justine cooper - rapt
Rapt, 1998
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans displayed as single-channel DVD projection; stereo audio
5:06 mins; b&w
Created at Sydney VisLab
Sound engineer: Mazen Murad
Editor: Chris Willing
Special thanks to Ray Scan Imaging and The Children's Hospital at Westmead, Sydney
Collection: Australian Centre for the Moving Image
Courtesy: the artist
contents: essay | artist's bio | artist's statement
In the Bible, the word 'translation' is used to describe the ascension of a person to heaven without death. Within the Catholic Church, the term also refers to the officially sanctioned movement of a saint's bones or relics from one place of rest to another. Writing about her work with medical visualisation technologies, Justine Cooper comments,
'The fluid transformations of the body in these works echo the materiality lost at the moment of its digital imaging, and its rematerialisation as information. Just as the body is recodified through medical technology, so its internal spaces and brute physicality are remapped and made accessible in these works. Living flesh is translated into malleable data.'1
There is a sense in which our bodies are always unknowable to us, and the history of western art is studded with moments in which new and surprising images of the human body emerge, shocking us into a fresh recognition of our place in the world, or of the worlds within. From Giotto, who introduced a sense of three dimensionality to the picture plane in the thirteenth century, to Picasso's abstraction of the human face, or the work of cinema in the horror genre, our culture urgently produces and assimilates images (along with religious doctrine and secular laws) which attempt to negotiate the gap or to act as translations between our consciousness and our physicality.
The images used to make Rapt are sourced from the artist's own body with the use of medical technology: MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans of the artist's body registered information that was rendered into detailed images of the body's soft tissue. Theoretically, the 'malleable data' gathered could be animated into an endless variety of sequences; interestingly, Cooper emphasises the strangeness of these interior vistas, opening the work with a large-scale fly-through sequence which could easily be read as images from outer space, or a cave system deep underground.
Shivers of recognition accompany us as we travel with the 'camera eye', effortlessly crossing the interior/exterior divide, watching as the body builds and falls away from itself in ghostly slices. The final sequence builds a head from back to front, slowly forming the image of a face. Despite the scientific accuracy of its representation, the face possesses a haunting, uncanny quality, which seems to challenge us to translate or incorporate this strange vision into the language we are comfortable using to describe ourselves.
1 Prefiguring Cyberculture, eds. Tofts, Jonson, Cavallaro, The MIT Press, 2002
1968 - Born in Sydney, Australia; lives and works in New York, USA
Interdisciplinary artist Justine Cooper has exhibited internationally in over 50 shows and screenings, across five continents. She is visual director for TULP: The Body Public, an upcoming theatre installation for the Sydney and Brisbane Festivals (2004), and is currently working on a new series of photographs based on the stored collections of the American Museum of Natural History. She has participated in public programming, artist residencies and workshops at a number of institutions and organisations throughout Australia, Asia and the United States.
Her areas of interest include the intersections of science and art, including appropriating the technologies of science for the purposes of art. More recently she has focused on the relationship of science to society, and how we systematise, assign or create value in our culture.
Cooper's work is held in both public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, and the Queensland Art Gallery. Her work has been reviewed in ART Asia Pacific, The New York Times, ARTnews, and Australian Art Collector.
Website links
http://justinecooper.com/
Rapt was created from Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans of my body.
The piece was made at the same time the Visible Human Project (VHP) was underway, where a death row prison inmate's body was mapped inside and out, down to the millimeter, using medical imaging technologies. Rapt counterbalances the VHP's morbid corporeality, its high resolution Technicolor factuality, by rendering a hazy, grayscale netherworld that does not obey the laws of space and time. A site is generated from a living body. 'Do I have clouds inside me too?' a small child asked. While Rapt poses the question of if and how new technologies shift the way we can conceive of space, by presenting us with an alternate, elastic interpretation of the body.
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