I am exploring four zones of inquiry in a somewhat paratactic fashion : the visual culture of bio-medicine; mobile, wireless technologies; the electronic or media arts; and feminist media studies.
In past research lives I have interrogated the power of marketing research in consumer culture and been fascinated with the work of C. Wright Mills, particularly his prescient work on designers and what he termed ‘the cultural apparatus’ in an unfinished manuscript.
Since 2005 I have edited the Canadian Journal of Communication. Barbara Crow and I founded the journal wi in 2007.
New release: Verkörperungen/Embodiment, eds Christina Lammer, Catherin Pilcher and Kim Sawchuk is an anthology of writings and artwork by an international group of feminists.
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THE VISUAL CULTURE of MEDICINE
Tumultuous carnality carries us to the thresholds of our physical capacities to engage with the world, an embodiment that often brings into sharp focus the promises and limitations of the most sophisticated of medical procedures. In the post war period a plethora of devices, such as ultrasound, endoscopy, and magnetic resonance imaging have been added to the biomedical arsenal to diagnose and assist in the treatment of what ails. (Kevles) In so doing, the medical gaze opens up new “vistas” (Stafford) traveling beneath the surface of the skin without cutting open the epidermal layer, revealing what is both most intimate and most distant: the biomatic substrata, a dimension which can be insistently present, particularly when we are ill, yet on a daily basis lies enigmatically beneath the surface of our skin.
Inseparable from this dynamic lived body, the body we take for granted except in moments of crisis, is the medical record that officially documents our somatic disorders. These dossiers constitute a veritable archive of statistical accumulations of data: blood pressure, temperature, pulse rates and collections of visually fleeting somatic traces. The data generated by the body can now be digitally encoded and thus connected into a wider network of information that affects how we live our lives– and who lives. (Nelkin).
The two projects that I have been working on in this area examine bio-medicine as it enters into public culture. The latest project on the biomatrix is focused on Canadian artists who explore this terrain. The earliest project, Biotourism, specifically examined the fantasy of inner body travel within popular culture.
Medicine and the Media Arts in Canada- exploring the biomatrix
This project documents the intersection of art and biomedicine in Canada. A significant number of contemporary Canadian media artists have appropriated both images and technologies from medicine to augment their “palette.” Here I include media artists working with a range of new technologies –computer imaging, digital photography, web arts, interactive installations, videos and video installations. Biomedicine is the focus of the creative work of nationally and internationally renowned Canadians such as Theodore Wan, Nell Tenhaaf, Catherine Richards, Frances Leeming, Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, Laiwan Chung, Jennifer Willet, Biotecknica (Willet and Shawn Bailey), John Baturin, and Annie Thibault to name only a few. The goal of this project is to document artists working at this juncture and to study, in depth, the practices of selected individual artists: all of this, to comprehend the contemporary rendition of the historic relationship between the arts and the sciences, particularly human biology.
Biotourism: inner space and popular culture
This project explores our fantastical relation to inner body space as it unfolds in the mass media culture of the post-war period to the present. Coffee table books, magazines, films, and television shows depict the movement of the eye through the body, but also promise spectators that they can enter into its stubborn recesses. As such, the what was formerly hidden from vision is now presented as a form of imagined travel through ‘inner space’ typically envisioned in terms that echo Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime as an affective instance of agreeable horror.
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MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES, WIRELESS WORLDS
This cluster of projects examines the increasing ubiquity of mobile, wireless devices in public space.
The Haunting
As a member of the Mobile Digital Commons Network, I collaboratively engaged in the hands-on production of a locative game of ghost capture called the Haunting.
EMU- Evaluating Mobile Users
EMU, co-lead by Dr. Barbara Crow of York University, worked with various teams of artists, designers and engineers developing protocols for doing systematic user-integrated testing on a number of MDCN projects including Urban Archaeology: Sampling the Park; The Haunting; and Tracklines (produced by a team at the Banff New Media Institute under the direction of lead designer, Angus Leech).
Wi and other writings.
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MEDIA ARTS
Used Goods/Salvation Works
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FEMINISM
I have it acknowledged as a ’separate’ area but in actuality the vibrant legacy of feminist theory and practice infuses all of my research projects, whether overtly stated or not.
This recent publication, Materiality, Memory Machines and the Archive as Medium touches upon the legacy of Innis through reflections upon working with digital technologies on various archival projects. The paper describes a project, in process, on the contribution of women to the history of medical illustration in Canada.
