3.1.4: Three Case Studies

The series of art works which I address in this chapter were produced by me in 2021 and 2022. These project specifically deal with conceptual and ethical problems in the history of medicine, and used humanist-facing, arts-based research methods to think through the conceptual issues I was encountering (3.1.3; 4.1.2).¹ I will spend time with these artworks to reflect on the successes and failures of each. The concerns about the sick patient, their subjugation under a series of overlapping gazes, and an ethical imperative to reframe and remake these images stretches over close to a decade of creative work. I will focus on three projects—Terminal Imaginaries (3.2.1) and Tuberculous Imaginaries (3.2.4), and “Dermographic Opacities” (3.3.1). These successive projects show a series of different approaches to the medical image, as they range from projector-based installations to a digital photo essay. I will use my own writing, as it appeared in grants, blog posts, and the public facing websites for each of these projects to help frame what I was thinking when developing the work. I will also address the gaps and concerns I now see with that line of thinking.

What I will show through these reflective case studies is a progression in my approach to the biomedical image, and my applications of opacity as an aesthetic intervention (3.3.3; 4.1.3; 4.2.3). Each of these projects applies opacity in distinct ways, and my shifting approach parallels a shifting understanding of both this theoretical framework and the materials with which I work. Being exploratory in nature, these projects show how the open-ended qualities of arts-based reflection helped sharpen my understanding of these materials. None of the other chapters in this dissertation would have been possible without these arts-based projects.

Ultimately, I use these case studies to consider how arts-based research can be a means to produce traditional, written scholarship, and articulate how these projects have informed my own thinking. My hope is that future arts-based researchers can consider and adopt practices that are similar to the recursive, mixed method approaches that I have used in my own scholarship (0.2.1). I specifically use this term arts-based research because it most succinctly describes what I mean: the creation of academic arguments with the interlocutor of the creative arts and its methods.²

I do arts-based research because it is a mode of understanding that fosters iterative, imperfect conclusions. It is messy and subjective, but its looseness, its attention to feeling, and its ability to examine aesthetic formations, enables insights which may be further leveraged in more traditionally academic discourses. This arts-based research does not supplant or supersede other knowledge practices; it is a mutually beneficial sidestep for traditional academics and artists alike. This dissertation would not exist in the same form without these projects, or the loose, imperfect methods that emerged through arts-based inspection (3.1.2). I hope scholars reading this chapter will recognize how non-written interventions—be they in the artistic projects like those in this chapter, or the digital design in the next (4.1.2; 4.1.3)—can tease out the implicit often unintelligible ideas in their own work.

I do arts-based research because it is a way for me to better understand my scholarly material, because it is a way for me to game academic systems to continue thinking of the materials in which I am invested, because it helps me connect disparate ideas without the necessity of a lit review. I want the artist/scholars that follow me to be free to adopt these modes without the false pretenses of a superior epistemics (3.4.1; 3.4.2; 3.4.3).