Doctors and researchers regularly rely on CT scanners to create images of body parts like brains, chests and knees. But an artist-turned-medical-student in Manhattan is using one such machine to peer into the meat and guts of cultural icons like the Big Mac, the Barbie and the iPhone, creating whimsical and occasionally creepy images.
Unlike a physician, he is not looking mainly for pathologies. Yet on some level, his work allows viewers to diagnose cultural objects, finding ominous or surprising details within them. This is inevitable, he said, given the association between CT scanners and medicine.
Still, he also aims to create images that are simply arresting, he added.
Formerly an art professor at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, Mr. Stuelke is now a third-year medical student at Weill Cornell Medical College. Since 2007, he has scanned dozens of objects in a CT scanner owned by the Biomedical Imaging Center at Weill Cornell. (The center donates scanner time.)
When an object is scanned, the machine produces 200 to 500 image slices. Mr. Stuelke loads this data into a computer program that allows him to assign different colors to areas of different density. Mr. Stuelke’s results include a Barbie with flaming orange hair and articulated white leg bones; a skeletal iPhone with a dizzying array of connections that resemble a fantastical, tricked-out city; and a translucent wind-up bunny whose internal mechanisms are disturbingly reminiscent of a bomb.
Mr. Stuelke was inspired by the work of Robert Heineken, a photographer known in part for whimsical images of food. Mr. Stuelke’s first scan, in 2007, was of a thawed TV dinner. More recently, he has created a Big Mac that features bright yellow sesame seeds on the bun and yellow glue spots, which mark where the box is held together, as well as a box of chicken nuggets.
The work is on display at www.radiologyart.com.
Critics may ask whether these images offer more than sumptuous, high-tech eye candy, and Mr. Stuelke does not necessarily resist that interpretation. “Some of them are just beautiful,” he said. “I mean, who knew a bunch of chicken nuggets could be gorgeous?”
Source from NYTimes
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