A key focus of my work is to explore how art can open up new realms of thinking which consider the body as a contested site of knowledge. This process enables an aesthetic space to reveal representational frameworks and explore ethical presence through the temporality and materiality of the image. My work attempts to engage the viewer-witness with realities of visual subjectivity by developing themes which focus on traumatic images, event, counter-monumentality and memory through the unconscious dimensions of the image. 

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This practice-based research considers how disciplines such as art, medicine,  film cultural theory and AI all employ assumptions about what counts as an authentic representation of a sick body. A key feature of these perspectives is a focus on vision in a way that ‘objectively’ represents subjective narrative. Another is the fundamental concept of share-ability. To what extent can something as intimate, and as close to home as embodied pain become image and in the case of medical imaging, an image-script that then comes to precede the patient and their lived experience? How can pain be articulated by a computational algorithm which promises to reveal secrets of one’s own body?

 

As a (tactical) storyteller working in film, the focus of this research is this image-script and what the scanner - mediated as camera apparatus - gives forth. Medical imaging sets out to digitally ‘flay’ the human, troubling that crucial boundary of selfhood. What constitutes a picture of health in an age of machine learning depends on a ‘penetrating’ gaze that is highly coded, and functions  across the territory of the patient and the cultural field. I am investigating how the scientific image becomes a source of authority - with wider implications on the experience of the neoliberal, cultural body - while the experience of the scanner offers a stage for the projection of fantasies and desires. The research de-territorialises the medical image to explore the aesthetic and political implications of scanning the pained, vulnerable body on contemporary image-making, and on questions of myth-making and biopolitical reality.