Speechless @ Body Worlds
December 27, 2006
As I stood there frozen in one spot, sketchbook in one hand, wearing my blue museum temporary pass for artists, only my hand and eyes moving rapidly back and forth across the page to the miniature hands, feet, eyelashes before me, I felt like time stopped. I could hear words around me and feel the presence of others but I was intensely focussed.
It was not what I had expected. I heard voices speak of someone they knew who was born prematurely. They guessed at the number of weeks so they could make comparisons. There might have been thirty people, maybe as many as sixty people who passed by during the 90 minutes I spent in that small room with those six glass cases. I heard in their comments what I was thinking and feeling as I drew. Not a single one made an inappropriate comment, not a single joke or smart remark. There was no fear, disgust or disrespect.
I have felt this in front of moving works of art by Rubens, Rembrandt, Jordaens, Escher, Akpaliapik. I have never experienced this in a museum like this before. Where is this situated in terms of museology? or in terms of the Exhibition of Cultures? Science and art have come together here to create a new knowledge system.
There are moments that artists experience while drawing from life, even still life. A detail reveals itself as if it was not there a moment ago. It’s just the way the eye automatically eliminates ‘noise’, the confusion of details that prevent us from seeing the whatness of things. But when you take 30 minutes, an hour, three hours to draw one thing, those hidden details become unforgettable. Suddenly I could see — with complete clarity — fingernails, the balls of the toes, wrinkles like a faint pencil mark creating baby frowns . . . I could imagine the shape of the womb.
I asked myself if the mother or child grieved to see us before this portrayal. No, it was more like a skillfully carved sculpture than an irreverent glance. It was after all created by the hand of God, before it was prepared for this place by scientists, technicians, artists and inventors. I actually silently prayed to see if there was any disrespect in the process of creating or exhibiting these forms. I wanted to feel the presence of a lost soul if there was any. The only souls I felt were living and like me, they were in awe.
Science World, Vancouver, British Columbia where I visited the exhibit and the Institute of Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany where inventor/artist Gunther Von Hagens has his headquarters, require that all artists wear a special pass while drawing in the exhibition space and that they send a copy to them within two weeks of the museum visit. This is the first of four drawings that I will be uploading to fulfill that requirement. The original sketches were done in a sketchbook c. 10″ x 6.5″ using a 0.5mm Pentel P205 pencil. I completed four drawings in c. 2 – 2 1/2 hours.
For more information on Body Worlds 1, 2 and/or 3 and the inventor/artist Gunther Von Hagens (b. 1945) see below:
Von Hagens, Gunther. Body Worlds http://www.bodyworlds.com/en/pages/home.asp
Body Worlds 3 http://www.scienceworld.bc.ca/whats_on/Body-Worlds/overview.htm
Synaptic gasp, neural architectonics and Descartes’ error
November 29, 2006
This is a work in process vaguely entitled Synaptic Gasp. The synaptic cleft in the human brain reminds me of the gap between the hand of God and Adam in Michaelangelo’s visualization of Creation.
Neurons must be triggered by a stimulus to produce nerve impulses, which are waves of electrical charge moving along the nerve fibres. When the neuron receives a stimulus, the electrical charge on the inside of the cell membrane changes from negative to positive. A nerve impulse travels down the fibre to a synaptic knob at its end, triggering the release of chemicals (neurotransmitters) that cross the gap between the neuron and the target cell, stimulating a response in the target (Baggaley 2001:104).
My mind is stuck on the image of the gap. That’s the leap of faith between that which we can know and that which is beyond our capacity to know. In the human brain this synaptic gap is so microscopic no one has ever seen it. But there are amazing images that are somewhat like science fiction as artists attempt to compile scientific data into visualizations of what it might look like. I am not attempting to be a science illustrator. But I think somehow this image will be like a cartography of a way of thinking that resonates more with complex hyperlinkages than with the human brain. I have been working on this Adobe Photoshop Image which seems to keep getting larger and larger.
This is the larger version of Synaptic Gasp,
originally uploaded by ocean.flynn.
I used the starry night wallpaper for the background. I did a pencil drawing of the the neural architecture learning as I was drawing. And I keep making sketches of close-ups so now I am trying to imagine terminal nerve fibres entwined in neurofilament, proteins at the interface of the downstream end of neuron’s dendritic spine and an excitary synapse.
The brain is a supersystem of systems. Each system is composed of an elaborate interconnection of small but macroscopic cortical regions and subcortical nuclei, which are made of microscopic local circuits, which are made of neurons, all of which are connected by synapses (Damasio 1994:30).
Damasio’s elegant text reads like poetry. He describes the neural underpinnings of reason and challenges Cartesian dualisms of mind/body, emotions/reason. Feelings and logical thinking are not like oil and water.
The “body [. . .] represented in the brain [constitutes] an indispensable frame of reference for the neural process that we experience as the mind (Damasio 1994:xvi).”
Our bodies are the ground reference for the construction we make of the world. Our embodied selves construct the ever-present sense of subjectivity, our experience. The body becomes is the instrument through which we construct our most refined thoughts and actions (Damasio 1994:xvi).
Churchland takes this reasoning to imply that we, our subjective selves — our very consciousness — are merely chemical reactions, synapses firing across synaptic gaps for purely physical reasons that science alone (not religion) will one day explain and interpret for us.
The ontology of things ─ objects, substance, stuff are all one thing ─ raises questions about the world’s origin or original principle (arche) and its nature (physis). The Conflicting-Worlds model holds that science and religion are mutually exclusive ways of knowing. Science is one ontological perspective, a way of studying what exists and ways of being of different kinds of things. Religion provides another ontological perspective or another way of adding something to the study of what exists. Those who adopt the Same-Worlds-Model, argue that science and religion are different epistemologies not different ontologies. Probably most of those who believe in the Same-Worlds-Model believe in a Higher Power, a God, Divine Architect in some form, who created man with the capacity and responsibility to explore logic, pure mathematics and physics. I can believe what I want but I like to read from both sides of the Möbius Strip.
Flashback: A uniformed unsmiling, fully armed police officer pulled me over. What had I done? What was I, my young, idealistic, apolitical and therefore politically naïve self ─ doing there in a Third World country under an unstable, potentially dangerous, communist, military dictatorship? The officer leaned into the open window on the passenger side of our old Renault 4. There was a long silent pause as he decided what to do with this flushed creature whose hands were clenched on the steering wheel like a ship’s railing in a storm. He reached in and picked up the book on the front car seat and calmly asked me a question in a voice that could have been saying, “Did you know you failed to stop back there?” But that’s not what he asked. Instead, I can still hear his words even decades later. He asked me, “Do you pray?” Is this a threat? No, he was fingering the book entitled Livres de prière indicating that he too prayed and would appreciate having the book. As I drove away trembling I looked in the rear view mirror as he opened the book, then pocketed it.
After I returned to my Western home and graduate studies, I could not forget this incident which repeated itself in many forms. In spite of the pervasive even dogmatic message that the logical next step in human consciousness resided in the 20th century’s western form of atheism, humanism and materialism most people many still living in fragmented nation states that were former colonies ─ still believe that humans are spiritual beings and that some form of prayer unites us all even if it is a silent “Help!”
For more on the body/mind duality debate see Dawkins, Pinker, Fodor, Searle. According to Richard Dawkins (1976 SG, 2006 GD) these scientific and religious ways of knowing are conflicting and mutually exclusive.
Heraclites described the ontological ultimate stuff a process, a ceaseless flux like fire, not a substance retaining its identity through time.
These sources include:
Baggaley, Ann, Ed. (2001), “Anatomy of the Human Body,” Human Body, Dorling Kindersley Publishing: NY, p. 104.
Damasio, Antonio R., 1994, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Grosset/Putnam: New York.
Damasio, Hanna, (1994) “Gage’s skull, illustrations” in Damasio, Antonio R., 1994, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, Grosset/Putnam: New York. p. 31-2.
Johnson, Graham, (2005), “The Synapse Revealed,” 23 September 2005, Science Magazine and the National Science Foundation. The first place winner of the Science and Engineering Visualization Challengewas Graham Johnson from Medical Media, Boulder, Colorado. His image is described on Science Magazine’s web page:
Deep inside the brain, a neuron prepares to transmit a signal to its target. To capture that fleeting moment, Graham Johnson based this elegant drawing on ultra-thin micrographs of sequential brain slices. After scanning a sketch into 3D modeling software, he colored the image and added texture and glowing lighting reminiscent of a scanning electron micrograph.
Bateke Mask (1998-9) Acrylic on Arches paper (30″ x 22.5″)
November 15, 2006
We left the P. R. Congo in 1989 taking very little with us. We had purchased the masks from a Congolese who came to our home, sang songs for us in Kicongo and even posed for two portraits, one for me and one for him. At that time he was concerned because this generation of youth in his village no longer wanted to learn how to make these masks. I learned later in preparing for a Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada that Picasso had a mask similar to this one collected in the early 1900s..
The warm, dark wood of the interior of the A-frame cottage on the lake contrasted with the cold, blue-white snow and December sky. Coming back to Canadian winters was just part of the unexpected reverse cultural shock experienced by those returning to their countries of origin after extended time away. By 1999 when I painted this we were all living our Canadian lives enjoying winter again with ice skating on frozen lakes like Lac Gauvreau, La Peche, Quebec.
Selected webliography and bibliography
Robert, Anne-Cécile. 2006. “Du cauchemar à l’espoir? Rêve d’une ‘seconde indépendance’ sur le continent africain.” Le monde diplomatique.November 2006.