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Drawing Blood

Drawing Blood

By: Drawing Blood
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 Welcome to Drawing Blood, the podcast about art, science, and the macabre, hosted by Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin.Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin Art Science Social Sciences
Episodes
  • S3 Ep6: Seeing Voices, Margaret Watts Hughes, and the Science of the Invisible

    S3 Ep6: Seeing Voices, Margaret Watts Hughes, and the Science of the Invisible
    Sep 30 2024
    Emma and Christy discover Margaret Watts Hughes's beautiful 'voice figures', a series of images made through the direct action of her voice between 1885 and 1904. In this episode, we discuss the earliest sound recordings, scientific 'instruments' (it's a pun), cat pianos, severed ears, occult science, seaweed scrapbooks, women in STEM, logos and the word of God, visualising the invisible, the Little Mermaid, clairvoyant research, 'thought forms' and the death agonies of pigeons, science and feeling, and why sonic media is always already haunted. CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading. MEDIA DISCUSSED Margaret Watts Hughes, Impression Figure (c. 1904), courtesy of Cyfarthfa Castle Museum and Art Gallery Margaret Watts Hughes, Tree Form (before 1904) Portrait miniature example: Nicholas Hilliard, Queen Elizabeth I(1572) Anna Atkins, Dictyota Dichotomy (Forkweed) (1848) Illustration from Margaret Watts Hughes, ‘Visible Sound: Voice-Figures’, Century Magazine (1891) Margaret Watts Hughes's eidophone Example of page from an algae or seaweed scrapbook by Eliza A. Jordan (1848) Georgiana Houghton, Glory Be to God (1864) ‘Phonautography of the human voice at a distance’ (lines of recorded sound generated by Scott de Martinville’s ‘phonautograph’, 1857) The graphic method: Étienne-Jules Marey's sphygmograph (a predecessor of modern EKG machines, 1881) Louis Bertrand Castel’s ‘ocular harpsichord’ (1725) Isaac Newton's colour spectrum and musical scale analogy (1675) The cat piano (illustration from La Nature, 1883) The ‘ear phonograph’ of Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence J. Blake (1874), 2018 model by the Science Museum Jan Van Eyck, detail from Annunciation (c. 1434–36) Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, detail from The Annunciation showing raised gold lettering (1333) Hippolyte Baraduc, two cameraless photographs showing various feelings ('restless desire to have phenomena of the hereafter'; 'mental sadness'), 1894–1913 ‘The Music of Gounod’, illustration from Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater's Thought Forms (1901) ‘Aspiration to Enfold All’, illustration from Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater's Thought Forms (1901) ‘Radiating Affection’, illustration from Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater's Thought Forms (1901) ‘The Intention to Know’, illustration from Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, Thought Forms (1901) Illustration from Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater's Occult Chemistry (1908) Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_ Follow our Blue Sky @drawingbloodpod.bsky.social ‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling, image courtesy of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgeons All audio content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!
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    58 mins
  • S3 Ep5: David Cronenberg's 'Crimes of the Future', Surgery, and Performance Art

    S3 Ep5: David Cronenberg's 'Crimes of the Future', Surgery, and Performance Art
    Aug 31 2024
    Emma and Christy watch David Cronenberg’s 2022 film Crimes of the Future, exploring the themes of this work while also connecting to some of the director’s earlier movies. In this episode, we discuss the fears and the pleasures of the human body and cutting into it; surgery as sex; Cronenbergian body horror; the monstrous as art; being and becoming cyborgs; evolution and pain; technology as prosthesis; the posthuman; contemporary performance art (good and bad); the cosmetic gaze; the body as text; and meaning making. CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading. MEDIA DISCUSSED David Cronenberg, dir., Crimes of the Future (2022) First scene with boy playing on beach, cruise ship overturned in water Saul Tenser in the Orchid Bed TVs showing ‘BODY IS REALITY’ during Saul and Caprice’s performance Scuttling, insect-like bureaucrats of the National Organ Registry Bureaucrat of the National Organ Registry telling Saul that ‘surgery is new sex’ David Cronenberg, dir., Crash (1996) Saul Tenser in the BreakFaster Chair Saul Tenser’s facial expression at the end of the film Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (1652) David Cronenberg, dir., Videodrome (1983) The hand-gun in Videodrome David Cronenberg, dir., The Fly (1986) Odile (decorative surgery) performance art Klinek (ear man) performance art ORLAN, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan (1990-1993) Stelarc, Ear on Arm (2007 - ) The Swan reality show (2004) The autopsy scene Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_ Follow our Blue Sky @drawingbloodpod.bsky.social ‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling, image courtesy of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgeons All audio content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • S3 Ep4: Tattoos, 'Deviant' Signs, and Surveilled Skins

    S3 Ep4: Tattoos, 'Deviant' Signs, and Surveilled Skins
    Jul 31 2024
    Emma and Christy present a brief history of tattooing in Europe. We talk tattoos as art history; sailors and soldiers; the archival (in)visibility of tattoos; the ‘Cook myth’, colonial contact, and contagion; syphilitic tattoos and pathologisation; working class bodies; tattoos and material culture; criminal anthropology; pain; the skin ego; danger and deviance; the limits of interpretation and (il)legibility of signs; ‘fugitive’ images; pilgrim tattoos; and art histories from below. CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE IMAGES WE DISCUSS, as well as complete show notes, references, and suggestions for further reading. MEDIA DISCUSSED Human skin with tattoos of two women's heads and a sailor, French (1880–1920), Wellcome Collection / Science Museum Gustave Caillebotte, Rue de Paris, temps de pluie (1877) Human skin with tattoo of a mermaid, Polish (late 19th–early 20th century), photographed by Katarzyna Mirczak (2010). For the exact specimen we discuss see Lodder, 'Things of the Sea' (2015), fig. 11. Photograph showing a man with tattoos and a black eye (late 19th–early 20th century), published in Lombroso, Criminal Man (1911) Staffordshire cream-ware bowl with inscription 'When this you see,/ remember me / And bear me in your mind / Let all the world,/ say what they will,/ Speak of me as you find', (late 18th century) Diagram showing Ötzi the Ice Man's tattoos (c. 3230 BCE), from Krutak, 'Therapeutic Tattooing in the Arctic' (2019) Sydney Parkinson (the artist on Captain Cook's first voyage to New Zealand), portrait of a Maori man with facial tattoos (1769) Print showing signs signs of syphilis on the site of a tattoo (1889), from 'Notes of Cases on an Outbreak of Syphilis following on Tattooing' (1889) Wax anatomical venus, Josephinum Museum of the Medical University of Vienna (late 18th century) Princess of Ukok (Siberia), with tattoos (5th century BCE) Print of the pilgrim tattoo of Ratge(r) Stubbe (c. 1669), showing Arms of Jerusalem tattoo Example of material culture with iconography similar to contemporaneous tattoos: Convict love token, 'When this you see, remember me' (c. 1831-1832) Tattoos by Sutherland Macdonald (late 19th century) Photograph of incarcerated person known as 'Fromain' (1901), Archives de la préfecture de police, Paris, published in Angel, 'Roses & Daggers' (2015) Drawing from Lombroso archives of the tattooed body of incarcerated person Francesco Spiteri, with labels describing and categorising his tattoos (1889), Museum of Criminal Anthropology, University of Turin Dried human skin specimen from the body of 'Fromain' (late 19th century), Wellcome Collection / Science Museum, published in Angel, 'Roses & Daggers' (2015) CREDITS Visit our website drawingbloodpod.com Follow our Twitter @drawingblood_ Follow our Bluesky @drawingbloodpod.bsky.social ‘Drawing Blood’ cover art © Emma Merkling All audio and content © Emma Merkling and Christy Slobogin Intro music: ‘There Will Be Blood’ by Kim Petras, © BunHead Records 2019. We’re still trying to get hold of permissions for this song – Kim Petras text us back!!
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    54 mins
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