Giving Bodies Back to Data takes us on a fascinating journey into the history and complexities of MRI technologies. Specifically, the book emphasizes the role that aesthetics, affectivity, and craft practice play in the processes leading to the production of and the artistic responses to these technologies.
The introduction presents readers with three compelling scenes that immediately grab their attention and set the tone for the entire book. In the first, Santiago Ramon Cajàl, equipped with pen and ink, sketches neurons by hand while sitting at his desk in Madrid in 1882. For the second scene the author fast-forwards to 1974, when physicist James Hutchinson, biologist Margaret Forster, and the biomedical physics laboratory team in Aberdeen produced the iconic first MRI image of a mouse with a broken neck. The data resulting from a small magnetic system were translated into an easily readable color-coded image with the help of color...