Justine Cooper

Justine Cooper works with medical imaging in her art practice. She uses these scans to restructure her own body. These scans create a new language through which to understand the body. A digital language that translates physical matter into something technology (and doctor's) can understand. Cooper discusses the unseen and seen, the virtual and the physical. The same ideas that I discuss in my own work with ultrasound scans. 

Trap - self portrait, Justine Cooper, 1998. 

"In Trap - self portrait (1998) and Reach (2000) I have had Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans - a medical imaging technology - taken of my hands and head, respectively. A restructuring of (my) body space takes place that necessitates the viewer using their own body to move around the work and reconstitute the single slices back into a unified space. What I find interesting are the translations/transformations it is possible to put ourselves through and how they emblemize technology's ability to impact and shape our conceptions of space. At the point of imaging, solid organic tissue is transposed into an ephemeral digital language of zeroes and ones, in much the same way that a cipher uses substitution to encrypt information. In the resulting physical work I attempt to retain some of the ephemerality of that earlier translation into digital space, some of the obscurity of the cipher, while offsetting them against the apparent tangibility of the body. Instead of a simple dichotomy between invisible and apparent, virtual and physical, continuity and displacement, an attempt at a less distinct or concrete disclosure is being made where the gap becomes the viewer's space."

Trap II - self portrait, Justine Cooper, 90 x 90 x100cm, perspex, film and stainless steel, 2003

"Trap II - self portrait (2003) I had Magnetic Resonance Imaging scans - a medical imaging technology - taken of head. A restructuring of (my) body space takes place that necessitates the viewer using their own body to move around the work and reconstitute the single slices back into a unified space. What I find interesting are the translations/transformations it is possible to put ourselves through and how they emblemize technology's ability to impact and shape our conceptions of space. At the point of imaging, solid organic tissue is transposed into an ephemeral digital language of zeroes and ones, in much the same way that a cipher uses substitution to encrypt information. In the resulting physical work I attempt to retain some of the ephemerality of that earlier translation into digital space, some of the obscurity of the cipher, while offsetting them against the apparent tangibility of the body. Instead of a simple dichotomy between invisible and apparent, virtual and physical, continuity and displacement, an attempt at a less distinct or concrete disclosure is being made where the gap becomes the viewer's space."

http://justinecooper.com/