Abstract: A multidisciplinary team at Rice University transformed the Texas Medical Center (TMC) Library’s collection of rare anatomy atlases into a physical-digital, human-sized atlas-of-atlases. The Electronic Vesalius installation gives these old books new life, informed by contemporary media theory and the centuries of medical and aesthetic criticism provoked by these multimedia image-texts.
When I started at the Humanities Research Center in 2015, the medical humanities minor was just getting off the ground, and I was becoming more interested in digital remediation. Sitting in the back of my office was a foamcore-printed cutout of the fifth table of muscles from Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis Fabrica, on loan from the Texas Medical Center Library’s McGovern Historical Research Center. His name was “Andy.” I found myself wondering, after W.J.T. Mitchell, what does this image want?
Diving into the TMC archives, I learned that this book and its visual representations of the human body were a touchstone for major debates at the intersection of the medical humanities, the history of science, and art history. Indeed, to ask what this image wanted is to ask about the history of objectifying the body. Over time, the project turned into a critique of interactivity as a design principle.
I partnered with Rice faculty, staff, and students. What we built was a low-touch-resolution, high-image-fidelity interactive, which tells viewers stories about the body and its history of representation. A traditional touchscreen connected to our interface pulls up textual treatments of image collections, showing techniques and objects from art historical and medical sources.