Alexa Wright

Messy entanglements: research assemblages in heart transplantation discourses and practices

The paper engages with a variety of data around a supposedly single biomedical event, that of heart transplantation. In conventional discourse, organ transplantation constitutes an unproblematised form of spare part surgery in which failing biological components are replaced by more efficient and enduring ones, but once that simple picture is complicated by employing a radically interdisciplinary approach, any biomedical certainty is profoundly disrupted. Our aim, as a cross-sectorial partnership, has been to explore the complexities of heart transplantation by explicitly entangling research from the arts, biosciences and humanities without privileging any one discourse. It has been no easy enterprise yet it has been highly productive of new insights. We draw on our own ongoing funded research with both heart donor families and recipients to explore our different perceptions of what constitutes data and to demonstrate how the dynamic entangling of multiple data produces a constitutive assemblage of elements in which no one can claim priority. Our claim is that the use of such research assemblages and the collaborations that we bring to our project breaks through disciplinary silos to enable a fuller comprehension of the significance and experience of heart transplantation in both theory and practice.

At the edge of my-self

The issue of subjective experience is one which concerns most artists. In my own work this is used to work out the relationship between ‘the self’ and its physical manifestation, ‘the body’. Three works are discussed here: After Image, a series of digitally manipulated photographs which visualise phantoms described by people who have had limbs amputated. This was my first formal collaboration with scientists. ‘I’, a subsequent series of digitally manipulated photographs, made in collaboration with people with congenital disabilities, is concerned with dissolution of the perceived distinction between the ‘normal’, and the ‘other’ (disabled or deformed), body. Lastly, Face Value is an interactive computer installation, made in collaboration with scientist Dr. Alf Linney, and designed to invite its audience to consider the automatic and unconscious judgements each of us makes about character based on (facial) appearance. Despite its dependence on digital technologies, my work remains adamantly physical.