A meeting of the core team for reflections, updates on the project development including the first experiments and a talk by Birgit Nemec about the perception of the human body in different periods of time.
If we look at the history of anatomical depiction through the past centuries what we see is a radically changing understanding of being human both in a medial and biological and in a social and cultural sense.
We learn from anatomical images how conceptions of the self, ideas about what it means to be a person, knowledge and beliefs changed, but also how changing conventions that govern the collaboration between artists and anatomists, the setting of boundaries between art and anatomical science, the dialogue between artists and anatomists shaped epistemological and ontological shifts. While early illustrated anatomical treatises, eg. the revolutionary 1543 work of Andreas Vesalius, De humani corporis fabrica, was a rich ensemble of imaginary figurations and artistic embellishments that contained humour, playfulness and allusion, today’s scientific imaging sticks to a straight and narrow path that does not allow deviations or correspondences between the anatomical body and the moral, political and social world, fun and pleasures (Cf. Michael Sappol’s Dream Anatomy). Images of the self are closely related to our inner reality, to an image and an understanding of self and the other and to the perception of the body, that can be a very private thing. However, images of the human are also closely related to emergent market practices and social identities, to notions of the private and the public sphere and to ongoing process of state formation and community building. What if we find ways to put the imaginary and the factual again in a close dialogue in order to create an environment that makes us wonder, feel, touch, empathically experience and thus understand what it means to be human today? We are searching for materials and in-between spaces that address uncertainties, ambiguities, speculations and imagination linked to the microbial paradigm shift both on an aesthetic and on an epistemological level.