Misia's Weblog

This has been a surprisingly interesting module. I would never like to study medicine but I’ve enjoyed reading the texts for our tutorial group meetings and I’ve also very much liked the skills trainings where we really got a “hands-on” experience of what we were reading and learning about. The difficulty was to connect the module with our curriculum. Without seeing the reader and knowing what is the contents of this course you may think it refers to computer games – body as a computer game’s character therefore an interface. As soon as you get to the literature for the first assignment you have no doubts that it is not at all the theme of the course. You will lean about representations of human body, history of anatomy. Suddenly it looks like this module has nothing to do with Media Culture but after a few classes you realize that it has a lot to do with Media Culture indeed. There are other media then television radio and the ones you usually consider popular media, the problem of real and virtual does not only consider abstract objects and people but also your very own and very concrete body and so on. I think that if you deal with something as concrete as the body you get a better understanding of what you’re learning about cause we all have a body and we can all refer to it.

Digital technology of creating representations is a very interesting subject to think about. It promises judgment free representations, just as mechanical objectivity did. But as soon as you really get to know the pictures you ask yourself a question - what is it? is it really a human? how can I use these picture for a betterment of the knowledge of my body? My answer for these questions was - I don't know. Without certain explanations I wouldn't know if the MRI scan shows a brain or a knee slice and surely I don't know how the fact that I've seen the slices can build up the knowledge of my own body. Maybe the fact that I got a lot of explanations makes it better but if it weren’t for that I’m not sure how useful it would be.

I have started thinking more about the body, as a side effect I guess, but it is weird I must say, because body is something we don’t really know and things we don’t know are often scary. Scientist have been working on explanations for all the questions we have for ages but even now, with all the amazing, new technologies they can’t solve the mystery of human body. This is what the name of this entry refers to, not that body became a mystery to me after this module. Not at all. I've learned a lot but even though we learn more and more, we discover new functions and we work on new tools to help us to work out the body, it still stays a mystery.
Our surface, our interface- unsolvable.

Posted by Misia at 2:24 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

The last skills training was fun!
We had to make a digital representation out of the MRI slices we've received.

This is a result of my groups' work
and this is a final view of the images we've made all together

What can you see there?
Stone? wall? mirror? fruits and vegetables?
If yes, then I'm sorry - it's non of these.
It's a virtual representation of a KNEE.
Can then virtual imaging have any use for people not educated in medicine without some guidlines or an explanation?

Posted by Misia at 4:28 PM | Permalink

On our last tutorial group meeting we were wondering how does the object of representation change through digitalization and if this way of making represenatations can be called objective or not.

Short list of questions to think about :
- how did the knowledge of human body change?
-how much do we know about the body?
-do we know more with the progress or is it a different knowledge?
-is digitalliazation continuing mechanical objectivity or truth to nature? both? none?
-whitch other knowledge/skills do we need to use the modern technologies?
-how does the object of represenation change through digitallization?
and last but not least - is digital imaging objective?

The last question is an interesting starting point for a discussion cause scientists through the ages were seeking for an objective tool to create representations. Firts mechanical objectivity now digital imaging seems to be the dream come true. Both mechanical objectivity and digital imaging involve the use of mechanical tools that seem to work by itself. Yet it is not the light that draws the image through the camera lens and it's not the MRI scanner that makes the brain scans just on its own. It is the scientist who decides what will be on the picture apart from the object, how the object will be positioned etc. ( in mechanical objectivity) or how the scans will be coloured, how will the body be positioned in the scanner, how the body will be resting etc.(digital imaging). Therefore it seems to me that the quest for an objective tool of creating representations is still going. Go inventors!!!

Posted by Misia at 1:33 PM | Permalink

On our second tutorial group meeting (assignment 1) we struggled with a very interesting but difficult questions-
what is scientific knowledge? Can scientists be objective? How to solve the problem of reference- do the drawings or schemas realy resamble nature? All this questions poped up because of Bruno Latour's text ( Circulationg Reference. In Pandora's Hope. Essays of the Reality of Science Studies)

According to Latour there is a problem with correspondence between the real object and the representation. We asks if we get more knowledge with the progress of the world and he answers- no. In his oppinion it's just a temporary end result. We don't really know more about the object, in this context, the body. We know more only about the represantations we create, not about the real objects.

To give an example- during the meeting we were wondering what would a Latourian say if we would say that the Earth is round ( or oval or elips, or whatever it is at the moment) and we are sure that it is round ( or oval or elips, or whatever it is at the moment) not flat, cause we know better then the people who lived on Earth before us.
We figured that a Latourian would say- the world was flat, because everybody agreed it was. They weren't less intelligent or anything like it, they've lived in a different world and they've explained things in different ways.

We should think about it when we'll be drawing our arms on monday- we'll turn our arms (objects) into represantations of our arms. But in the same time we'll be the scientists or rather illustrators drawing it plus its our arm! This is gonna be interesting....

Posted by Misia at 5:57 PM | Permalink