Week 4 - MedTech + Art

Ava, the artificially intelligent robot from Ex Machina

My dad is an orthopedic surgeon that uses a wide array of new technology to better perform his job, so I have a unique insight on this week's medical teachings, but because his work has nothing to do with cosmetics I was curious to learn how art played into this discussion. It seems to me that the constantly recurring theme these past four units have been the human body. From Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (Da Vinci, 1490) bridging the gap between the math/sciences and art to movies like Ex Machina (Garland, 2015) that portray a complex, artificially intelligent robot as a soft spoken and beautiful woman. The human being is an infinitely complicated organism that humans are fascinated with and determined to figure out. As I finished Professor Vesna's third video lecture this week, I was very interested in all of the performance art with the medium being the artist him/herself. I then began to flashback to the previous weeks of this course and recognized the influence the human body has in connecting art to each topic we discuss. I think this is because the human body is so complex and highly functional, but aesthetically pleasing at he


same time. And it dawned on me that this is what society is constantly striving for, things that both work and look better. The priority of the two differ case to case, but they are forever present. I was particularly shocked when I learned that plastic surgery was being practiced 4000 years ago in Ancient India. But it was first used for the sake of promoting skin regrowth, and as years went on, the practice of "plastic surgery" encompassed exclusively cosmetic procedures. A French artist named Orlan turned it into an art exhibit when she began her project The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan (Orlan, 1990's) and had multiple cosmetic procedures done to transform herself into elements of famous paintings and sculptures to represent a story about each piece. Works like this show our fascination with the human body, and how advancements in medical technology allow us to understand and recreate the human form more accurately. Examples

Exhibit at Body World's of a man playing basketball 

 include Gunther Von Hagen's plastination techniques allowing exhibits like Body Worlds to exist, or how X-rays made the human skeleton a staple at any Halloween party. Modern anatomy and medicine consensusly boomed with Henry Gray's Gray's Anatomy (Gray, 1858) and subsequently allowed mankind to push the boundaries of medicine, art, and how the both intertwine.







Sources

Da Vinci, Leonardo. Vitruvian Man. 1490. Paper. Gallerie Del'Accademia, Venice, Italy.

Ex Machina. Dir. Alex Garland. Perf. Domhnall Gleeson. Universal Pictures, 2015.

ORLAN. The Reincarnation of Saint-Orlan. 1990s. Body.

 Gray, Henry. Gray's Anatomy. 1858. Print.

Body Worlds. By Gunther Von Hagens. Tokyo. 1995. Performance.

Images

http://blogs-images.forbes.com/markhughes/files/2015/04/EX-MACHINA-4.png

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/cy50kq/picture30897180/ALTERNATES/FREE_640/body2

http://bac-bodyartandceremony.weebly.com/uploads/3/0/4/1/30413798/3160146.jpg?504