Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology

to offer critiques of big business and big science. Rogers is especially interested in whether an artist engaged in credible scientific procedures might still be called an artist, or if a scientist might themselves be considered an artist based on their engagement of the public imagination. In Chapter 6, Rogers discusses her own curatorial project, Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology. She explains how her intention was to establish public dialogue with, and participation in, scientific processes and knowledge-making procedures, not to fill a perceived knowledge deficit. It seems clear that Rogers’s ASTS project has stemmed from this kind of curatorial work. As a curator, she forms links between works to create new material assemblages through which knowledge may be produced. Similarly, the vision of art-science that Rogers outlines involves artists re-skilling, speculatively designing, or otherwise imaginatively engaging scientific protocols, to render novel assemblages of materials, people, and technologies that problematize art and science boundary concepts. One area that might be interesting to unpack further is the division of art and science processes into either “material” or “rhetorical” categories. Although Rogers acknowledges that these terms are imperfect, there perhaps remains a risk that, by describing everything in terms of material/ rhetorical agency, her analysis establishes new categories of division, even as she breaks down art/science dualisms. The rhetorical associations of a system cannot be changed without changing the materials assembled therein, and conversely, as the materials networked change, so too do the rhetorical positions through which they speak. That said, I sympathize with Rogers’ position: She is both a theorist aiming for a systematic analysis of art-science and a member of the art-science community. Adopting accessible, albeit imperfect, terms is arguably more impactful as a form of advocacy than would be a purist theoretical project with a correspondingly more limited audience. I think Rogers’s approach is commendable for this practical stance. It is clear how her theories can be applied, and so her work moves beyond the purely critical into the practically useful, which, if the intention is to build more equitable, aesthetically inclusive systems of knowledge, is an essential criterion for success. In this respect, Rogers comes across as sharing much with her case studies, such as the Blaschkas, whose scientific models she describes as “cutting-edge heuristic apparatuses” (p. 222); this definition could equally well be applied to Rogers’s own theoretical project.