Re-Corporealising MRI Data_ a Practice-based investigation into MRI
Link to PhD: University of Portsmouth, titled Re-corporealising MRI Data: A Practice-based Investigation through Art and Science.
Publication with .able journal can be found here
Publications on HAL can be found here
ABSTRACT
The collection of works by Jennifer Crouch in this section of their website was created as part of my practice-based PhD project carried out at the University of Portsmouth. This research project began with MRI and makes use of scientific knowledge and personal experiences of medicine, treatment for breast cancer and the health care system.
Being largely isolated from how computational technologies work generally, there is an increasing incentive to make their internal processes accessible. Through this research project and the experience of making the artefacts exhibited, I developed embodied approaches to understanding biomedical imaging that explore the ways in which MRI data is organised and codified. My sculptural, woven, drawn and painted practices draw on the mathematical and physical processes of MRI.
Sculptural ‘phantoms’ investigate the interface between body and machine and are semi-figurative constructs informed by how the body interacts with the physics of MRI. I also developed a weaving practice as an embodied method to investigate how analogue signals in MRI are transformed into digital biomedical images. My woven work is a non-pictorial deconstructive reconfiguration of mathematical phenomena needed in signal analysis. My aim in this was to investigate, through making, how this aspect of MRI technology works.
The creative acts of drawing, illustration, making diagrams and paintings chart the entanglements of the body, bodily materials, and their interactions with MRI. The visuals and images produced also act as a map connecting the various elements of my art practice to my findings, materials, processes, places, systems, environments and my experience of being a cancer patient.
