Question 1 - Critical Annotated Webliography

1. Visuality is a domain that Haraway critiques of science in general through what she calls ‘the god-trick’: the belief that it is possible to see everything from nowhere. Discuss some of the issues of visuality raised by the Visible Human Project.

Figure 1: Littoral Zone Animation, by Tiffany Holmes[1], a computer artist.

Visuality is an “ocularcentric culture”, the culture that based on what we see. It is undesigned coincidence with ‘god-trick’ in Donna Haraway’s “The Cyborg Manifesto”, the possibility to see everywhere from nowhere. The Visible Human Project (VHP) was developed by National Medical Library in USA, in the way of transferring the corporeal human body into digitalized and visualized database for scientific researches on human anatomy. Given these two Visible Human, a digitalized human-anatomy database was started to develop in 1994. Two Visible Humans were dissected in around 1mm and 0.33mm, and photographed after each dissection. It was unusual to anatomize by slices instead of organs, which thousands of pixels were shaped. The transformation of corporeal body into digital form is a type of embodiment, and death does no longer exist. In this case, human are able to read our identities of afterlife, by distributing online materials, which are consisted of our identities and fleshes. A new type of selfhood is also generated through the VHP development.

An anthropology approach of merging technology and the idea of “normal body” is made, to identify ourselves in artificial way. “Enhancement Technologies and the Body” [2] suggested that technological enhancement to human body is going ‘beyond’ to the normal. The first Visible Human, Joseph Paul Jernigan, from Texas, volunteered to provide his body for scientific research after he received the dose in his age 39, therefore his body was considered as in “good health”. VHP provides us an appropriate model of healthy body, to distinguish between artifice and natural. Furthermore, in this text and Haraway(2004) had suggested that one can choose own embodiment. The Visible Man, Jernigan has transformed himself from a criminal to a man that benefit to the society, in a peculiar way to other people, which reincarnated into series of data. Therefore shifting identities in digital world can be able to achieve in the future.

It was suggested that capital punishment is as a kind of torture for the Visible Man by visualized his identity on screen. The digitalization of Jernigan’s identity as the continuity of his punishment, written by Catherine Waldby in “The Visible Human Project: Life and Death in Cyberspace” [3], who specialized in VHP. These two Visible Human’s images were stored in massive computer dataset and can be downloadable via the internet. Bodies are preserved and stored into database, and taken from internet or CD out of screen as users’ wishes. The Visible Man, Jernigan’s identity as a criminal was also reviewed as medical is always associated with punishment in historical context, displayed their dissected corpse after executed. The digitalization of Visible Human manifested that to understand our tangible human bodies by understanding the intangible identities of ourselves through the Worldwide Webs.

There is also an association between the roles of gender and human anatomy which performed by the VHP. Lisa’s article in Visible Woman [4] found from Google Book Search is particularly discussing the relation between gender and anatomy. Generally, human bodies presented in male, makes female-specific anatomy difficult. The Visible Woman, a ‘Maryland housewife’ who died in her age 59, during a sudden heart-attack in her house, is opened to widely discuss in feminists’ area. The presence of Visible Woman has increased the awareness about women’s health, indicated that female-anatomy is becoming the subject of medical studies. Moreover, Visible Woman presented the meaning of what is gender assigned to us, both physically and mentally. She was dissected into 0.33 mm, which indicated that there is closer, more intensive scrutiny for the female body, as the subject of anatomy. However, as she is a postmenopausal woman, has an incomplete model of reproductive system, the VHP is unable to re-simulate female’s menstruation on screen. The lack of healthy woman representation does highlight the insufficient training of female-anatomy. Nevertheless, her corpse provided the bodily mode of mothers, in existed of non- functioned reproductive system.

Replication of life is made by reproduction. However no sexual reproduction had taken place in VHP, which embedded in human nature. Instead, it duplicated in the ways of “copy and paste”. According to Waldby’s another essay [5], she suggested that the association between VHP and reproduction of life. Under the form of VHP, the digital icons are alive whereas human bodies are already dead, since VHP is the simulation of living human. Also the animation of human movement has reduced the differences between living person and a corpse. Virtual screen interface has transformed as a space for other bodies also. The data storage, the screen, the cyberspace, provided by VHP as a ‘new Eden’, information about Visible Human was ‘in-form’, which inherits ‘god-like’ power to authorise them. VHP is a re-animation of vitality, a resurrection of dead bodies on screen.

In VHP, the Visible Humans are consisted by thousands of images which photographed on their flesh; and word-by-word description around the images. “Human body is hybrid of word, image and mark, and it is examined by various tools of media such as magnetic resonance images (MRI) and computer tomography (CT).” These imaging tools are used during the dissection of Visible Human. Many artists also used some of the MRI scans to present themselves, such as Tiffany Holmes’s Littoral Zone (figure 1). VHP has explored the intersections of digital art and science technology, and derived from Holmes’s paper [6], which is about the connections of alphabetic, artworks and personal perspective.

In conclusion, the ‘god-trick’ defined by Donna Haraway, is to see the concrete, corporeal bodies, from the abstract, virtual computer screen. The VHP itself is a “translation of the world into a problem of coding” (Haraway 2004), from transformation of Visible Humans’ identity and their bodies into massive computerized storage, a digitalized “coffin”. Therefore Jernigan was no longer blamed because of his crimes; instead he benefited the society by contributing his cadaver to scientific research. He has shifted his identity successfully. On the other hand, the identity of Visible Woman was still veiled, but as time rolls on; her significance is widely discussed for Australian feminists’ studies [7]. The VHP’s digitalization and visualization over human bodies provide a higher level of visuality, based on what we have seen on the VHP materials from Internet, and Holmes’s medical-related artworks; to represent our bodies and realise ourselves, to the sets of 0s and 1s.

Notes:
1. Tiffany Holmes (1999) ‘The Corporeal Stenographer: Language, Gesture, and Cyberspace’ Leonardo 32, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1576821 (accessed 22 August 2008).
2. Linda F. Hogle (2005) ‘Enhancement Technologies and the Body’ Annual Reviews of Anthropology 34, http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.144020 (accessed 18 August 2008).
3. Catherine Waldby (1997) ‘Life and Death in Cyberspace’ Artlink 17, http://search.informit.com.au/fullText;res=APAFT;dn=971111255 (accessed 15 August 2008).
4. Paula Treichler, Lisa Cartwright, Constance Penley (1998) Visible Woman, http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=N3FGXKV0TtwC&oi=fnd&pg=PA21&dq=Visible+Human+Project&ots=5rs-kE2GqV&sig=7HX1RWvRFDKWMkma1phMFzXSjLU (accessed 18 August 2008).
5. Catherine Waldby (1999) ‘IatroGenesis: The Visible Human Project and the Reproduction of Life’ Australian Feminist Studies 14, http://docserver.ingentaconnect.com/deliver/connect/routledg/08164649/v14n29/s7.pdf?expires=1219036260&id=45549506&titleid=338&accname=The+University+of+Western+Australia-Library&checksum=A14CC5155613B710A0EFBC391BA0B8F3 (accessed 18 August 2008).
6. Holmes (1999), p. 387.
7. Susan Magarey & Susan Sheridan (2002) ‘Local, Global, Regional: Women’s Studies in Australia’ Feminist Studies 28, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3178497 (accessed 22 August 2008).

Reference List
Haraway, Donna Jeanne (2004) ‘A Manifesto of Cyborg: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in 1980s’ The Haraway Reader, http://hive.library.uwa.edu.au/cgi-bin/hive/hive.cgi/02652.pdf?HIVE_REF=hii%3A14261&HIVE_RET=ORG&HIVE_REQ=2114&HIVE_PROD=0/02652.pdf (accessed 15 August 2008).