Document:Q10574

This project is an epistemological response to the Visible Human
Project, an endeavor, begun in the early 1990s, to create an online,
digital database of cross-sectional anatomical slices of a human male
and female cadaver. Using material from this database,
ftp_formless_anatomy constructs a counter-database, a teratology (the
study of monsters) of the digital-anatomical body.
A theme running through most of my theoretical and net.art work is the
relation between the body and technology. Specifically, two questions
are of interest here: Firstly, how do normative, dominant notions of what a body
is get constructed in a given context? And secondly, within those normative
models, where are the possible points of slippage, formlessness,
hybridity? Recently, much of my attention has been focused on how the
body-technology relationship is articulated in the contemporary
lifesciences (molecular biotechnology, genomics, tissue engineering,
digital anatomy, tele-medicine, bioinformatics). These fields provide
one example of a set of discourses and practices that are, as we speak,
in the process of articulating what will come to be recognized (and thus
legitimized) as body & technology, as nature & culture, and as
information & materiality.
-Eugene Thacker