CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
|
|
Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture |
Dolores A. Steinman and David A. Steinman, Biomedical Simulation Laboratory, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Medical Imaging in the Digital Age: Fusing the Real and the Imagined
In the current visual environment, where there is seamless merging of the real and imagined, the medical imager has a very hard task at hand. Technology has made possible the visualisation of our inner lives and fantasies as well as our inner bodies and their hidden sites. The issue at stake is the sharing of these images and the way they find their place in the current visual culture, compounded by the lack of both clear guidelines and of a common language of interpretation with the potential of manipulating and being manipulated.
Medical images have been used in the past as educational or informational tools for medical students and health care practitioners, specialists trained to interpret them. Today these images are transcending the expert/public barrier and becoming deeply embedded in the popular psyche, hence the need for a clear, accurate and unequivocal message. Thus, our effort to generate truthful yet simple images.
Another challenge we face in this race for responsibility, accountability and commitment to truth is the seduction of visualisation, as well as the commoditisation of the body’s image and of its health care, and the resulting use of appealing medical images for commercial use. As a result, the public’s earlier naiveté and a certain deference is being replaced by both jadedness and a false confidence that leads to occasional mistrust or disappointment when the computer-generated medical images supplied by us via health care providers do not match the ones seen in advertising posters or banners.
As medical imagers, we are part of the apparatus that renders the hidden body visible, and thus we are exposed to the subjectivity of choice between transparency and concealment, with the possibility of creating a ‘false truth’. With ever developing technologies and constantly improving visual representations of the unseen body, the computer-generated images we create are closer to ‘real’ medical images and become part of popular visual culture.
Slowly, we are moving away from the position of ‘high priests’ using a private and obscure language while keeping the right balance between accurate representation and an appealing image totally devoid of meaning.
Building upon visual vocabularies borrowed equally from the medical and the art world, we are striving to fuse the virtual and real with developing technology while redefining visual medical conventions and implementing them into the popular understanding.