Giving Bodies back to Data

Activity

Invited speaker

Description

Pa.STIS opens 2022 with a seminar by Silvia Casini, senior lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, with a presentation of her book “Giving Bodies Back to Data. Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology” published by MIT Press. The book provides an examination of the bodily, situated aspects of data-visualization work, looking at visualization practices around the development of MRI technology.
Today, in fact, our bodies are scanned, probed, imaged, sampled and transformed into data by clinicians and technologists. In her book, Silvia Casini reveals the affective relations and materiality that turn data into image – and in so doing, gives bodies back to data. Opening the black box of MRI technology, Casini examines the bodily and situated aspects of visualization practices around the development of this technology by combining history, theory, laboratory ethnography, archival research, and collaborative art-science. She presents an in-depth ethnographic study of the development of MRI development at the University of Aberdeen’s biomedical physics laboratory, from the construction of the first whole-body scanner for clinical purposes through the evolution of FFC-MRI.

Period	19 Jan 2022
Held at	University of Padua, Italy
Degree of Recognition	National