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posted by Elizabeth Harvey on November 10, 1999 at 11:43:50:
technology/chamber walls/memory/colour It is difficult to visit this visually opulent site with its intellectual provocations and its saturated colours without thinking reflexively about the process of visitation. In a sense, computer technology replicates the patterns Jack describes--whether alveolar chamber walls, Islamic geometric tiling patterns, soap bubbles, or honeycombs--because as respondents to the site, we are simultaneously confined to the solitude of our own computer terminals and also joined within the honeycomb community of respondents, both divided and linked by the walls of our subjective partitions. I was especially intrigued by the exchange between Patrick and Jack because it brings up questions about memory. Patrick talked about his infant son being confined to an incubator and Jack invoked a memory that is not quite a memory about having spent his first weeks in an incubator. Both of you explicitly consider memory--as a repository (chamber) of experience that is always changing, being affected by others, altering as we add life experience to the mix. Of course, as psychoanalysis reminds us, we never have unmediated access to those memories, particularly to the primordial ones--in utero, birth, first breath, life in the glass chamber of the incubator. Still, they must shape in some primitive way our orientation to knowledge and they must do so in ways that are not just epistemological but also burdened with emotion. I think that looking at an image of an embryo or fetus is heavily freighted with affect--we tend to get these images in popular culture and the media in places where they have an affective dimension: illustration of the marvels of science or life (or both), abortion debates, pregnancy books. I don't think it is possible (certainly not for me as a woman/femminist/mother) to look at these images in a way that's shorn of desire, nostalgia, wonder. I expect that there's always a sense of connection to our past (in utero) and future (children). The richness of the color seems to stand in some displaced way for that emotional register (and Julia Kristeva's theory of the semiotic as the register of the pre-linguistic, often evoked by color, is pertinent here). And I wonder about my own response to the idea of fetal isolation, for I shared my uterine comaprment with a companion (a twin)! In looking at the images on the site, I have an eerie sense of invasion. Not only am I looking (presumably) into the private chamber of a woman's body (or perhaps at what has been removed from it--the fetus/embryo still connotes that interiority), but I'm also looking at the inside of that embryonic/fetal body, at the various developmental stages of lung tissue. This radically interior view seems as once a violation and a marvel, a violation because in order to see properly one does need in a sense to discard the exterior body (of woman, of fetus). In order to see patterns and the relationships among them, we need to violate the context--isn't this how scientific vision is honed (by isolating the body part so as to concentrate more fully on its attributes)? What about artistic vision? By yoking the two, Jack, you seem necessarily to raise ethical questions about science, about the appropriateness (and cost--literal and ethical) of cultivating scientific vision. This brings me to my final point--how extraordinarily visual the site and the experience of the site is. This seems like an obvious point, except that the images (fetus, soap bubble, tile, honeycomb) evoke the other senses as well, especially touch. The sheer beauty of the website (colour, layout, images, patterns) almost compensates for the senses that aren't there, but not quite. And that made me think of the incubator again, for if you saw the world in your first weeks of life, Jack, through glass walls (and were deprived, perhaps, of certain experiences of smell and touch), are we replicating your state from the other side, looking through the glass wall of our computer screen deep into the early memory of an infant breathing? Follow Ups:
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