In 2008 the Canadian news covered the story of the adoption, in several local hospitals, of the Given Imaging Corporation’s, PillCam ESO, a camera you swallow like a pill that is used to examine the intestinal tract. Originally developed for military application by a team of Israeli scientists, this miniature camera takes fourteen pictures per second as it travels through a subject’s inner recesses on its twenty-minute voyage.

Approximately 2,600 images in total are beamed, wirelessly, to a miniature computer strapped to the body of the wearer. Once the camera’s journey is complete, the images are then downloaded onto another computer, where they are pieced together for analysis, interpretation, and cross-verification with other data such as blood and urine analyses (http://www.givenimaging.com).

This diagnostic technology, and its transformation into a headline news story, \ is emblematic of a phenomenon I have described, in a series of essays on art, medicine, technology, popular culture and the body as biotourism. In biotourism audiences are given a chance to experience the cultural fantasy of travel into the contours of “inner space,” either their own or that of someone else. In the art world, installations such as Mona Hatoum’s Corps étranger, set up a compelling and disturbing journey through her intestinal recesses that places the visitor not only into close vicinity with her nether-regions, but into a collusion with the technologies of visualization that make this act of seeing possible.

The study of biotourism has been premised on four vectors of analysis, that exist in various combinations in these locations and across media sites: scale (whereby the miniature is turned into the gigantic, inverting the relationship between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic); space (in particular, as the configuration of inner space as a landscape or territory for fictive travel and exploration); movement (the ways that travel through this bioscape is staged diegetically); and affect (usually expressed in terms of the sublime or the grotesque) (Sawchuk 2000).

These spaces, part of the “recessive body” beyond the purview of our daily gaze (Leder) may be familiar, drawing upon a history of representations from both figurative art and gross anatomy. In the world of “biotechnomedicine” (Dumit, 2004), The Visible Human Project’s ghostly “revenants” (Waldby, 2000) may be produced by complex scanning procedures and computer simulations to provide scientists with the means to “fly through” a three-dimensional rendering of a corpse, but the forms and navigational systems still bear a history of depiction of the anatomical body. In other cases, journeys through these bioscapes may present the exceedingly abstract and unfamiliar image-traces of micro-molecular processes that seem disconnected from what we know, or think we know as a body.

Biotouristic narratives traverse both the spaces of production of “technobiomedicine” and the often unruly fictional renderings of our anxieties and longings towards these formal scientific practices in popular culture and the media, including television, movies, news, magazines, and advertising. The bioscape represented culls from the history of technological mediation of the body: a “get milk” advertisement shamelessly may depict an x-ray of the bones of a human drinking milk, while a highway billboard from a few years back presented a colour image of a cancer cell with the subtitle “dangerous beauty” in an effort by the Canadian Cancer Society to instigate awareness and raise funds.

Travels through the body is, likewise, a staple mode of representation in museums, science centres, galleries, and other exhibition spaces. Here I have documented how curators and artists have attempted to render two-dimensional images of the bioscape into a three-dimensional haptic experience for visitors. Most often this has entailed an ongoing encounter with the anatomical body, as in The Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia’s “walk through heart” a plastic simulation of a the chambers of the heart complete with soundtrack. In these displays exceedingly familiar, and highly symbolic and iconic anatomical structures (the heart, the brain) are enlarged, exaggerated and corporeal relations are inverted for pedagogical purposes. There is often a lesson, delivered in admonitory tones, about the individual’s responsibility to achieve good health at the same time as moving through the body tries to engage and entertain these same visitors.

What is typically absent from the displays is a discussion of how science produces representations for different purposes, and how they “act” or “perform” in different context. The study of biotourism is not only the study of the modalities of scientific representations of the movement through bodies but a consideration of the technologies that produce bodies in science as well as the different “styles of thought” associated with different communities of practice, to quote Ludwik Fleck. Turning attention from biotourism to biomediation entails foregrounding the technical apparatus of image production and display, not to present a story of the triumph of technology, but to comprehend the practices that give rise to new bodies beyond the anatomical and physiological.

This has repercussions for the display of science and technologies within museums. This is an approach to the present that takes into account the persistence of ‘older modalities’ for thinking and experiencing bodies in these shifting conditions of intellectual and cultural production. Change within these domains never happens in one fell swoop or evenly, as my previous examples indicate. We might ask why the anatomical body, from Günther Van Hagen’s parade of plastinates to the recurrent exhibitions of the history of anatomy, continue to fascinates and draw visitors to galleries and museums. Is it because there is a nostalgia for this body, one that is comprehensible, familiar, seemingly more tactile, hugely affective, yet waning in importance in terms of scientific exploration and explanation? Why the persistence of these familiar corporeal tropes when, as Nikolas Rose has argued, the contemporary biomedical body began to emerge when “life itself” was molecularized and “conceived on a different scale”, a transition that has been in motion for well over 70 years? As he explains, “in the 1930s, biology came to visualize life in terms of phenomenon at the sub-microscopic region– between 10 -6 and 10 -7 cm.” (44) As he suggests one of the “keys” to the contemporary “biopolitics of life lies in the new molecular scale on which life is envisaged and acted upon.” (82). If this is the case then it is critical, as the mandate for this symposium suggests, that we contemplate the politics of life at this register, and find new ways to publicly display these shifts in a manner that is compelling to the public.

One of the other possibilities is to take the vernacular ways that we understand life, and the history of media representations, as an important part of the display culture of science: to bring the popular forms they take into the gallery, museum and science centre as a part of culture, and as a key part of the process of the mediation of science and technology I the public realm, that can be put on display as artifact and object alongside of more “official” and accurate renderings of scientific imaging: in other words, to bring the role of critical media studies into the gallery and the museum.

Conceptulaly, thie involves not only a consideration of biotourism, but biomediation and where the emphasis is on the term “media” and the many modes, twists and turns whereby media forms intersect and collide to create out modern sensibility towards our self-understanding as embodied beings. Thinking not only of what is presented, but the complex processes by which, as Viviane Sobchack writes, we come to chart how “each technology not only differently mediates our figurations of bodily existence but also constitutes them” (136). As materialities of human communication the media we use have not only “historically symbolized but also historically constituted a radical alteration of the forms of our culture’s previous temporal and spatial consciousness and of our bodily sense of existential “presence” to the world, to ourselves and to others.” (136)

It also entails new forms of collaborations, and considering the researcher less as a “biotourist” travelling through these spaces, and instead as “embedded,” implicated and invested, at a practical level, within “biotechnoscience” a position that is compelling, but which also has its pitfalls. In establishing these collaborative connections, the role of the cultural theorist is transformed. Rather than occupying the position of moral high ground, from the outside, one is brought into the processes and practices of mediation in a manner that invites collusion and an immanent engagement with these domains.

References
Dumit, Joseph. 2004. Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans ad biomedical Identity. New Jersey. Princeton University Press.
Fleck, Ludwik. 1979. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Leder, Drew. 1990. The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rose, Nikolas. 2007. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Sawchuk, Kim. 2000. “Biotourism, Fantastic Voyage and Sublime Inner Space” in Wild Science, Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media. Janine Marchessault and Kim Sawchuk, editors. London : Routledge.
Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photogrpahic, Cinematic and Electronic “presence” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture> Berkeley: University of California Press.
Waldby, Catherine. 2000. The Visbile Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. London: Routledge.

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