DATA SCULPTURE
I created a true-to-scale sculpture of my MRI data: a materialisation of un-tangible bodily data. Milled from dense fleshy pink foam, this sculpture is a physical and tactile rendering of what MRI reveals. The changes I made to my data resulted in patchy and globular, partial and flayed forms. My data sculpture is an uncertain embodiment of subjectivity contextualised by the speculative, unknown status of my cancer in 2018. The danger which my data sculpture may or may not contain is emotionally untranslatable.
My MRI images and data sculpture tethered my phantoms to my bodily matter which is always in flux and always hybrid, subject to ongoing evolution and random mutation. This is what makes bodily matter unfathomable. Disrupting and fragmenting essentialist and totalising social categories is central to queer theory, definitions of the abject, and disability studies and was a parallel between my practice and my experience of cancer (Cox, 2018). Critical factors that influenced how and what materials I would use to make my phantoms depended on matter that was organic or a ‘tissue mimicking material’ (TMM). I also drew from the experience of working with my data by allowing globular forms to emerge through how I made my phantoms. Kristeva (1982) analyses different abject subjects, demarking their commonality in power to disrupt or threaten notions of a whole self. My data sculpture displaces bodily boundaries and disfigures bodily forms. My data sculpture was made before my cancer diagnosis. The affecting psychological response this stirs in me when I hold the data sculpture in my arms illustrates the type of agency inanimate objects can possess. I wanted to harness and nurture this affective power. My data sculpture produced a necessary and troubling reforging of my data via my gaze. No longer a diagnostically readable image, my data sculpture distorts the symbolic and normative discourse of MRI images. Being simultaneously “too alien and too close” my data sculpture informs how I create my phantom organs (Bennett, 2010, pp. 3-4).