In 2016 I reedited “The Modern Orpheus”. I had originally made a longer version of the film in 2014 as part of a project during my MFA. This film was, ostensibly, about the history of the atomic bomb and its aftermath, but during production it became more about my horror and guilt after seeing the images the United States produced to study the aftermaths of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (figs. 1 - 2). The film’s title, “The Modern Orpheus”, made reference to two texts: the secondary title to Mary Shelly’s *Frankenstein*, *Or the Modern Prometheus*, and to the Grecian Orpheus myth. Mary Shelly’s *Frankenstein* responded to the rise of the emirical sciences, and was written out of Shelly’s own experience watching grave-robbers while visiting her mother’s grave.[^fn1] Orpheus is an oft remixed tale of love, loss, and the failure in trust. Orpheus’ undoing is his gaze: he looks back to see if Eurydice is following him out of the underworld.
Figure 1. A still from *The Modern Orpheus*. This was originally footage taken by Americans looking at the wreckage in the aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
Figure 3. A still from *The Modern Orpheus*. This image shows a Japanese subject suffering from health problems related to the bomb was used multiple times in multiple ways in the film.
Figure 2. A still from *The Modern Orpheus*. This image is one of many images in the collected video for the project. A patient is shown with obvious wounds from the bomb, and filmed for some spurious scientific purpose, but more looks like they are reflecting on their own pain.
The mix of these two threads expressed a desire to see, and the complicated, vital process of remembering. Rather than portraying the Orpheus myth as a tragedy, I saw it as a kind of necessary truth telling having witnessed the ruin of history.[^fn2] One of the films two narrators, a female speaker, makes this theme legible: she asks, “Do you remember Orpheus? By staring back, he trapped his love Eurydice in the underworld. He could not conquer death, but he could speak it, and by uttering that truth, he made it real.”[^fn3]
This notion of visual truth telling came out of the production process. The film was made of primarily archival materials (and some footage of a past failed project from 2013). I had visited the National Archives in Park Slope in the Summer of 2013, hoping to copy some of the footage that the United States had collected in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. When I started watching the hours of material, I found myself caught in a roiling current of guilt, which had been masked by layers of American imperialism and American exceptionalism. Reflecting on this, in some promotional materials prepared for the film’s short festival run, I wrote, “While I collected images, I found myself appalled by what I had unearthed. These images of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so coldly collected. How could any ethical filmmaker agree to shoot images like these? How could anyone approach this work with such nonchalance?”[^fn4]
Unlike the preceding chapters, this chapter is not about tuberculosis. This chapter instead addresses my artistic practice and how it informs my research (4.1.2). I am stepping back a few steps to self-mythologizing my previous work, as a way piece together a larger series of themes and problems that predate this project: health, science, individual guilt, and a history of violence that imprints onto images. The last point is most central to *The Modern Orpheus*, as the other narrator, a male speaker, says:
>There is an argument to these images. The purest oppression is annihilation, and these documents express a biased scientific record: a sterilized, distorted vision through a victor’s lens.
>An American captured these images.
>I know this language. The camera eye dissects the survivors. The individual is obliterated.[^fn5]
In “The Modern Orpheus”, I tried to reconceptualize this violent image, to make it known, to make it hurt a viewer in such a way to move an audience to reconsidering the past. I also felt successively more uncomfortable with the image itself. I sought to shift it, in the way Chris Marker evoked André Tarkovsky’s “the zone” in his 1984 film *Sans Soleil*. Playing with layering high contrast filters, I wondered if I could flatten the image, to undo the clinical vision of American doctors (figs. 4 - 5).[^fn6]
Figure 6.
Figure 7.
Figure 5.
This chapter will reflect on a series of art works I produced between 2021 and 2023.[^fn7] These works specifically deal with the health sciences as I developed methods for humanist-facing, arts-based research (4.1.3; 4.6.0). I will spend time with these objects 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 decade of creative work. I will focus on four projects---*Terminal Imaginaries* & *Tuberculous Imaginaries* (4.2.0), “Dermographic Opacities” (4.3.0), and *Tuberscopia* (4.4.0). These successive projects ranging from projector-based installations, to sculptural work, to a photo essay show a series of different approaches to the medical image. 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 these projects, and I will address gaps and concerns I see with that line of thinking. Rather than be an exercise in ego boosting, I use these case studies to consider how arts-based research can forward other forms of scholarship, to articulate how these projects have informed my own thinking, with the hope that future arts-based researchers can consider the recursive mixed method approaches arts-based research fosters.
I do arts-based research because it is a different 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 supercede 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.
The projects which I describe in detail in the following sections all explore the opaque as a critical methodology for the history of medicine. Opacity, as defined by Eduard Glissant, operates as a personal refusal to be ingested into western epistemic systems (4.x.x). The artistic and scholarly work specifically wrestles with the productive possibility of noise, thinking about how adding or subtracting noise in ways that display can subversively address implicit functions in the supplied visual artifacts. Iterative, this work has been successful to different degrees. What I hope to convey, however, is not the epistemic superiority of arts-based research, so much as the affordances of this loose, aesthetically driven kind of *praxis.*
To frame the specific projects described later, I first will describe in better detail as to what I mean by arts-based research (4.1.2), and reflect on the arts traditions upon which I build (4.1.3).
Figure 3. A still from *The Modern Orpheus*. This image shows a Japanese subject suffering from health problems related to the bomb was used multiple times in multiple ways in the film.
Figure 2. A still from *The Modern Orpheus*. This image is one of many images in the collected video for the project. A patient is shown with obvious wounds from the bomb, and filmed for some spurious scientific purpose, but more looks like they are reflecting on their own pain.
The mix of these two threads expressed a desire to see, and the complicated, vital process of remembering. Rather than portraying the Orpheus myth as a tragedy, I saw it as a kind of necessary truth telling having witnessed the ruin of history.[^fn2] One of the films two narrators, a female speaker, makes this theme legible: she asks, “Do you remember Orpheus? By staring back, he trapped his love Eurydice in the underworld. He could not conquer death, but he could speak it, and by uttering that truth, he made it real.”[^fn3]
This notion of visual truth telling came out of the production process. The film was made of primarily archival materials (and some footage of a past failed project from 2013). I had visited the National Archives in Park Slope in the Summer of 2013, hoping to copy some of the footage that the United States had collected in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. When I started watching the hours of material, I found myself caught in a roiling current of guilt, which had been masked by layers of American imperialism and American exceptionalism. Reflecting on this, in some promotional materials prepared for the film’s short festival run, I wrote, “While I collected images, I found myself appalled by what I had unearthed. These images of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were so coldly collected. How could any ethical filmmaker agree to shoot images like these? How could anyone approach this work with such nonchalance?”[^fn4]
Unlike the preceding chapters, this chapter is not about tuberculosis. This chapter instead addresses my artistic practice and how it informs my research (4.1.2). I am stepping back a few steps to self-mythologizing my previous work, as a way piece together a larger series of themes and problems that predate this project: health, science, individual guilt, and a history of violence that imprints onto images. The last point is most central to *The Modern Orpheus*, as the other narrator, a male speaker, says:
>There is an argument to these images. The purest oppression is annihilation, and these documents express a biased scientific record: a sterilized, distorted vision through a victor’s lens.
>An American captured these images.
>I know this language. The camera eye dissects the survivors. The individual is obliterated.[^fn5]
In “The Modern Orpheus”, I tried to reconceptualize this violent image, to make it known, to make it hurt a viewer in such a way to move an audience to reconsidering the past. I also felt successively more uncomfortable with the image itself. I sought to shift it, in the way Chris Marker evoked André Tarkovsky’s “the zone” in his 1984 film *Sans Soleil*. Playing with layering high contrast filters, I wondered if I could flatten the image, to undo the clinical vision of American doctors (figs. 4 - 5).[^fn6]
Figure 6.
Figure 7.
Figure 5.
This chapter will reflect on a series of art works I produced between 2021 and 2023.[^fn7] These works specifically deal with the health sciences as I developed methods for humanist-facing, arts-based research (4.1.3; 4.6.0). I will spend time with these objects 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 decade of creative work. I will focus on four projects---*Terminal Imaginaries* & *Tuberculous Imaginaries* (4.2.0), “Dermographic Opacities” (4.3.0), and *Tuberscopia* (4.4.0). These successive projects ranging from projector-based installations, to sculptural work, to a photo essay show a series of different approaches to the medical image. 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 these projects, and I will address gaps and concerns I see with that line of thinking. Rather than be an exercise in ego boosting, I use these case studies to consider how arts-based research can forward other forms of scholarship, to articulate how these projects have informed my own thinking, with the hope that future arts-based researchers can consider the recursive mixed method approaches arts-based research fosters.
I do arts-based research because it is a different 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 supercede 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.
The projects which I describe in detail in the following sections all explore the opaque as a critical methodology for the history of medicine. Opacity, as defined by Eduard Glissant, operates as a personal refusal to be ingested into western epistemic systems (4.x.x). The artistic and scholarly work specifically wrestles with the productive possibility of noise, thinking about how adding or subtracting noise in ways that display can subversively address implicit functions in the supplied visual artifacts. Iterative, this work has been successful to different degrees. What I hope to convey, however, is not the epistemic superiority of arts-based research, so much as the affordances of this loose, aesthetically driven kind of *praxis.*
To frame the specific projects described later, I first will describe in better detail as to what I mean by arts-based research (4.1.2), and reflect on the arts traditions upon which I build (4.1.3). 
