biomedical imaging laboratories as part of the creative practice.
The artwork exhibited includes sculptural ‘phantoms’ that are used to investigate the interface between body and machine in MRI and are named after scientific devices of the same name. By thinking about how matter interacts with MRI, I could make these artefacts from within and as part of MRI. My artistic phantoms are made using ‘tissue mimicking materials’ that from the perspective of the scanner, could be part of a living organism.
You will also find woven works, patterns and swatches created in response to the way in which an MRI scanner turns signals from the body into a digital image of the body. These woven works and the patterns developed for them are based on the mathematical processes of signal analysis. They were made from within and part of the MRI process. Drawings, illustrations, diagrams and paintings created as part of my research process are also created to chart my artistic practice's entanglements and constellational nature.