Brainbodies and the imaging of plasticity

ABSTRACT

This article considers two conceptual formations – brainbodies and plasticity – through some of the image-form processes of neuroscience, art and curation. Underpinned by the writings of philosopher Catherine Malabou, the ethnography of Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar Joseph Dumit, and the artistic projects of curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the article firstly examines Positron Emission Tomography (PET) (as articulated by Dumit) and its image-making processes to show how plasticity is at work in the brainbody’s molecular negotiations with the scanning apparatus. Secondly, the article analyses the entanglements generated out of the receptions of neuro-aesthetic and artistic image-forms in the curatorial directions of two of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s projects: dOCUMENTA (13) and the 14th Istanbul Biennial SALTWATER: A Theory of Thought Forms. A diffractive methodology of reading, as articulated in the feminist technoscientific writings of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, helps to re-register the plasticity of matter in the contexts of art and curation. The image-forms that feature in this article expose some of the boundaries and limitations of cultural meaning-making and their associated forms. This includes the productive insights generated out of the crossing through of disciplinary perspectives and their image-making mechanisms.

KEYWORDS:

• Brainbodies
• plasticity
• image-forms
• neuroscience
• art
• curation

Acknowledgements

This article has evolved out of the 7th Annual Conference on New Materialisms, organised by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST Action IS 1307 Networking European Scholarship ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’). The conference, held in Warsaw in 2016, sought to revisit Donna Haraway’s ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ (1988). As a participant in the workshop ‘Process of Imaging/Imaging of Processes’, organised and led by Liv Hausken, Bettina Papenburg and Sigrid Schmitz, I proposed to consider the contexts of neuroscience, art and curation, out of which certain images of brainbody phenomena are formed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Rowan Bailey is the Director of Graduate Education in the School of Art, Design and Architecture at the University of Huddersfield. She is also an active member of the Centre for Sculptural Thinking. She is currently investigating sculptural materialities in artistic, scientific and curatorial cultures. Her publications include: ‘Concrete Thinking for Sculpture’, an essay on the variegated plays of concrete as a material and as a concept (parallax, 21.3, 2015, pp. 241–258); ‘Thinking Sculpturally', a catalogue essay for the 2017 exhibition Tony Cragg: A Rare Category of Objects at Yorkshire Sculpture Park; and more recently in 2018, ‘Where is the Brainbody in the Stories of Curation’, a paper on the curatorial mechanisms and strategies of displaying brainbody phenomena.

ORCID

Rowan Bailey http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9594-2348

Notes

1 Dumit also notes: ‘These positron emitters have relatively short half-lives, meaning that they do not stay radioactive in the body too long (unlike carbon-14, which lasts for centuries)’ (Dumit 2004, 69).