| dc.description.abstract | Rene Descartes, when writing on optics and consciousness, (La Dioptrique 1637) instructed the reader to take a dead eye from a recently deceased body and use the eye as the lens for a camera obscura. In his misguided search for the ‘seat of the soul’ (which he deduced was in the pineal gland) he spoke of looking into ‘the mind’s eye’, in Descartes’ time impossible, but now thanks to fMRI scanners and confocal microscopy, a reality. The ‘Cartesian Theatre’ (though not conceived by Descartes himself) offers us the spectacle of the mind as a darkened theatre where we may search for ‘the self’, (Doy 2005) but the self is an elusive spectre, and neurologists now know that the self is not constant but is in a state of continuous neurobiological flux. Medical imaging technology looks ever inward in search of the absolute truths that science seeks to answer, the eye of the lens inverted, the mass of the brain seen through the ‘astro gaze’ (Kember 1998) of the medical researcher, a cosmos of synaptic activity and dendritic growth. But what if the brain is dysfunctional, what if Huntingdon’s or Alzheimer’s disease has created an extreme environment where memory, connectivity, and perception are altered, eroded, and ultimately destroyed? What then of the search for self, what then does the minds eye see?
This paper seeks to address these issues through practice-based enactment of theoretical thinking. Based on my (2005/6) residency as ‘Sciart Research Fellow’ in the Neurology Department at Cardiff School of Biosciences, I will offer three time-based interdependent ‘case studies’ that explore the mind as a hostile and extreme environment. Six Stages of Mutation is based on the Victorian science of Morphology (a precursor to contemporary genetics). A DVD morphology of my own mutating face as mapped via MRI scanning and subsequently edited as a series of dissolving, biological morphs, the face mutates from the surface characteristics through the layers of skin, muscle, tissue and bone, ceasing to function as a representation. This is no image caressed and transfigured by light, but one of invasion, bombardment, decay and disintegration, morphology mutating out of control, the mind as alien terrain.
In Vanitas: Seed Head three genetically linked morphing faces (parents and child) are set within an x-ray of a bulb like skull, floating against the ‘coma blue’ of the medical instruction screen. Aqueous humours representing the Aristotelian ‘soul’ circulate around the heads which continuously ‘loop’, linking generation to generation in a technological vacuum of eternal life. Bio-botanical Vanitas II shows the hippocampus of a diseased brain (infected by Alzheimer’s disease) as it struggles to link and consolidate memories, evocative even as its power to consciously perceive a ‘self’ diminishes in this hostile and extreme environment. The works are the result of collaboration between lens-based arts, neuroscience, neuro-psychology, anatomy, and biological imaging: art and science exploring the complexities of the mutating and disordered mind. | |
