Ooh La La: The Face(s) of Transplantation
Odds are you're still stuck in your cave or busy vetting a line-by-line assessment of donations to your personal cause if you haven't heard the news from the Cleveland Clinic. At the Distributed Presses blog, we hold tight to our particular penchant for the merging of art and science and couldn't be more engrossed by the minute-by-minute 23-hour account of the world's first human face transplant. Part of the fascinating commentary by surgeons involved, as featured in the New York Times, accounts for the discretionary lines between this high-risk experimental procedure and the social & affective dynamics of facial reconstitution. Says Dr. Eric Kodish, chairman of the Cleveland Clinic's Department of Bioethics, "This is not cosmetic surgery in any conventional sense." Where art thee, Philip K. Dick?
What's so fascinating about the ethos and radical aesthetic / scientific potential at stake here? And, more pressingly, what makes this the right moment for such an operation? In early 2008, FACT (Foundation for Art and Technology) in Liverpool brilliantly anticipated this trend with their influential exhibition SK-INTERFACES, curated by Jens Hauser. Exploring the concept of skin as a technological interface, both literally and metaphorically, the exhibition's accompanying volume provocatively treks through the multidisciplinary wake of this fusion of high art and cutting-edge scientific advances, drawing on politics, architecture, biotechnology, philosophy, and the history of the Western world in order to assess new milestones in this material (re)surfacing.
If that's not enough to wet (or even re-fuse?) your palette, then keep your eyes pealed for FACT / Liverpool University Press's Spring 2009 release Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty (edited by Andy Miah), a not-to-be-missed exploration of technological innovation through the lens of biocultural consumption that considers issues as diverse the ethics and aesthetics of human enhancement and our lost dreams for the space age, among other topics.
In any case, today's a day to celebrate our ability to remake our own somatic architecture—and mull over all the potential becomings at hand. I suggest a back-to-back screening of Robocop and The Bicycle Thief—as new frontiers shift around the body and sentiment.