Chapter 9

Scientific Looking, Looking at Science

Our interpretation and experiences of images are never that of a singular, discrete events but are informed by a broader set of conditions and factors that have already impacted our way of viewing the world.

Visual Culture is a broad spectrum of facets that make up this being; television, fine arts, popular film and advertising. But this is usually seen as distant from science, law, and medicine; but all of these subjects are impacted by how we look and perceive them.

Ever since the invention of photography, scientific roots are what make it up as a means of documentation, even the creation of film was a scientific discovery, not based in the art world. With the rise of digital importance in the 20th century, scientific data is also displayed in a new way using new technologies and advancements.

"seeing the unseen" -- has become even more prevalent in the now because of the technologies like ultrasound, CT, and CAT scan machines that can detect problems that were never visible.

Rose speaks about how we can experience our bodies on the molecular level, even though we cannot see it we understand it through a set of systems and scientific representation

These systems are both literal and metaphorical, where as before anatomy and physiology may have organized our way of seeing the body in terms of structure of tiny units that play off each other, things we cannot see or control.

The Theatre of Science

Leonardo is so prominent as an artist throughout history because of his overlap with science and art. He created a figure around the representation of proportions based on treatise De Architectura by the roman architect Vitruvuous that made reference to geometry and perfect human proportions.

THe sense of understanding the body by physically or virtually cutting through it to expose the organs is something common today. In the past the cutting of the body to see inside was something that was specifically deemed scientific.  In early modern society, many dissections were performed publicly. Anatomy theaters were a type of spectacle through which anatomists attempted to not only educate but also entertain colleagues, students, and spectators. This was the play between life and death.

These theaters were intended to convey messages about the deceased, many of which were criminals. This gave the scientists the justification to do so, the painting by Remberant depicts the doctor opening up a criminal and there is a crowd of onlookers.  A fascination with the dead body and an association of morbidity and crime would become a central feature of visual spectacle of modernity.

The Visual Human project (VHP) was funded by the US government and the University of Colorado. This involved taking two bodies, one male and one female, freezing them and then slicing each and taking digital images of the slices to create a digitally composited images of the entirety of the human body.

The desire to see art and science, or pop culture and science as separate has a long history in western philosophy, yet scientific images almost always beg the question of whether these domains can ever really be kept separate

Photography was a way of documenting offenders and these documentations of identification records were used to convict and fine repeat offenders

The use of electrical shock to make muscles contract to create specific expressions. this was done by Duchenne.

Imagining the Body's interior: Biomedical Personhood

starting from x-ray in the early developments of medical advancements, to the use of ultrasound in the early 1960s that does not expose the patent to deadly waves of radiation to see into the body. The use of the sonogram is something wit ha deep and personal emotion. The first "portrait" of the child to be.