An examination of the bodily, situated aspects of data-visualization work, looking at visualization practices around the development of MRI technology.
Our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled, and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In this book, Silvia Casini reveals the affective relations and materiality that turn data into image--and in so doing, gives bodies back to data. Opening the black box of MRI technology, Casini examines the bodily, situated aspects of visualization practices around the development of this technology. Reframing existing narratives of biomedical innovation, she emphasizes the important but often overlooked roles played by aesthetics, affectivity, and craft practice in medical visualization.
Combining history, theory, laboratory ethnography, archival research, and collaborative art-science, Casini retrieves the multiple presences and agencies of bodies in data visualization, mapping the traces of scientists' body work and embodied imagination. She presents an in-depth ethnographic study of MRI development at the University of Aberdeen's biomedical physics laboratory, from the construction of the first whole-body scanner for clinical purposes through the evolution of the FFC-MRI. Going beyond her original focus on MRI, she analyzes a selection of neuroscience- or biomedicine-inspired interventions by artists in media ranging from sculpture to virtual reality. Finally, she presents a methodology for designing and carrying out small-scale art-science projects, describing a collaboration that she herself arranged, highlighting the relational and aesthetic-laden character of data that are the product of craftsmanship and affective labor at the laboratory bench.
Author(s): Silvia Casini
Series: Leonardo
Publisher: The MIT Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 320
City: Cambridge
Contents
Series Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Visualizing the Body in the Digital Age: A Brief Historical and Conceptual Background
Book Structure
1. Center–Periphery in Data Visualization: Concepts and Methods
The Relational View of Data
Epistemic Cultures and Their Trading Zone
Reorienting the Center–Periphery in MRI Innovation
A Stereoscopic Vision of Art and Science
I. Opening the Black Box
2. Histories and Practices in MRI Early Development
Encountering MRI
Visualizing Data in MRI: How the Journey Starts
Mark I as a Boundary Object
The Drive Toward the Patient in the Aberdonian Development of MRI
Opening Up the Black Box of Data Visualization in Biomedical Imaging
Scaling Up: From the Hand-Painted Image of a Dead Mouse to a Full-Body MRI Scan
3. Inside the Laboratory: From Signal to Coils, from Images to Bodies
That Obscure Object of Desire
MRI Development and Reinvention: Two Poles of One Experimental Trajectory
Fast Field-Cycling: Reinventing MRI
From Signal to Coil
Understanding Quality in Biomedical Data Visualization
4. Visualizing Uncertainty in MRI Reinvention
A Leap in Scale: From the Transparent, Molar Body to the Potential, Molecular One
Data Visualization and Uncertainty: What Are We Looking At with FFC-MRI?
The Eclipse of the Real
Biomarkers and the Uncertainty of Interpretation
Chapter Final Remarks
Intermezzo. Lives in the Grid
Introduction
From Data to Image: The Grid in Biomedical Imaging
The Cartesian Grid: From Modern Art to Predictive Modeling
II. Art–Science Collaboration
5. Challenging the Neurorealism Fallacy through the Arts
Visualizing and Sonifying the Living Brain
The Neurorealism Fallacy and Its Visual Incarnation
Challenging the Neurorealism Fallacy through the Arts
Body–Brain Systems: From Second-Order Cybernetics to Bio Art
Bio Art and Body–Brain Systems
Chapter Final Remarks
6. Archives and Laboratory Ethnography: Giving Bodies Back to Data
Is This a Man?
A Cross-Disciplinary Project
Immobile Choreography: From the Idea to the Exhibition
From Where Do We See? The Role of the Archive in a Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
Chapter Final Remarks
7. Bodily Sociotechnical Imaginaries in the Age of Operational Images
The Age of Operational Images
A Poetics of Private/Public Bodies and Health Spaces
Living with Demons—A Dialogue from the Future Past
Book Concluding Remarks
Notes
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Intermezzo
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Bibliography
Index
Color Plates
