Anatomy in the expanded field. Aesthetics, ethics and epistemology in contemporary medical imaging.

New technologies has turned medicine into partly an image science.
The research project aims to investigate epistemological, aesthetic and ethical aspects of science’s new visual mappings of the living body, ranging from full-body scans down to the cellular, genetic and molecular levels. The project will be carried out from the perspective of art history and visual studies.

The project aims to explore the aesthetical, ethical and epistemological aspects of contemporary medical imagery of the human bodily interior. The starting point is the strong impact, since the 1970s, of technologies for scanning electromagnetic radiation that emanates from organs and substances in the body. They have brought with them a dramatic increase of data, which advanced algorithms compute into pictures. Hence a new medical visual culture has emerged, which influences science as well as popular science and art. However, Art History and other image-oriented disciplines within the humanities have not yet developed analytical tools to understand those images and their particular forms of visuality. The project Anatomy in the Expanded Field will study how those images are produced and interpreted in the laboratory, in science communication and pedagogy, and in art, in order foster a deeper understanding of their function as epistemological and aesthetical images with ethical implications. The project relates to the history of anatomical illustrations and to the technologization of vision in modernity, as well as to the momentum of biomedicine in society at large today.