This volume addresses the interdependencies between visual technologies and epistemology with regard to our perception of the medical body. It explores the relationships between the imagination, the body, and concrete forms of visual representations: Ranging from the Renaissance paradigm of anatomy, to Foucault's "birth of the clinic" and the institutionalised construction of a "medical gaze"; from "visual" archives of madness, psychiatric art collections, the politicisation and economisation of the body, to the post-human in mass media representations. Contributions to this volume investigate medical bodies as historical, technological, and political constructs, constituted where knowledge formation and visual cultures intersect. Contributors are: Axel Fliethmann, Michael Hau, Birgit Lang, Carolyn Lau, Heikki Lempa, stef lenk, Joanna Madloch, Barry Murnane, Jill Redner, Claudia Stein, Elizabeth Stephens, Corinna Wagner, and Christiane Weller.

This book works to delineate some of the major routes by which science and art intersect. Structured according to the origin myths of the posthuman that continue to shape the idea of the human in our technological modernity, this volume gives space to narratives of alter-modernity that resonate with Ursula K. Le Guin’s call for a new kind of story which exposes the violence and exploitation driven by a sustained belief in human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism, and cultural superiority. In this context, the posthuman myths of multispecies flourishing given in this collection, which are situated across a range of historical times and locations, and media and modalities, are to be thought of as kernels of possible futures that can only be realized through collective endeavour.

This is the first book that examines the close affinities of the novels of J.G. Ballard and posthuman thought This book outlines the symbiosis of humans, nature, and technology in Ballard’s fiction In the context of the global pandemic and threats of authoritarianism, this book evaluates the timeliness of Ballard’s fiction about technology and its impact on human interaction This book offers a feminist reading of Ballard that highlights the author’s emphasis on the materiality of the human body as a porous and protean site of possibilities