Visible Human Project

Waldby, C. (1997). "Revenants: The Visible Human Project and the Digital Uncanny." Body and Society 3(1): 1-16.

Waldby, C. (2000). "Virtual Anatomy: From the Body in the Text to the Body on the Screen." Journal of Medical Humanities 21(2): 85-107.

Waldby, C. (2000). The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine. London and New York, Routledge.


Catherine Waldby's work on the VHP is not to be missed. She describes the VHP, a new digital technology that can replicate human beings internally and externally. She claims that the technology is ontologically revolutionary, arguing it to reflect a change in the relationship between life and death. Waldby suggests that public interest with the VHP can be situated in a history of popular fascination with and anxiety about medicine technologies that represent the human body. She considers that digital visualisation intensifies the altered distinction be life and death facilitated by photography.

"Virtual space as the matrix for new form of life"

VHP captures narrative of Frankenstein - the medical experiment, the reanimated corpse, the monstrosity of animated death.

Viroid Life

I like Keith Ansell-Pearson's work a lot. This book tackles a number of assumptions about concepts of technology, life, evolution, and the machinic. It argues for a symbiosis between organic and non-organic matter,between biology and the machine, essentially claiming that our evolution takes us further from the coldness of metal and closer to the wetware of biological life.