31-3594

Lidija Kononenko

Royal Academy of Arts, London

2020 Winner

The jury praises the interactivity and playful combination of imagery of a human peripheral nerve with a text-based story that unfolds at various scales and highlights the role of the nervous system in the human condition.

The interactive work can be viewed here: https://lidijakononenko.com/31-3594

31-3594 is a microscope specimen, a map of symptoms, and an investigation of the unknown. As the web page is loaded, a small pink speck appears with a magnification function. With each click a scan of peripheral nerve reveals more of itself, filling the screen with text layered over it. Like other microscopic images, this scan is distributed across screens, whilst anonymised by law. Pierced through light, the subject is known through vision with an unknown history. The medical image is an evidence of the body, health and pathology. Recordings allow absence of the person, substituting them with representation of the mass. To read the text the piece demands the viewer to search the specimen closely, finding the other’s symptoms. The writing is fragmented, exploring sleep as a voluntary act of losing one’s own consciousness. As sleep is still largely an uncharted territory for science, the writing utilises the contradictions in linguistic analysis, and thus asking – what can a picture of a cross-sectioned nerve tell us about falling asleep?

This work was made with help of Light Microscopy Core Facility, UCL, ICH. It can be embedded on any website.