Monthly Archives: February 2016

Response to Scientific Looking, Chapter 9

Image from Northwestern 

The author of this article makes a powerful case for the idea that culture informs science, which in turn informs science, and so on and so forth.

I was familiar with how the camera changed how artists and scientists view their respective disciplines, and I was also familiar with the philosophy of eugenics, but I had never before read anything that so clearly illuminated how the camera provided such widespread means of spreading that philosophy.

I’ve always found it interesting to reflect on the claims science has made over the years, and on their cultural power. This chapter certainly presents a lot to think about in both of those respects. This chapter also provoked some questions in me:

What are the current social assumptions that scientists have today, and how do they inform their research? 

The problem with this question is that it points to what I will call the “Post-Modern Conundrum”. It is easy to see the overt racism that guided much of the early use of photography to study human morphology because of our own chronological distance. As a result, one is lead to my earlier question, yet it cannot be answered, because as we see from this analysis it is only possible to detect biases and the effects of culture on science in hindsight. This leads to the development of psychological tension in the post-modern scientist and thinker:

How is one to know if one’s own research and thought is negatively influenced by ones own’s culture? Or framed another way:

How will the scientists of one hundred years from now view the science we are doing now? Will they comment on how inhumane it was? Will they have some sort of advanced knowledge about humanity that we did not even realize we were stifling by means of our scientific inquiry and cultural arrangement? 

Another thought I had while reading this article was in regards to the contrast presented between photography and ultrasound. The author takes the position that these ultrasound images have power because their data is presented visually instead of in charts or graphs, a assertion that I believe has been frequently demonstrated. It is possible to take one step further back from this idea, and leap further into post-modern thought with the realization that both of these devices are simply collectors of electromagnetic waves. We cannot see these waves, and these devices present to us visual representations of one way or another of these waves, but not the waves themselves. From this lens, it is possible to see that all these devices, photographs, ultrasound, MRI, PET are not in fact making visible the invisible but really translating something invisible into something that can then be interpreted through vision, whether the things being interpreted are graphs or images.

Regarding the commentary on human anatomy and the cultural coding of dissection and Bodyworlds, I realized that the author never pointed out one of the implicit messages of all of these disciplines, that truest knowledge of the human body can only be obtained when it no longer functions as it did in life. This implies that the animating force of life, what each human experiences as living is so complex that only in its absence can anything definitive be said about it.

Finally, the latter part of the article reminded me of the trans-humanism movement. Which is thought-provoking to say the least. They even have a political party, to which I have provided the above link.

Image form Wikipedia  

Reflection on Feedback from Creative Presentation #1 

The most important criticism I received as feedback was the perceived weakness of a social component to my presentation of Buster Simpson and his work. It is true, my main focus up until that point had been on Simpson’s environmental projects, and the vast amount of scientific scholarship that has gone into studying some of the topics he alludes to in his work, namely nurse logs, riparian restoration, and pH imbalances. This feedback was helpful because it gave me an opportunity to narrow my study of Buster Simpson. He has produced a vast body of work, and I was not sure how to choose an aspect of it to focus more in-depth on. The desire of others to hear more about the social impacts of Simpson has led me to focus in on his persona of the Woodman. His performances as the Woodman made some of the biggest social statements of his early career, on the nature of waste in the city. I would argue that the spirit of the Woodman was carried on into his later installation works. Simpson himself addresses this in a video I was very fortunate to locate. In it, he discusses the role of his piece Secured Embrace   as the spiritual successor to the Woodman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE6F8P17F_g

This allowed me a more pronounced sense of direction in my paper, but there was as still a social component missing from my creative response, which will take the form of recycled materials, a 3D printed block, and sword ferns as symbolic representations of the ideas discussed in the paper. Many commentated on the prototype of the sculpture that they appreciated and/or were intrigued by the symbolism contrasted with the simple shapes of the actual form. What it was lacking though, was some mention of this social component. At first, I thought the only way to rectify this was to write some sort of paragraph that would be displayed in front of the sculpture, making some comment on restoration that was vaguely connected to the nurse logs. Then, I realized there was a much simpler, and therefore more effective, was to integrate a social message into my work. I took a cue from Simpson and decided to write a simple phrase around the the four different half-tree outlines that will make up my sculpture.

Image from Pinterest  

I have not finalized the phrase, but it will be something such as

Our material die but the forests don’t

or

Material dies but trees don’t 

This allows me to speak both to the fact that we as a society often do not think about what happens to materials once we use them, and it introduces the topics of nurse logs, that don’t truly “die” because they still contribute to the forest, in an interesting, integrated way.

Another important piece of feedback I received was that people were getting my ideas, but the were not organized in a clear way. I attribute this scattered description to the fact that I have read a wide range on things about the artist, and was myself still trying to see how everything fit together in the sculpture. In response, I developed a chart that traces my thought processes in the symbols of the work and also provides rudimentary answers to my research questions:

If anything, what causes nurse logs?

and

What is the role of the Woodman in Buster Simpson’s work and how is that philosophy carried through in the works of his in which I am examining?