Let me begin by stating that the observations I make are based on my experience as a visual artist, writer and academic working with history of medicine museums and medical spaces for the past decade. For much of this time I have engaged with various digital practices, through production and dissemination, and these technologies have impacted on both the subject and context of the works produced. I frequently work through site-specific, collaborative intervention. These interventions are designed to provoke interdisciplinary discourse across the visual arts, biomedicine and the museum space, and engage the public in understanding both historical and contemporary issues of biomedical investigation and epistemology. A key element of this discourse is the complex and at times contentious process of interpretation, a loaded term that connotes quite different meanings for each participant. For the artist the challenge of working site-specifically in response to a particular medical collection or space is quite different to hanging work on the gallery wall, and as Graham Sullivan (4:2005) notes: “The contemporary artist these days is part theorist, performer, producer, installer, writer, entertainer, and shaman, who creates in material, matter, media, text and time, all of which take shape in real, simulated and virtual worlds”. The museum curator is also expected to fulfil a number of overlapping roles and in negotiation with the artist, museum staff, and trustees must find a way of allowing artistic integrity and imagination to find expression without over shadowing or compromising the collection in question. This brings me to the thrust of the workshop: how do digital technologies influence these processes of creation, negotiation, interpretation, and dissemination. For the purposes of this presentation I am suggesting that we re-frame the question somewhat to reflect the role of digital technologies at the intersection of biomedicine, the visual arts, and the museums sector. The technologies themselves are neutral – artists and scientists both use digital technology. Digital editing tools such as Photoshop are often used to select and accentuate a particular neuron or dendritic structure, with the resulting images equally at home in the art gallery or in journals such as New Scientist (see for example the work of Susan Aldworth or Andrew Carnie and visit the web archive for the Wellcome Trust’s exhibition ‘Truth and Beauty’). Even highly specialist technologies such as electron scanning microscopy and fMRI are used by artist’s working in collaboration with colleagues in the life sciences. These technologies allow access to previously inaccessible areas of the body such as the inner brain, which can now be seen alive and functioning leading to neuroscientists making the kind of claims about ‘revealing the self’ that were once the preserve of artists.

So what do we mean by materiality in this context? Materiality refers to the physical and material substance – the thing itself – but for historians and archivists it also refers to the medium used to store and transmit the object. This storage is increasingly digital and the digitisation of medical and museum collections has created greater accessibility to what were hitherto exclusive collections. But for the artist materiality has a much broader meaning and is bound to representational discourses of the real and the virtual, discourses that are becoming increasingly important for the museums sector where digital technology is creating the opportunity for not only greater democratisation of medical collections but also more opportunity for artistic intervention and subsequent public dissemination. In order to broaden discussion around these issues I will show examples from collaborative artworks that demonstrate these processes and dialogues and have, where available, inserted web-links for the reader to refer to at the end of the paper. I will mainly use examples from my own practice-led research, not because I think them exemplary but because they demonstrate first hand experience of the research, production and dissemination processes.
Narrative Remains (Ingham 2009) made in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust and The Royal College of Surgeons Hunterian Museum in London investigates post-mortem narration of anonymised body parts and asks if the legacy of historical remains can be used as a teaching and philosophical aid to understanding 21st century notions of embodiment within the medical museum teaching space. The project made full use of digital technology via film, photography, print and web publications and social networking sites, in order to bring subjectivity back into the medical museum space. One of the comments in the visitors book, from an MA student in Museum and Gallery Education, states: “I know yours was an art piece, but I think it served an interpretive role for visitors . . . I always feel a bit freaked out at the Hunterian, as much as I love it, and the way you brought subjectivity into that clinical environment seemed really important. I wish it would be up permanently.” Also addressed is the question: “How can museums contribute to medical teaching and research and how can their collections stimulate the use of physical objects in the humanities and social sciences?” The director, Simon Chaplin, and I jointly presented papers at several conferences, medical, museological and art, accompanied by joint screenings of the film, and contributed essays to the print publication. The project is now part of the Hunterian’s web archive. Another project, also supported by the Wellcome Trust that worked in this way was Anatomy Lessons (Ingham 2004/5), which addressed the question of “how to use both the visual and non-visual in curatorial practice”.

In the case of Anatomy Lessons the artworks (digital photography and film) were exhibited back in their site of origin – working dissecting rooms and medical museums that are normally off limits to the public. The smell, feel, and atmosphere of these oft misunderstood spaces worked as powerfully, if not more so, than the artworks themselves.

An artist whose practice addresses many of the questions in this workshop is Susan Aldworth. Her installation Matter into Imagination (2006) http://www.thegarret.org.uk/aldworth.htm shown at The Old Operating Theatre Museum in London’s east end and in various medical teaching museums in Britain, combines fine-art printmaking with molecular images of the brain bringing contemporary art into dialogue within the medical museology. Digital technologies such as computer assisted design and fMRI and SEM imaging are crucial tools for the artist. Neuropsychologist Paul Broks (2008:18) says of her work: “Do we need more pictures of the brain? For Aldworth, such images, 
the real and the hyper real, the photographic and the digital, are deeply provocative but serve only to intensify the core ambiguities that drive 
her work.” Seeds of Memory (Ingham 2006) also brings contemporary neuroscience into dialogue with historical collections and with the role of the non-visual (smell and touch), while Vanitas: Seed-Head (Ingham 2005) used participatory web technologies for an installation in Amsterdam’s historic Waag Theatre of Anatomy (normally closed to the public), which developed from discussions with neuroscientist Prof. Kevin Fox. Without access to these web based digital technologies the exhibition and contextualizing elements would have had far less public impact.

I want to conclude withTheatres of Memory/Flux, a developmental project with University College London’s Francis Galton Collection (important in the history of forensics, biometrics, genetics and psychology). The collection is off-limits to the public except for research but working with curator Natasha McEnroe we hope to use digital technology to develop a web exhibition that will make the collection more accessible and more vivid in terms of re-presenting the past in the present. The project explores how many of Galton’s discoveries are still of relevance today and uses biometric scanning technologies and microscopic biological imaging (in this case of the brain) to prompt questions about classification, typology, and individuality.

I suggest that it is this re-positioning of the historical within the contemporary, of the digital within the analogue, and the layering of past and present, that is considerably enhanced through interdisciplinary collaboration.

References:
Broks, P. (2006) Infant Fingers in Scribing The Soul, (Aldworth, S.) London: Arts Council of England

Ingham, K. (2004) Anatomy Lessons, Manchester: Dewi Lewis Publishing

Narrative Remains, (2009) London and Swansea: RCS Hunterian Museum and CLASI Publications

Sullivan, G. (2005) Art Practice As Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts, California and London: Sage Publications.

Wellcome Trust Truth and Beauty Exhibition (2002): http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2002/Features/WTD004698.htm

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