recent biomed, displays/exhibits, art and biomed
Winners of the 5th annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge — where’s the aesthetic power?
Apropos biomedicine and aesthetics — this week’s (28 September) issue of Science presents the winners of the 5th annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge which the magazine organises in partnership with the National Science Foundation.
Here’s one of the two winners in the photography category:
– which is a rendering of a CT-scan from a 33-year-old Chinese woman being examined for thyroid disease. 182 thin CT ’slices’ were stacked together to create a 3D image looking upward at the sinuses from underneath the head (more here).
And here’s a screen shot of the winner in the category non-interactive media:
– an advertising video called “Nicotine: The Physiologic Mechanism of Tobacco Dependence”, created by the scientific visualization company Hurd Studios and used by Pfizer to market their anti-smoking drug Chantix.
More winning photos in Science vol. 317 (no. 5846) pp. 1858-1863 (28 September 2007).
Nice pics, okay, and probably good advertising iconography — but where’s the aesthetic power?
01 Oct 2007 Thomas
I’m not quite sure I know what you are missing in these images. Maybe I just don’t know what you mean by “aesthetic power”. I feel quite drawn to the upper image because of its visualizing qualities, but also for aesthetic reasons - I think there is a depth in it that i like to look at, and which will certainly make me chose this visualisation of the sinuses over others.
In addition, the radiologist producing the visualisation informs us that he chose this particular set of CT-scans because of the “beautiful anatomy” of the patient. I think aesthetics seem to have a lot of power in this image.
Well, I guess I side with Simon Schama: “Just how powerful is art? Can it feel like love or grief? Can it change your life? Can it change the world?” (The Power of Art, 2006). Some will consider this a hopelessly outdated (and romantic!) position. Others will, on the contrary, feel that such questions are refreshing after the decades of historical, social and cultural contextualisation hegemony; we cannot and shall not undo the contextualist era, but we can at last begin to ask those questions which contextualism never dared address.