Exosomatic Echoes (2021)
Currently exhibiting with Art in Flux at the National Gallery’s Virtual Space.
View virtual exhibition with Art in Flux and the National Gallery here.
Still from BioDigital Audio Visual Work ‘Exosomatic Echoes’
AudioVisual work currently only viewable at Art In Flux with National Gallery ‘Reclaimed’ Virtual Exhibition - link above image.
Image Description
Moving-Images Description: The visuals are monochromatic; depicting various shades of black, grey and white. Seven by seven small squares come together to form one larger square. Some of the small squares are black and do not have any moving images, others contain circles and semicircles in varying shades, with moving images. Each of the smaller squares carry different ambiguous MRI and x-ray imagery, and these morph into each other at varying speeds. The smaller moving-image squares are familiar as they relate to the anatomy – such as the brain – but altogether as a whole, it is augmented beyond comprehension, and without discerning information.
Sound Art Description
The soundscape bellows as a piercing, computerised, high-tempo, and high-pitched siren - but one with echoic cosmic ambience.
Exosomatic Echoes (2021) exhibits as an MRI-generated, monochromatic, bio-digital, and moving audio-visual work, utilising transmedial programming, code, the artist’s lifelong lived experience, and personal medical archives (i.e. biodata, MRIs, X-Rays, CTs and diagnostic reports) to centre autonomy, subvert medicalised technologies, and reclaim practices of othering, and ableism, that continue to be quantified by those acting under the medical model of disability, and the medical industrial complex.
Exosomatic Echoes seeks to disrupt dominant ableist narratives, the clinical gaze, and the social enactment of the diagnostic gaze; in particular, the notion that science and technology serves to ‘cure’, ‘fix’, ‘restore’, ‘eliminate’, and ‘normalise’ the disabled body, so to conform to able-bodiedness, westernized beauty ideals, and normative performativity.
Sensorially, Exosomatic Echoes dismembers the diagnostic gaze; the raw medical moving-imagery is fragmented, transposed, and replicated within a simulated ‘contact print’ aesthetic, used by photographers to aid the selection of images for enlargement or for identification purposes. The original MRI images have been augmented, thus subjected to deidentification, to background the diagnostic gaze and the othering of disability (and disability aesthetics), and bring forth the re-worlding of the disabled body.
The chaotic moving-imagery permeates a synthetic soundscape subversively satirising the sonic environment of a hospital, and exorcising intrusive recollections of the aural environment and sensibilities of medical institutions.
With this in mind, the work is an embodied audio-visual stim, transforming sensory experiences of medical rituals, pain, biodata, imagery, routines, sounds, memories, and the post-traumatic, into cultivated sites of radical crip agency. Here, the crip (disabled) cyborg body and technology is a site of wider possibility, and way(s) of being, that transcend preconceived ideals of able-bodiedness, aesthetics and normativity, and fuel re-making, re-worlding, and allow the re-imagining of disability futures.
Click thumbnails below to see Exosomatic Echoes embedded within the virtual exhibition.
Personal Medical Data and Imaging (under the Data Protection Act 2018 and GDPR 2016), images and works.
All Rights Reserved ©️ 2023 Aminder Virdee.