Search results for "technology "
stethoscope - fragment
In discussion with Fran - we were going through a box of old and antiquated medical instruments he'd collected, objects of curiosity, memory and history - we noted how the stethoscope serves not only to provide a 'virtual world' as Jonathan Sterne puts it (an acoustical representation), but acts as a sort of 'distantiation device' - a prop which helps the doctor to adopt a role and enter into the performance in which the human body is objectified.
Placing a mediating device between two human beings facilitates the creation of a subject who manipulates an object. We parcel off the problem-of-the-body into an objectified, if not objective, realm which we believe is transcended by the physical theatre of the stethoscope itself, and the disembodied, privileged knowledge of the physician. We defer our formal discomfort by effacing our embodied being.
I imagine a time-lapse evolution depicting the history of the stethoscope: play it in reverse and the long looping cord shortens and hardens into a trumpet; the forceps-like earpieces exit the ear, fuse and widen into the mouth of a horn; the bell and diaphragm device contrived for human contact simplifies into a chest piece with a hole. Then, finally, the whole instrument disappears and the physicians ear falls onto the patient's chest in a tight human embrace.
The artist as a prophet of his own legacy
Tuesday, 03 October, 2006 - 06:50
I caught the last half hour or so of BBC4's showing of Hereafter, a biopic of the pianist Glenn Gould, and was sorry not to have seen it all. I will almost certainly need to buy this DVD.
What I did manage to see was an interview with him in which he was talking about recordings of his work versus live performance. The interviewer was laying it on very thickly about how nothing compares to the live performance. Gould, however, was having none of it. We've always been subservient to the performer, who calls all the shots. Now, anyone can control how they consume these performances. Never mind the fact that the phone might ring. How many more people get to hear it at all, and isn't that recompense for the lost aura of the live performance?
Pleasingly, you can see loads of Glenn Gould performances on YouTube right now. His Goldberg Variations is amazing. And I think he would have approved.
The Witchhunt Tendency
Thursday, 29 September, 2005 - 06:50
Watching Scorsese's biopic of Bob Dylan, 'No Direction Home', one thing stuck out was the fact that guidelines issued to the FBI on recognising communists was that they might be carrying guitars.
This pattern - that a person's use of technologies of communication sifgnifies their nefarious intent - is repeated endlessly, most recently in the case of a man with an interest computers and telecoms who became a suspected terrorist.
And today I hear that a man who heckled Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, at the Labour Party conference, was held under the Terrorism Act.
Guitars, amateur radio kit, and now your very voice, are all weapons of dissent which you may want to think about twice before using.
