3.2.6: Ethical Concerns

After completing Terminal Imaginaries in 2021, I began thinking more about my role in the production and reproduction of these images. I have a pit in my stomach when I work with visual material from the history of medicine. There is something about these images that makes me uneasy, and sets off a set of inner alarm bells in my head, which I have been able to better articulate in the years after finishing the majority of the projects in this chapter. I will address the ethics of extraction and value production in medicine in the next chapter (4.1.3; 4.1.4; 4.2.4). For this chapter, however, I am more interested in showing previous drafts of the kinds of opacity which are used elsewhere in the dissertation. My shifting views regarding my relationship to these images and primary materials was only possible because of these earlier video art projects. Each project, as an iterative practice, helped me better describe the problems that I was observing.

As I worked on Terminal Imaginaries and Tuberculous Imaginaries I began to consider my role as an artist more carefully: What does it mean to rely on mostly abstracted human material, rather than those with the human body obviously visible? What does it mean to erase the bodies of patients, as I do for Tuberculous Imaginaries’ Projector B (3.2.4)? What is necessary in an artwork, an installation, or an academic essay to make a proper and convincing critique?

For Tuberculous Imaginaries, I wrote a short description of the project which viewers could access via QR code. At the end of this essay, I tried to describe my own ethical position:

One final note: I have attempted to short circuit the spectacular exploitation of the sick, dying, and dead patient with care to not show the patient in exploitative, dehumanizing, and humiliating positions. In a previous photo essay (and early draft of the current project which was originally called Terminal Imaginaries) I more openly displayed the patient, and the various contortions the patient experienced when made into a specimen by medical researchers. I have left some images that show the patient in this installation, but at times I actively erase their physiognomy to emphasize the position of the doctor in those same frames. My intent for this project is not to continue to do violence to those who suffered from illness and the humiliations of the clinical gaze; instead, I hope to concretely show the ways medical professionals are imaged and imagined in relation to their work.¹

When I produced Terminal Imaginaries the spring prior, I also tried to hedge the project in a way so as to foreground my ethical concerns:

One more note, before you explore, is that due to the history and horror of medical science—its penchant for abusing the othered bodies is a long and gruesome history in its own right—these images reveal violence done to bodies that echoes, reverberates, and replicates in our contemporary period. I invite viewers to contemplate these images as both historical—that is of a moment in the past—and as contemporary—as they resonate in the present. I would appreciate your thoughts, meditations, and responses, so as to revise and sharpen the critique in future exhibitions. Thank you for your time.²

The tenor of these two statements displays a change of thought, from which this dissertation and its platform benefitted. In some ways, the statement written for Terminal Imaginaries is more open: it invites conversation. Especially considering the identities of research subjects who were more prone to be turned into medical research objects,³ this concession affords an ability for an effected audience to speak more openly; however, it also feels very weak in terms of approach. In reality, while working on Terminal Imaginaries, I was unsure about how I should address these materials. Returning to the same public-facing setup for Tuberculous Imaginaries, I found a need to be more clear about what I was doing and why I did it.

I am uncomfortable regarding certain choices I made for both installations: they are things I would not do in the future—like the inclusion of figural representations of human subjects. I tried to be as transparent as possible, publishing a detailed research and installation protocol that I had developed (X.3.1), but there is a certain amount of harm—harm for the patients whose bodies were used for medical research without their consent; harm for reproducing their bodies within the media art discourse—which stick to these materials. I still have a reluctance to damage these images in their totality, wavering as I do with choosing to leave any of the awful images in tact. One of the problems with these images is that there is no just way to present them, and the arts-based examination and re-mediation of these images makes for different potential nuances.

The problem that arose with Terminal Imaginaries and Tuberculous Imaginaries was that displaying harms does little to rectify those harms. It reproduces them (4.2.4).⁴ From these installations, I became more and more concerned with the harm that is enacted in knowledge production. These concerns were leading toward the opacity functions which enable the site to function (4.3.3), and were only possible through the iterative investigations of these installations. These digital, web-based interventions began with an interactive photo essay, “Dermographic Opacities”.