zacharytDESMA9: medicine + teche + arte

For thousands of years, humans have been very interested in the topic of our very own anatomy. The act of dissecting cadavers, then drawing and recording the details discovered was (and still is), however, frowned upon in most cultures. Of course there were still many artists that studied the human anatomy in great detail using this method, but it would be until the twentieth century that we would be able to look at the human anatomy in greater depth using less invasive techniques. X-rays, CAT scans, and MRIs, to name a few, were developed to take pictures of the body noninvasively and give us images with very specific details as to what is all going on in different bones, organs, tissues, etc.

In the sci-fi film The Island, people can have clones of themselves in case they ever needed an organ transplant or something of the sort, but the public is unaware that these clones are conscious beings and not vegetative husks like the cloning company assured. This film brought the idea of reconstructive plastic surgery to another level by demonizing the concept of having clones used for our benefit and that the whole idea of ‘Playing God’ ultimately has its consequences.

In Diane Gromala’s TED talk, she depicts virtual reality programs being used in all sorts of fashions to cause intra-sensory conflicts, or even to relieve pain. When immersed in a virtual simulation, users may find that if they ’move’ rectilinearly through their surroundings, a proprioceptive conflict can cause them to have sensations of weightlessness and other sensory abnormalities associated with the use of drugs. This is really fascinating because with these images and sounds, we can use the power of meditative focus to essentially achieve the bodily ‘high’ commonly associated with drugs. Gromala also presented the idea of using monitoring techniques, to allow users to interact directly with their virtual environment, and the closer that they are able to achieve a meditative state, the imagery and sounds surrounding them becomes clearer. By having them focus inward as opposed to outward, their bodies temporarily “forget” about the pain they have.