“Light-footed dancing steps” – “Giggler in mother’s womb” – “Baby week 38 plays the guitar. A small germ with music in the body” – “A tiny boxer” – “Holding hands” – all titles assigned to 3D and 4D ultrasound visualisations of foetuses in the womb displayed on the internet by Danish ultrasound clinics. Since around 2000, an increasing number of clinics offer so called luxury or reassurance scans as a supplement to the free scans for visible signs of disease or malformation offered by the public health care system. For what corresponds to a little less than 200 Euros, expecting women/couples can acquire scanning and take-home images of their unborn when they like – and many do so one or more times during a pregnancy.
Reflecting on this development brings about the simple question dealt with in this short paper, as well as in Reality Show – one of the installations of Split + Splice: What are we looking at?

Showing I: Making Baby visible
[show (verb): be, allow, or cause to be visible]

The dissemination of ultrasound pregnancy scanning and imagery into lay practices coincides with the availability of new scanning technologies adding depth and movement to the images of the unborn. Whereas professional and specialised skills were prerequisite to translating the flat contours of early ultrasound visualisations into useful information about fetal development, the 3rd and 4th dimensions added along with improved hard- and software have provided present-day ultrasound images with a close resemblance to the more familiar ones of photography and film. This has significantly increased their interpretability even for lay people and turned them into a marketable good and contributed to their dispersion throughout the public realm: Modern ultrasound appear to reveal a hitherto hidden reality not only to the experts, but also to the parents-to-be. As one clinic puts it:

“Hello in there.
If you have once been ultrasound-scanned and have seen with your own eyes the incipient new life budding inside the womb – you’re sold! The experience is entirely inexpressible. […] Also, many would like to share these early peeps at the small new family member with their close ones.”

One way of sharing the acquired vision is to bring home a ‘family video’ or the ‘first pictures of Baby’ for the ‘family album’ – standard practices of any pregnancy scanning clinic.

Browsing some of the many internet fora for pregnant women confirms that ultrasound customers, too, perceive of the technology as a way of seeing the real. As one woman expresses it: “it is fantastic to have seen your child as if you were holding it in your arms”. Another focuses on what she experiences as a photographic documentation of what she saw: “It is really a portrait of him taken from my belly!”

Although most private clinics do inform that pregnancy scanning in some (rare) cases may result in unhappy findings, marketing emphasis is not surprisingly on the overwhelming emotional experience and potential transformation awaiting their customers: Ultrasound images will enable the prospective parents to ‘be along from the very beginning’, to recognise individual and family features in the child, to be close to, and even get to know their child before birth. Again, this is confirmed by customers exchanging scanning experiences on the net: “Wow, I fell madly in love with him, he’s simply too gorgeous. I could gaze in at him forever and ever!”

In other words, the very visibility created by ultrasound technology may have – and is expected to have – affective consequences such as feelings of presence, closeness and bonding, as it has long been argued in the medical literature. It may, in essence, perform the foetus as a physical reality that parents can practically and emotionally relate to.

Titles given to the displayed visualisations, as quoted in the introduction, further stress that what is made visible is not only a living body, but a ‘someone’ in the womb – someone already provided with a unique personhood and individual talents.

In sum, professionals and lay persons tend to refer to ultrasound visualisation as a kind of peep-show rendering the womb transparent and allowing the spectator to actually see and hence get to know the foetus-person inside the body, real-time.

Showing II: Displaying visualisation practices
[show (verb): put on display in an exhibition]

The ultrasound images circulating in private and public space today are highly mediated visualisations generated from the assembly and digital transformation of data produced by the reflected echoes of bundles of ultrasonic sound waves – a technique in some ways different from the touching and handling of foetal bodies ‘in the flesh’ necessary to produce the drawings, models, tables and histological slides that proceeded it. It has been argued that a corporeal foetal body has been substituted by a de-materialised and hyperreal one that has over time come to seem “natural” to us. However, even the familiarity of such a corporeal foetal body was already the result of visual as well as (con)textual mediation performed by generations of scientists in close corporation with artists and modellers.

The technology of ’peeping in’ did not emerge out of the blue. It is merely the latest instantiation of how, for centuries, scientists and other professionals have developed ways of making the content of the pregnant womb visible to the outside world. Without these earlier visualisations of the foetal body, there would probably have been no customers recognising what they see in today’s 2, 3 and 4D ultrasound images as ‘their child’.

It is exactly the connectedness of foetal visualisations in a longer historical perspective that I sought to explore in Reality Show. The installation consisted of five pairs of display cases each separated by double mirrored shields. Each pair presented on the ‘back’ side a particular historical foetal visualisation – and on the ‘front’ side elements of the technical apparatus used to produce this kind of visualisation.
Working chronologically ‘backwards’, the five visualisations were:

• A 2007 digital file looping on a small screen, showing part of a 4D ultrasound scan of a foetus around week 13. Below this four Polaroid photos of two-dimensional B-mode images from the 1970s.

• An embryological Normentafel from anatomistWilhelm His’ 1882 Anatomie menschlicher Embryonen, showing ‘normal’ embryological development from weeks 2 to 9 of gestation.

• Two obstetrical wax reliefs from early 19th Century showing a female body opened by dissection, and a 9 month foetus in the uterus.

• A fully developed foetal specimen from the teratological Saxtorph Collection at the Museion (specimen undated, collection established and extended 1771 to c1950).

• And an engraving of triplets from anatomist Thomas Bartholin’s Neu-verbesserte Künstliche Zerlegung des Menschlichen Leibes, 1677.

The visualisations were chosen to draw attention to what is made visible – and how the visualisations have been produced. Some examples of the first (what): The normal foetus of the wax table, the norm for progress in foetal development of the His table, the extraordinary triplet pregnancy of Bartholin’s book and the (perhaps?) pathological specimen of the Saxtorph Collection are astonishing in their own capacities. At the same time, they invite to reflection on the ambiguous content and purpose of modern ultrasound scanning: This is a technology where reassurance and luxury meets risk assessment and diagnostics. The unforgettable experiences of scanning customers may potentially be remembered not for the belief that everything is normal in Baby’s first picture – bur for increased risk estimates, the finding of malformations, and for troubled decisions as to whether the pregnancy should continue or be terminated. The table of developmental norms may also remind us that the surveillance of normal foetal development performed in ultrasound clinics today rely on various sets of norms that are in themselves scientific artefacts based on the collection, preparation and systematisation of uncountable foetal specimen and data. From yet another perspective, the absence of the pregnant body in all but one of the visualisations is conspicuous, as it has been argued in much feminist literature on the medicalisation of pregnancy.

On the how side of the installation, in brief, the Bartholin triplets were connected with drawing and engraving tools. Chemicals and instruments for preservation of human material accompanied the Saxtorph specimen. Dissection instruments next to wax and modelling tools related to the wax tables. Microscope, microtome and histological slides demonstrated the making of His’ table of norms. And a simple A-mode ultrasound apparatus supported by two graphical representations of the basic functionality of ultrasound were opposite to the ultrasound visualisations.

Whereas the five visualisations were invisible from the ‘front’ side of the installation, the double-mirrored shields made it possible to see both the visualisation and, behind it, the technical means of its production.

Showing III: Performing foetuses
[showing (noun): the action of showing something, or the fact of being shown; the way in which something is argued or represented; performance]

Why place these elements of the visualization technologies as the first perspective visible when entering the room? As written in the room panel and the exhibition manual: “‘Seeing’ depends on elaborate visualization instruments designed to display the vitality of the body. Dead or alive, it is opened, divided, and sliced; traced and mapped; criss-crossed by lightbeams and soundwaves. Only then can the mediated ‘parts’ be reassembled, this time in images…”. Countless working hours, instruments, and materials, a variety of highly specialised scientific, technical and artistic skills and, probably, a considerable amount of failure have been invested in processing female and embryonic/foetal bodies in order to produce something that could, and can, be seen by professionals and lay people. This is the kind of labour that has shaped the present knowledge and recognition of the content of the pregnant womb. The foetuses we live with today, as Barbara Duden puts it, were first conceived not in the womb, but in visualizing technologies.

Thus, by dragging the tools to the forefront, I wished to stress exactly the producted-ness of each of these five ways of ‘seeing’ – and, accordingly, to postpone the focus on the particular kinds of bodies that could be seen on the other side of the screens: The foetuses performed in data, ink, wax and flesh.

The primate of vision/visibility in the production of truth and objectivity is a well-researched subject.

Seeing, it has been convincingly argued, is a highly mediated practice – and mediation in foetal imagery has not become less complex with 3 and 4D ultrasound scanning. My ambition, however, is not to dismantle the reality of the foetuses made visible. Rather, my inspiration and theoretical basis for working with Split + Splice and with this installation is drawn from the turn towards performativity, as it has been developed by a.o. Annemarie Mol, and closer related to this particular topic by Donna Haraway and Karen Barad. Barad in particular has worked extensively and critically with what she defines as representationalism: the cognitive divide in Western culture between the object seen, the subject looking, the visualisation in image or text, and the apparatus of its making. Barad suggests the alternative agential realism, an analytical approach that does not dissolve objects into discourse, but turns its attention to the ways in which phenomena are performed in material-semiotic intra-actions co-constituting all partaking elements.

In Barad’s reading, the ultrasound image on the screen in pregnancy scanning refers not to any foetal object per se, but to a particular phenomenon “constituted in the intra-action of the object (commonly referred to as the ‘fetus’) and the agencies of observation”. Phenomena do not (pre)exist, they occur. This approach allows matter and bodies – transducers, screens, foetuses, pregnant women – to be significant and active in the world, yet denies them the status of objective referents (the real real) of which the visualisations can only be more or less accurate representations.

Reality Show is, of course, in itself a phenomenon in this sense: A performance in which images, instruments, showcases, texts – and I – intra-acted in the constitution of what “showing foetal realities” could be about. I remain more doubtful whether visitors too became engaged in this particular performance, or rather intra-acted with the installation in so many different ways, if at all. The difficulties in making objects talk in the museum mirror the challenge in the theoretical turn from discourse to performance and materialisation.

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