Mandy Eugeniou

Research project: What kind of (sick) object am I as an MRI?

Abstract

This practice-based PhD examines how the experience of pain can be seen as a potential form of agency, as well as an aesthetic & political space in the context of hegemonic and medical discourses. The biomedical disinterring of bodily secrets occurs through a kind of ‘digitally flaying' by emerging biotech producing visualisations through a phantasmatic register. These imaginings enter new kinds of proximal relationships with the human body as it is captured informatically and mapped out as a site of knowledge. What can these technologies know?  

The work stages an encounter between medical aesthetics, embodied pain, film practice and culture. Utilising the MRI as a metonym and metaphor, what is suggested is how this ubiquitous cultural icon impacts on the experience of the neoliberal body, its fleshy idiosyncrasies and glitchy instabilities. Contemporary pain might be the purview of science, but a tradition continues whereby the different perspectives of medicine, art, film, cultural theory and AI all share the notion that suffering can be transformed into an object to become shareable. This perspective brings about an iconography of corporeal matter which enables a form of witnessing influenced by photography, X-ray and film-making. What becomes elided/hyper-looked/overlooked by the medical gaze is the subjective and intersubjective dimension. Through medical visualisations, the suffering body is in a state of becoming and even more iconic in its iconicity.  

The imaging of pain is seen to be an entangled assemblage of images, scripts, practices, and processes within a grid of representation that modulates across epistemic frameworks and diffuse gazes. What kind of potential object does the vulnerable, suffering body become in the pursuit of objectivity, and what kind of disobedient object is a body that refuses to share?

The research examines the performance of pain -  my own making and unmaking - through its co-option by imaging technologies in an age of AI. What kind of (sick) object am I as an MRI? involves me, my sonic presence and image-script within a feminist, crip and phenomenological methodology.  I follow traces of the poor image to establish the ground upon which I can explore its authority and affective intensity as it travels across anonymous rhizomes of biopower. The aim is to open up spaces between code and experience, image and script, script and voice, and, embodiment and time. Practice involves performative storytelling, embodied film-making, scripting and lo-fi, punk/collage aesthetics to explore a closer understanding of the experiences around the chronicity of pain.