One of my current research interests regards art-science cross-fertilizations and, more specifically, the use of brain imaging techniques in contemporary art practices. Scholarly literature has already pointed out how brain scans have contributed to redefine our cultural and biomedical identity (Dumit 2004; Vidal 2009). In my presentation I shall put forth – in a rather sketchy way – some reflections on the concepts of archive and presence related to brain scans and, more in general, to bioart, also showing some images and video extras from my curatorial work.

My doctoral research project examined the aesthetics of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a scientific technique that generates images of the body (and particularly, the brain) for scientific and medical purposes. By using a variety of approaches and materials (artworks, exhibitions, scientific experiments, interviews with artists) I attempted to develop new methods and contexts relevant to the processes by which MRI is resituated in gallery spaces and cinematic environments. The methodology adopted is that of a cinematic montage where images are edited together and one against the other. I worked again and again with the same material (the brain scans I obtained in two different MRI examinations I underwent) with the goal of setting it in motion from one archive (the scientific laboratory) to the next (the editing suite) to end up with the art exhibition of MRI-based artworks by the Breton sculptor Marc Didou. I became artist, video-maker, and then curator, adopting Andrea Fraser’s strategy of changing role within the museum and art world (Fraser, 2005).

For the purpose of this workshop, I would like to focus on two concepts, the ARCHIVE and PRESENCE that are central to brain scans and their display in a museum or a gallery. I believe that these two concepts are of fundamental importance also when dealing with bioart.

5. First, the archive (and the museum as archive) needs to be re-thought as an impulse, as a biological passing condition which happens in our body, rather than as a physical place where things are stored. How does the concept of the archive and that of the archive-fever operate in contemporary curatorial practices dealing with brain imaging techniques?

6. Second, to present a thing, to have something present here and now within a collection is the dream of any archive and also one important feature of art dealing with biomedicine. Many biomedical “objects”, in fact, resist depiction (some of them can hardly be seen) and, therefore, display and presence too. Bioart or art that deals with biomedicine does not want to depict, portray or represent life, it wants to be life itself. The question of presence calls for the body present ‘here and now’. Although often obliged to recur to ex-post documentation (mainly through video or photography), artists working in bioart want to stage biological processes that are perceived as “living”. This is also the case with artists working brain imaging techniques.

One of the problems of brain imaging techniques is to loose touch with the object it investigates (the cognitive processes of the brain).

THE ARCHIVE
The archive exists in two forms: firstly, as a physical space where artefacts and materials are collected and displayed according to certain criteria/rules in order to be accessible by visitors and users. Secondly, the archive poses the terms of discourse within a specific space, time and cultural location: it is ‘the system that governs the appearance of statements’ (Foucault, 1976: 129). Among the institutional articulations of power and knowledge relations, there are the institutions of the museum and art history (Bennett, 2005). In the archive objects are organised, divided and classified according to ‘grids of knowledge’, that is, according to the position they occupy in the space and in relation to the agents present in those spaces (for instance dealers, curators, artists).

The concept of archive, however, exists first as a drive, as an energy operating within those same places (Derrida, 1997). Whether intended as a physical space or as an ensemble of rules, the archive is characterised not by the set of things collected within it, but rather by the things left out or still to be archived. The link between loss, absence and archive is highlighted by Derrida’s notion of ‘archive-fever’. The archive is like a living organism which can suffer from an illness or weakness, and consequently, needs to find measures to protect itself against the aggression of external agents. As madness is sometimes necessary in order to be able to cope with unbearable events, fever is a mechanism adopted by the organism in order to preserve healthiness.

The archive escapes a panoptical seeing. A fixed spatial and temporal point of view from which one can get hold of the archive is impossible or, better, it is possible only from the outside, if one stays out of the archive. Once entered, the archive becomes a labyrinth threatened by its own components and by time. Similarly, MRI is threatened independently from the archive in which it is stored. In the laboratory, MRI is threatened by contingencies which have to do with time: the bodies of the patient/experimental subject in need to be kept still; the parameters used to set up the MRI scanner; the time-lapse which does not allow a perfect translation of the inner processes into outside readable data.

PRESENCE
The desire for instantaneous presence and an archival aspiration characterise modern and postmodern technologies of representation (photography, chronophotography, television, digital imaging and also medical imaging techniques). The struggle for instantaneity is in tension with the archival historicizing impulse. In the modern era the obsession with instantaneity, with movement, with the metaphor of ‘flux and flow’, cohabits with the desire of archiving presence. But what can be archived immediately looses its presence (the present), entering the past and exhibiting absence.

As Mary Ann Doane argues: “The fascination with an impossible instantaneity is still with us, perhaps even more insistently, corroborated by a continuing chain of new technologies of representation that seem to put instantaneity more fully within our grasp” (2002: p. 106). This is the contradiction at work in bioart too: the impossible dream of giving museum visitors a direct, immediate encounter with the ‘here and now’ of the living. Brain imaging techniques are deeply concerned with the problematic of the archivability of time, with the temporal resolution of the scans.

The concept of the archive as a living organism offers the possibility to think about the body undergoing an MRI as an archive of sensations, facts, impressions. In this respect, artists understood that what is really at stake with brain imaging techniques is not so much the fact that the images produced are the results of a complex manipulation of data thanks to computer software, but rather the fact that brain scans present and, simultaneously, efface the body they imagine. Brain scans are not copies of the internal processes of the brain, but rather their emanation. Neuro-based art, then, does not so much depends on information technologies, but rather on the disciplines of the living, biology, genetics, neurobiology. Brain scans and bioart, more generally, intrigue the general public by seek to challenge the relations between the artist, her display, the recipient and the socio-economic context in which this art intervenes.

THE CURATORIAL WORK
The video created after the two examinations, 265 Looping Snapshots, muses on the experience of undergoing an MRI as a voluntary experimental subject. It is not designed as an informative guide on MRI, nor does it stand on its own, rather it should be kept open and constantly reworked through. The video seeks to explore the way MRI images function once lined up in the editing suite. It focuses on the role played by MRI sound, on notions of surveillance, on memories triggered by the repetition of a simple movement like ‘raise your hand’.

The body in the video is geometrised, projected in a slide-show format, and even cut-up through framing. The eyes, the hand, the fingers, all parts that the brain scan did not image, appear in the video. These organs are frozen in gestures by framing and filmed in close-up, so that each of these gestures (the blink of the eye, the raising of a finger, the movement of a wrist) becomes visible. Framed as if they were not belonging to a body, turned into close-ups like faces, these gestures (like MRI images) recall the poses of Muybridge’s photographic sequences, where the duration of an action is arrested into discrete instants and, thus, rendered measurable. But what do these poses express? The poses are haunted, again, by what has been left-out of the laboratory, that is, the body of the experimental subject which remains to be photographed, resisting and insisting on the margins of the MRI image. In Marc Didou’s exhibition too, the body appears again: thanks to the curved mirror viewers walk through the sculpture backwards, facing what might have been its starting point: the physical body of the artist.

My curatorial attempt which was not limited to the actual setting up of the exhibition, but started already within the scientific laboratory, was to constantly re-configure the existing material (brain scans), creating new patterns, associations, oppositions. To change role, passing from being an experimental subject within the lab, through being a video-maker at the editing suite, to re-work this material into the exhibition I curated, helped me to highlight the fluidity of each archive, to observe how in the passing the objects to be archived (the brain scans) were constantly transformed.

In this respect, the model is that of the collage-montage experiments undertaken by avant-garde movements of the 1920s (Cubism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada) in art, film and photography: “this manner of presentation was a way of thinking whereby linearity, causation, consequence and transparency were displaced by the vagaries of the multi-directional and by mechanisms of memory, dream, association, the unconscious, serialisation, repetition, simultaneity, lack of finish and conclusiveness and a confounding of the logical by the poetic” (Rohdie, 2008) . The collage-montage principle along with the shift in roles obliges the curator to revise former categories, classifications, pathways such that no work or object or text had an immutable and definite place.

Despite the importance of contemporary reflections on distributed curatorial expertise and participatory museums to envisage a new model for museums (Museum 2.0), I believe that we need to set these “new” models back into the avant-garde practices of the last century (in particular, the 1920s that have inspired also artists and filmmakers of the successive decades). This period might still offer us the conceptual apparatus for re-thinking curatorship and exhibiting practices, despite we as curators still do not have – luckily – a ready-to-use road-map capable of driving us along the way. To seek refuge in past artistic practices, as I am doing here, can be a sign of a condition (the archive-fever, again) experienced by curators who are increasingly challenged by tecnoscientific objects – think for example about genetics, about the use of nanotechnologies in organisms, etc. – that cannot be easily archived.

References:
Bennett, Tony. 2005. ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’. Thinking about Exhibitions. Eds. R. Greenberg, B. W. Ferguson, S. Nairne. London and New York: Routledge. 81-112.

Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Doane, Mary Ann. 2002. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Dumit, Joseph. 2004. Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1976. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Harper Books.

Fraser, Andrea and Alberro, Alexander. 2005. Ed. Museum Highlights: The Writings of Andrea Fraser. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Hauser, Jens. Observations on an Art of Growing Interest: Toward

Rohdie, Sam. 2008. “Intersections” , Screening the past, 23.

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/23/intersections.html.

Rose, Steven. 2005. The 21st Century Brain. Explaining, Mending and Manipulating the Mind. London: Jonathan Cape-Random House.

Vidal, Fernando. 2009. ‘Brainhood, anthropological figure of modernity’ History of the Human Sciences. Vol. 22.1, pp: 5-36.

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