“Detecting cuts is making them” Imaging technologies have been attempting to turn bodies into datasets, to reproduce and simulate a readable and writable volume of bodies in silico. This video speaks of the body, data, and the transformation between them from the embodied perspective of the interstitial fluid, the fluid between cells. Wandering and thinking with the amorphous liquid network of relations circulating around the body, we will look into tissue staining and digital segmentation and their similarities — both reduce ambiguity, build contrast, define structure and make visible. Here visibility becomes a matter of dimension, projection, axis, and rotation. Once turned into data, both corporeal flesh and digital flesh become operable, entering a recursive simulation in which depths and densities can be sliced, false-colored, navigated, enlarged, rotated and stacked back into three dimensions. The materiality of the body is reworked according to the logic of computer storage and computer vision to reproduce a stable, operable body of volume. Bodies into datasets, datasets into flesh, memories into algorithms, algorithms into membranes from collective remembrances.
_jiawen uffline_
jiawen (they/she) exists as a user most of the time in their life, having little agency as a standard user, both technologically and politically, she seeks for otherwise possibilities for queering the given identity of a user, their wish is to be an analogkäse in the digital figurations and drip sizzling fat on the cables and ports. Apart from that, jiawen’s research focuses on technology as memory and desire, with contaminated history but appearing pure, sterilized, decontextualized and dehistoricized, reducing rather than relating. jiawen looks into the (counter)history, materiality, poetics and politics of technology. she sees ŀæÅk as an instance of the space-time continuum and a definite part of the digital reality, and leaking as a method to survive together.
*Touching Thoughts is an art-science cooperation project the net culture initiative servus.at – Kunst und Kultur im Netz and the JKU’s Medical Faculty (Department of Pathology and Molecular Pathology and Institute of Anatomy and Cell Biology of JKU), that aims at exploring protocols and modes of three-dimensional imaging in the field of digital pathology, and how scientific and medical knowledge and truth are generated through digital technologies.
