Twine: IMAGING IN ART AND SCIENCE

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From: Richard Twine
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2007 11:22:25 -0000

I'm a Sociologist, I expect the second two themes of the symposium willbe of more relevance to my work. Where imaging in science has come intomy work however is first when I looked at 18th/19th century physiognomyand phrenology. Here of course images of the face - often already incaricature - were endlessly re-produced to try and solidify the notionof a fixed relation between bodily exterior and psychical interior, andspecifically more fairytale/culturally entrenched discourses of 'beauty'and goodness. [Twine, R (2002) 'Physiognomy, Phrenology and theTemporality of the Body' Body and Society Vol.8, No.1, pp.67-88].Similar claims on the truth telling properties of the human body are nowrevived - as Anker & Nelkin also point out - in contemporary genomicsdiscourses, yet now we move to the physical interior of the body, bethat sequences of genomic code or the sort of imaging of the interiordescribed well in Waldby's work. I have a scepticism for the ability ofsuch visual discourses to say anything particularly interesting orholistic about the 'human', seemingly still positing 'that' as a fixedproperty waiting to be revealed. I also have a developing interest inthe visual practices of advertising work carried out by emergent biotechcompanies, and the visual practices of scientists in their powerpointpresentations. You can see a few examples of these from the bioblogproject I worked on last year out of the BIO 2006 convention in Chicago

Best wishes,
Richard
Dr.Richard Twine
Principal Investigator & Postgraduate Director
ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (CESAGen)
[http://www.richardtwine.com/bioblog/].
Homepage http://www.richardtwine.com/

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