3.2.5: Overlapping Visualities and Cutting Away Material

For projector C, I took time to annotate excerpts from the same primary sources that were the basis for the two other projectors. I have included a few of the full transcripts in the appendix (X.3.2; X.3.3;).

I used this method to close read the texts with which I was working. Having been rushed and relying too heavily on skimming in the lead up to the install, my hope with doing an annotated close reading was to force myself to look with more intensity at the specific primary sources. I tried to be candid, commenting often on the strange and disrespectful way doctors described their practices and patients.

One of the problems of the installation, like with Terminal Imaginaries, was that each of the projectors was designed to do its own feed. I had hoped that the accidental interlinkage between the different length videos may cause interesting juxtapositions, but in watching others engage with the piece, it appeared that each video feed competed with the other. The text drew the most detailed inspection, if only because it was the longest running feed.

This problem was compounded by my over reliance on the installation’s accompanying website to explain the creative decisions.¹ Again, like with Terminal Imaginaries, I feel the installation was trying to do too much (3.2.3). Like trying to articulate a book project in a conference paper, the scale of the project asked too much of the audience, asked too much of the creator. The themes of the video feeds link together concerns of power: of whose bodies were depicted and how (Projector A and B), whose symptoms were tracked (Projector C), and who was afforded anonymity and why (Projector B).

These aesthetic and conceptual issues aside, Tuberculous Imaginaries, like Terminal Imaginaries before it, helped continue to frame and structure my understanding of medical visual culture (1.1.2; 2.1.2). Projector B became the beginning document for my work on doctors in frame (1.4.1; 1.4.2), and Projector C’s interest in textual analysis planted the seeds for the linkage of case studies to visual representation (2.3.2; 2.3.4).²

More than this, Tuberculous Imaginaries marked a contining shift in focus from the medical image to the ethics of representing the history of medicine (4.2.5; 4.4.5). The ethics of the medical image, its reproduction, and my control over how it could be represented and re-presented—that is, how the presentation is shown in context for a new audience—became a centralizing interest for my future creative work and for this dissertation.