3.2.1: Terminal Imaginaries

Terminal Imaginaries, was produced in the spring 2021, funded in part by a Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC) scholarship and through funding from Indiana University’s College Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI). A video installation for three projectors, it was developed when I was still winnowing my dissertation project. In the period shortly after creating the piece and the videos associated with it, I would go on to successfully defend a prospectus for this dissertation, which at the time was titled “Ontologies of Undoing” and addressed the ways that human remains produced value for medical institutions.

Figure 2. A diagram of the projector setup for the Terminal Imaginaries installation.

Figure 3. A mockup of the terminal imaginaries installation with each image showing (although they are not meant to be shown on a single wall).

The problems with that prospectus, and the Terminal Imaginaries installation, were similar: I was still being too vague in my approach, and I had not cobbled together a completely forthright understanding of the history of medicine. This installation project helped me spend more time with a small collection of images, and it afforded me time to think through the creative, aesthetic modes I used to understand how those images operated. This project formulated an exploratory approach to the history of medicine, which inspected a wide set of materials from around the turn of the twentieth century. This work would form the spine of a successive installation, Tuberculous Imaginaries (3.2.4; 3.2.5), and the basis of my visual culture critique discussed earlier in this dissertation (1.1.2; 2.1.2).

Terminal Imaginaries was never shown to the public, but instead was developed and displayed in the garage of the condo where my wife (then girlfriend) and I lived (fig. 1). I built the installation during the Covid-19 lockdown, before either my wife or I got our first vaccines, and so it was never shown because of the limitations of that moment. I displayed it virtually as part of the Media School’s annual graduate conference, Common Ground, in spring 2021.

The work was made from three projectors and three corresponding mini computers,¹ which ran the video feeds as a looping .mov file through the open source VLC media player. In addition to these video feeds, the projectors were mounted on tables with black paper flags and a circular mirror hanging in front of the light beams (fig. 2). While never displayed, I had hoped the waist high projectors would make an audience self-conscious of their presence in the room, of their bodies, and to subtly steer them around the space.² Each of the three projectors displayed a different set of images (fig. 3). In the installation’s corresponding website,³ I wrote,

Each projector has a different kind or genre of image. Projector A uses materials sourced from dermatology textbooks; Projector B’s images were pulled from different anatomical atlases (most notably Dr. Henry Gray and Warren H. Lewis’ Anatomy of the Human Body, also known as Gray’s Anatomy); Projector C features images of anatomical classes posing in front of their anatomized subject. Together, these projectors present a meditation on modern medicine’s visual culture.⁴