Biodesign Challenge Seminar: Sensing Self in Landscape (Comics, Plants, and Sensing)
Monday March 4 7-8:45pm
Wolff Conference Room, 6 East 16th Street 1103, Wolff Conference Room
Image Description: Hyungkoo Lee, Altering Facial Features with WH5, 2010., Digital print, 121x121cm.
Susan M. Squier
The Playful, Speculative Landscapes of Graphic Medicine
SUMMARY OF TALK: Comics combine visual images and words in a sequential form that allows the reader to move fluidly between the factual and the fictional, to imagine new landscapes and represent otherwise inaccessible internal worlds, and demonstrate the complexity of what is too often seen as a cut-and-dried medical issue. Comics about medicine, illness, and disability in the genre known as Graphic Medicine use the strategies of play and speculative thought to illuminate embodied human experiences of illness and disability because the perspective of the person with the illness or disability shapes the vision of these works. I will talk about two comics, one of which I discovered at the MoCCA (Museum of Comics and Cartoon Arts) Festival in NYC and the other which was published in the Graphic Medicine series I co-edit at Penn State Press, which use play and speculative thought to offer an alternative to the narrowly medical approach to illness and disability. Texts: I Am Not These Feet, by Kaisa Leka (Helsinki: Absolute Truth Press, 2008) and My Degeneration, by Peter Dunlap-Shohl (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015).
Madeline Schwartzman
See Yourself Sensing
Summary of Talk: Madeline Schwartzman delves into a range of futuristic proposals for the body and the senses, culled from her books See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception (Black Dog Publishing, London, 2011), and See Yourself X: Human Futures Expanded (Black Dog Press, 2018), as well through her conceptual brainstorming and electronic spacial explorations and installations. Her current series–Face Nature–turns Schwartzman into a human / plant hybrid, and lurches the artist and the viewer into pondering life in new ways.
BIOS
Susan Squier:
Susan Merrill Squier is Brill Professor Emeritus of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and English at Penn State University and Einstein Visiting Fellow, Freie Universität, Berlin. She is the author or editor of ten books, including Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawings as Metaphor (2017), Graphic Medicine Manifesto (2015), Babies inBottles: Twentieth-Century Visions of Reproductive Technology (1984), Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (2004) and Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet (2011). As Einstein Visiting Fellow, Freie Universität, Berlin, she is part of the PathoGraphics Project which studies the relations between literaryillness narratives and works of graphic medicine. She is co-editor of the book series Graphic Medicine at Penn State University Press as well as a co-organizer of the international series of annual conferences on comics and medicine, whose upcoming conference will happen in Brighton, England, in July 2019, on the topic “Que(e)ring Graphic Medicine.”
Madeline Schwartzman: See YourSelf Sensing
Madeline Schwartzman is a New York City writer, artist, curator and architect whose work explores human narratives and the human sensorium through social art, book writing, curating, and experimental video making. Her book See Yourself Sensing: Redefining 4 ` 4~ Perception(Black Dog Publishing, London, 2011), is a collection of futuristic proposals for the body and the senses. See Yourself X: Human Futures Expanded (Black Dog Press December 2018) explores the future of the human head. Schwartzman is currently working on Face Nature, a series of self-portraits with nature and electronics installed on her body. installations. Her current series–Face Nature–turns Schwartzman into a human / plant hybrid, and lurches the artist and the viewer into pondering life in new ways.www.madelineschwartzman.com