A lot of the medical imagery has to do with my own biography. I had open heart surgery, I had knee replacements, I had a hiatal hernia, etc. Every time you go for surgery, you get a whole spectrum of imaging. Of course, I've been doing research in imaging technology across the board for close to twenty years. When you think about it, medical imaging is actually quite new. The first major medical image was the x-ray in 1895. That was the first time you got imaging of anything that's in the bodily interior.

Definitions get you into that time trap, and I'm very much more process-focused. Take Lucy, for example. Lucy is famous largely because she has almost a total skeleton. The more sophisticated we get with instruments, the more we can find out. Through CT scans of her skeleton, they now think she died falling out of a tree because of the way her bones are broken. If nineteenth and twentieth century technologies can retroactively transform our bodiment, what then do the technologies we now use do?

I argue that science would be much richer if it were multisensory. The problem with instrumentation is that instruments, unlike our senses, can be monosensory. Since the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum - which is really the discovery that all energy coming from something has a wave form - in theory we could image anything along that spectrum. In fact, we don't, because only certain parts of the spectrum have been instrumentalized. But the new thing is computerization. You can take all the data, the measurement of the frequencies, and transform it into an image.

I never went into aesthetics. Aesthetics is what philosophers have to say about art, and a lot of them take an analytics position and raise the question, "What is an art object?" As soon as you fall into that trap, an artist is going to come along and say, "That isn't art - it's something else." That's a hopeless gig.

You have a long history of changes in diagnosis, from no touching to touching, to assessing acoustics and visuals. But visual is a problem, because if you're a living being you can't see beyond the surface of the skin. Now you don't have that problem. Laparoscopic surgery, inserting a camera into the body, is sometimes called "Nintendo surgery" - the best training for laparoscopic surgeries has actually been video games.

I can't experience my brain because I'm inside of it. If you're imaging your brain, you can also find scary things. As one ages, your brain shrinks. And how much it shrinks, and where it shrinks, relates to conditions like Alzheimer's and dementia.

A lot of the medical imagery has to do with my own biography. I had open heart surgery, I had knee replacements, I had a hiatal hernia, etc. Every time you go for surgery, you get a whole spectrum of imaging. Of course, I've been doing research in imaging technology across the board for close to twenty years. When you think about it, medical imaging is actually quite new. The first major medical image was the x-ray in 1895. That was the first time you got imaging of anything that's in the bodily interior.