The work makes connections between physical and virtual navigation through the direct depiction of geographic and medical explorations, and subsequently within the very nature of the piece, a website which exists virtually and can be accessed globally, with no physical restriction.
On entering the site you are welcomed by two appropriated images; one an allegorical etching depicting Spanish ships setting sail to conquer new worlds; the other a lateral slice of the human body taken from the Visible Human Project, where cadavers have been digitally and literally sliced into 1mm cross sections enabling detailed and accurate mapping of human anatomy. (The first Visible Human was sourced from a 39 year old convicted murderer who had donated his body to science, the juxtaposition of the images consequently draws reference to the convict populations who formed the first immigrant inhabitants of Australia).
The body is entered into and navigated through four significant portals; the brain, the heart, the feet and the reproductive organs. As pages unfold medical images overlap and merge, chromosomes overlay a wombed foetus and human organs ebb and flow hypnotically. The seductive and surreal imagery is coupled with texts (which also act as hyperlinks to navigate the viewer through the site) from the great explorers of the New World. These quotes are often personal, taken directly from the letters of James Cook, Christopher Columbus and Joseph Banks, which invite us to share in their excitement and sense of discovery. The images become metaphors for the act of exploration and discovery, and the impact of such endeavours on those visited; a circle of bones becomes a porthole through which young explorers snuck out at midnight out of sight of their master; disembodied hands (translucent X-rays) pass over the black screen like ships in the night, fluid and entrancing, seeming to suggest a direction to follow.
The links between the mapping of the globe and the human genome, are subtly interweaved throughout the site, and reach a climax when in a letter to naturalist Banks, Cook encourages him to “distribute among the inhabitants such things as will remain traces and testimonies of your having been there”. While this may have referred to the broad colonial activities of flag hoisting and religious conversion, the juxtaposition of a foetus slowly rotating beneath a grid of chromosome pairs encourages us to apply a more direct reading of explorers leaving traces of a genetic nature, where their explorations resulted in them entering the gene pool of the communities which they ‘discovered’.
As a ‘virtual’ artwork viewed on the world wide web there is a strong sense of irony, that over three hundred years ago brave and inquisitive men set sail into dangerous waters to explore unknown territories which we can now communicate with in an instant - I am currently sitting at the opposite end of the day in dreary Autumnal London, while Spring starts to bloom in the Southern Hemisphere, viewing the work in an ethereal realm.
Traces and Testimonies makes me think about the ambitious 18th century voyages of discovery to the New World and compare them to contemporary explorations, and how as our understanding of our physical world has increased we have started to investigate both outward into space, and inward into our own fundamental and complex workings. And it seems fairly obvious that our thirst for exploration and discovery is unending, so, where next?
Heather
Barnett
Artist | Curator
London, England
October 2002
