I've long been interested with the aesthetics of scientific images of times past. The catagorical and meticulous taxonomic illustrations and etchings of plant life and anatomy, especially of the German school, are particularly fascinating. And the imagery that accompanied phrenology is not only visually stimulating, but carries with it a creepy and arcane sense of what medical science once dictated and the primitive, turn-of-the-century surgeries it once condoned.
I suppose I like these types of images as art because they are offer such an anthropological glimpse at another time, a time when they didn't know better. These images almost seem like parodies of themselves because they've become vaguely iconic in a steampunky kind of way. But the are innately pure, the products of genuine attempts at learning, advancement and knowing better.
A forty-four year-old third-year medical student named Satre Stuelke has found another way to look at scientific imagery as art, but this time, instead of taking the outdated imagery of the past, he has manipulated a high-tech medium used to provide medical images today, the CT scanner. Instead of putting people or any other living things through the scan, which compiles a 3-D image that reveals the inner workings of the scanee using hundreds of images slices. Stuelke, once a professor at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, has created a group of images by putting a number of inanimate objects, like a Big Mac, a mechanical, drum-playing duck, a 6-piece Chicken Nuggets, an iPhone and a Barbie doll, through a CT scanner.
The images serve to point out how little command we have over our bodies. The objects that Steulke has scanned seem simple and self-explanatory enough. all of them are either children's toys, un-sophisticated (or childlike) food, or grown-up toys (sophisticated devices that are often taken for granted, like cellphones). These are objects over which we have dominion, yet Steulke's images point out that they are raw, constructed and mechanical at their cores, and a look under the outer layers reveals unattractive or unexpected insides. The CT machine's express purpose is never forgotten, because we've seen this type of image before, the fuzzy and transparent outside revealing the inner workings, at diagnosis. But how many of us, unless faced with a medical reason, actually think of our bodies from the inside out (I'm not talking about chi and aura and finding your inner zen–I'm talking intestines and brains and kidneys).
Our perceptions of gender are largely superficial and have to do with the few inside-ish things that we have on the outside of our bodies (but hide with clothing in public). It's strange that something so mechanical and biological like genitalia has so much to do with gender and individual identity. Being mystified by our common inner-workings–like heart, lungs, pancreas–might help to provide insight on how those who identify as transgendered are pushed to reach that identity.
