Week 4: Art and Medicine and Technology

Blog #4: Art and Medicine and Technology

This week’s topic was art and medicine and technology. When I began thinking about the intersection of medicine and art I really couldn’t see how they related. The medical profession seemed very removed from art because I was thinking of it too narrowly. I was imagining helping the sick and healing the wounded, but when I listened to Professor Vesna’s lectures one of the first things she mentioned was Body World. That surprised me, but I realized that it was a perfect example of this intersection — the use of medical plasticity procedures to preserve bodies, and then arranging them artfully in a traveling display. I personally visited this show when I was young at OMSI in Portland, Oregon. It really grossed me out at first, but it also intrigued me very much.

As I began thinking more about art and medicine and technology, I realized that this intersection is actually an everyday part of our lives. Any time we manipulate our bodies with the intent of a certain physical look, we are really engaging in art. And the reason we know that certain manipulations will have the desired effect is because of medical scientific research. One example of this is bodybuilding. These athletes have perfected their training regiments and their nutritional intake to achieve a certain look. Many of them consume certain chemicals (not just steroids; but creatine, casein, protein supplements, etc) in order to boost muscle output, and their entire methodology is medically-based to achieve an artistic result.

Another example of using medical technology to achieve an artistic result is plastic surgery. This has become widespread in our culture, and there are a few more extreme examples. A man named Rodrigo Alves has had sixty procedures done in an attempt to look more like the Ken Doll children’s toy. He recently even had four ribs removed to achieve this effect. There are several other people with similar goals, including one woman who wants to look like a cat, and another like a Barbie doll. While I don’t think this is healthy, physically or psychologically, it certainly wouldn't be possible if art, medicine, and technology did not all work in tandem.







Works Cited

Davison, Rebecca. “Human Ken Doll Rodrigo Alves.” Daily Mail Online, Associated Newspapers, 30 Jan. 2018, www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-5329153/Human-Ken-Doll-Rodrigo-Alves-says-no-plastic-surgery.html.

M, Risahope. “New York's 'Body Worlds: Pulse' Makes Art Out Of Plastic Corpses.” Science in the City, 7 June 2013, scienceinthecityblog.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/new-yorks-body-worlds-pulse-makes-art-out-of-plastic-corpses/.

“The Hidden Dangers of Bodybuilding.” NewsComAu, 27 Mar. 2015, www.news.com.au/technology/science/human-body/debate-over-dangers-of-bodybuilding-resurfaces-after-images-of-deceased-bodybuilder-andreas-munzer-go-viral/news-story/09bbf254b392105616c7db352b4e874b.

Vesna, Victoria. “Http://www.youtube.com/v/Ep0M2bOM9Tk.” Lecture. Medicine
pt1 . Youtube, 21 Apr. 2012. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep0M2bOM9Tk>.

Vesna, Victoria. “Http://www.youtube.com/v/FIX-9mXd3Y4.” Lecture. Medicine
pt3. Youtube, 22 Apr. 2012. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIX-9mXd3Y4>.

Vesna, Victoria. “Http://www.youtube.com/v/psjnQarHOqQ.” Lecture. Medicine

pt2. Youtube, 21 Apr. 2012. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psjnQarHOqQ>.

Comments

  1. Drew PlattMay 2, 2018 at 11:59 AM

    I really liked the statement you made saying "Any time we manipulate our bodies with the intent of a certain physical look, we are really engaging in art." This really opened up my eyes that almost anything can be related to art. I also like the fact that you talked about plastic surgery and gave a little story about Alves. Good post.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownMay 2, 2018 at 10:35 PM

    Hello Tyler, I think you did a great job explaining the relationship between art and medical technology. I like how you relate to your own experience in Portland and share it with us. The picture you use to show the muscular body is pretty cool but a bit scary. It's crazy that people will do surgeries in order to become an inhuman figure. It's smart of you to link these things up with this course.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Event Blog #1

Image
Event Blog #1 "Spun Chairs" The Tyranny of Consciousness For my first event, I visited the Hammer Museum. It was a unique and awesome experience because of the interesting mix of exhibitions and arrangement of artwork. What initially struck me was the opportunity to interact with the art. There was a permanent exhibition called the “Spun Chairs” which look like kind of like large yarn rollers, but you can sit in them and spin around. There were also ping pong tables that visitors were allowed to use, and an installation called The Tyranny of Consciousness by Charles Atlas. It combines forty four sunsets into one long video with a voiceover by a drag queen called Lady Bunny. It was actually very peaceful and reminded me of Santa Monica. Salome Dancing before Herod I also explored “The Armand Hammer Collection.” This exhibit was interesting to me because it contains many Renaissance-era works of art. A lot of the paintings in this room reminded me of our
Read more

Event Blog #2

Image
         I attended the Fowler Museum on UCLA’s campus for my second event. This is a place I’ve been meaning to visit my entire college career, so this was a great opportunity to finally go. A lot of what I saw at Fowler made me think about the interaction between art and technology, and what we really mean when we label something as a technology. The silver ship        The first exhibit I went to that made me ponder this was “Reflecting    Culture: The Francis E. Fowler, Jr. Collection of Silver.” Right near the  entrance is a plaque discussing the process of turning silver ore into  silverware. It says “art, craft, and business all commingle in the fashioning  of silver, which involves long hours and arduous techniques, acts of  repetition and acts of imagination.” What a wonderful way to describe the  marriage of art and technology and science! The process of turning raw ore  into wonderful pieces of art isn’t something that humans have known how  to do for a particula
Read more

Week 7: Neuroscience and Art

Image
Blog #6: Neuroscience and Art Gall's 27 compartments This week’s topic is neuroscience and art. One of the themes that intrigued me was the prevalence of misinformation (and/or lack of information) on this topic. The brain is such a complex organism that we still don’t understand most of its processes, even though we can replicate some of its functions with neural networks and AI. One result of this knowledge gap, and a natural part of the scientific process, is incorrect theories. An example from the lecture is that of phrenology, presented by Franz Joseph Gall. He divided the brain into 27 specific compartments by function, evaluated people’s abilities by their head shape, and laid the foundation for the idea that intelligence is correlated to brain size. He called each compartment an "organ purposed for a certain faculty." Left brain vs right brain Another example of an incorrect theory is that of the right brain being used for creativity and the left
Read more