The human body configuration in the virtual environment. The Visible Human Project: an artistic approach

Abstract

Medical images of the interior body through imaging technologies as Magnetic Resonance are increasingly presents in our culture. The representation of the interior body is no longer a perishable physical object, but an incorruptible and manipulable set of data you can approach from wherever you are and from any field of knowledge. The aim of this article is bringing to light the use of medical imaging data by artists, considering different levels of reading apart from the diagnostic one. The connection between the cases brought in this article is the Visible Human Project, supported by the National Library of Medicine (1994-1996), from which an extend iconography has unmistakably filled the cyberspace. Two cadavers dataset are freely used by scientists, artists, publicists and anonymous users, and enable us to think about concepts as hypervisibility, virtual space, data manipulation, avatar and transparency, all of them determining new ways of body representation in our society.