The Presence of the Absence: sensory aesthetics and Magnetic Resonance Imaging

In Giving Bodies Back to Data, Casini opens the black box of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), unpacking a rich history of technological development that blends physics, engineering, medicine, and people, with their bodies, their senses and their complex aliveness in space and time. The book’s title is programmatic and the main argument is that in the arduous process of developing complex technologies, there sometimes lies a spectacle: the presence of the absence of those for whom these technologies are developed, or whom they should serve. Medical imaging technologies deal with both the bodies of the medical doctors who should be able to interpret the operational images produced by MRI, and with the bodies of their patients. While the sight with the way in which we interpret colour and colour differences played an important role in the aesthetic decisions involved in developing MRI outputs, currently these operational images exist far away from the bodies of the people they represent. As compared to Dumit’s Picturing Personhood or to Van Dijck’s The Transparent Body, where the focus is on analyzing the vast mediatization of these images and how imaging technology changes the cultural conceptualization of human bodies, Casini focuses on the path towards the technological development itself. The book comes as a response to American cultural anthropologist Joseph Dumit’s call to subvert the history and models of biomedicine and neuroscience, and to remain a humanist in today’s world (Dumit 2012, 235).