what is lancebt doing when his image appears in the mirror
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How do we learn to think about what we have inside our bodies? From autopsy, surgery, and dissection, to x-rays and MRIs and CT scans, biomedical imaging technologies allow medical practitioners to study, compare, diagnose, and treat human bodies. But the images generated by medicine have also always broken out of their instrumental contexts to become part of wider culture, showing us how to picture ourselves in ways we cannot do with just a mirror. In the process of escaping from medicine, these representations take on new functions, symbolic, aesthetic, and existential. Outside the clinic, the image of a skeleton is never just a plain descriptive account of bone. It is scary, or funny, or beautiful, a monstrous memento mori, a Halloween costume, or a still life.
Imaging/Imagining the Human Body in Anatomical Representation is an unusual three-venue exhibition at the University of Chicago in which representations of human anatomy reveal the interdependence of biomedicine's imaging technology and art's creative imaginings. One of the visitor's first encounters is with a pair of whole-body images of the human vascular system. The first image is from Govard Bidloo's 1685 anatomical atlas, Anatomia Humani Corporis, a man-shaped map of rivers and their tributaries, or maybe the tracings of leafless winter trees feathering out from a central trunk—except that in the centre of the trunk we find a heart. Beside it is a second image, similar yet different: a digital composite generated for the exhibition, made not by the old technologies of eye and pen (and cadaver) but instead data-sourced from CT angiograms. Both are medical representations of the anatomy of the vascular system, yet their context here, reproduced larger than life and hung in a gallery, makes them both also works of art. They are paired so that the viewer must ask not only “what am I looking at?”