“Living” Anatomies 1900/2000: Cinematography of Serial Sections and Voxel-based Volume Visualisation

Abstract

Around the turn of the last century -1900 - the new medium film was conceptualised as “Living Photographs,” today - around 2000 - a different kind of media-application is called “living:” that of the computer. The popular and scientific representations of the “Visible Human Project™” form an especially interesting example, because in it a forgotten prehistory of the “information age” can be found in the motifs and techniques of early medical cinematography, which animated serial sections of human tissues. Karl Reicher’s and Victor Widakowich’s film experiments, since 1907, have led to specific concepts of time and space, which prefigure not only the discourse-figure of “living” media artefacts, but the anatomical visualisation of human bodies in Virtual Reality as well. This history of scientific imaging is reflected also in the filmic avant-garde of the 1920s, especially in Oskar Fischinger outstanding “Wax-Experiments.”