I’ve always been fascinated by medical illustration. My undergraduate degree was in studio art–figurative sculpture and painting–so I marveled at the technical skill required to make the drawings themselves. But I also appreciated the text. In order to sculpt the human figure, I needed to know precisely what was happening under the skin. I memorized all the muscles and how they moved, every bone in the skeletal system and where it stuck out. I absorbed books like “Gray’s Anatomy,” and Frank Netter’s “Atlas of Human Anatomy.” I thought of them as illuminated manuscripts. The text alone would have been less than useful to me and the illustration without the text would not been enough either. I thought it would be interesting to look at some of these illuminations, think about the intermingling of text and image, and examine their “born digital” equivalents.
Below are two Persian illuminations that I find particularly compelling. The first details the human muscle system. I like its primative feel, the squatting pose and the way the notations look like tribal tattoo, ritual scarification patterns, or the sinews of the muscle itself. The second drawing has the opposite effect, an exaggerated gentility, the patient sits, fully conscious, politely allowing the surgeon to slice open his cranium. Captions for the drawings were taken from an article entitled, “Arab Roots of European Medicine” by David W. Tschanz, MSPH, PhD.

The Anatomy of the Human Body. Persian notations detail the human muscle system in Mansur ibn Ilyas’s late-14th century Tashrih-I Badan-I Insan.

An illustration in The Surgeon’s Tract, an Ottoman text written by Sharaf al-Din in about 1465, indicates where on the scalp incisions should be made.

Above left: A Dead or Moribund Man in Bust Length; a Detail of the Jaw and Neck; the Muscular and Vascular Systems of the Shoulder and Arm (recto). Leonardo da Vinci (Vinci, 1452-Cloux, 1519).
Above right: Detail Section of the Mouth and Throat; the Muscular System of the Shoulder and Arm (verso). Leonardo da Vinci (Vinci, 1452-Cloux, 1519).
Renaissance European artist Leonardo da Vinci, created sublime illuminations, heavily annotated with notations made during dissections. The effect of the notations reminds us that these drawings were “studies” of the human body and its mysteries. For me, these drawings are as compelling as Da Vinci’s more “finished” works. When I was seven months pregnant, I waited in line for four hourse to see the Met exhibition: Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman which included the drawings above. It was worth it.
I should also mention one of his contemporaries, Andreas Vesalius, (1514-1564) who was the author of an extremely influential atlas of anatomy.

The modern-day equivalent of Vesalius, might be Frank H. Netter, M.D., whose brillantly illustrated “Atlas of Human Anatomy,” is required reading for many first-year medical students.

Flix Productions’3D animation of the beating heart (click on image) could be considered a born digital update on Netter’s style of medical illustration. No text on this one (so it doesn’t really belong here) but I wanted to indicate how 2D drawings are being “improved” by digital technolgy. This animation gives a 360 view of the heart and shows it in motion. I imagine the text might be read by a narrator or included on the screen on in a pop-out window.


We can’t overlook, “Gray’s Anatomy of the Human Body,” I found this (above left) image in the Bartleby.com edition which is available online. The drawing also seems to be a rather eerie premonition of the sonogram (above right). I like to think of sonograms as machine-generated born digital illuminations. I’ve cropped the text off the one above to protect privacy, but it would normally have useful information about the mother and fetus printed in the margins.
Another iteration of the born digital illumination, this 3D animation of a normal birth created by Nucleus Medical Art. It looks so painless in the movies.

The institute is hosting a competition called Born Digital 1: Illumination, which asks artists, writers, programmers, and designers to address the conceptual underpinnings of illuminated manuscripts in the context of the born digital artifact. We are playing somewhat loose with the term “illuminated manuscript.” Our “Born Digital” contest asks for a single page rather than an entire book and is not necessarily interested in a literal reinvention of the form (unless you’ve come up with a particularly great one). We are intrigued by the fact that illuminated manuscripts do not separate text and image into different disciplines requiring separate platforms for display and critical discourse. We find that, in the workshop of the digital medium, disciplinary amalgams are once again emerging, and we would like to examine this shift.
Without attempting to give a history of the evolution of this form, I will, over the next several days, point out a few contemporary models that pay tribute to medieval illumination. The graphic novel comes immediately to mind. Chris Ware’s, “Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid on Earth, Art Spiegelman’s, “Maus,” and David B’s, “This Sweet Sickness,” have shown us the power of image and text working in tandem to deliver a profound aesthetic, emotional, and intellectual experience.
Early digital versions of the graphic novel include Pyramids of Mars, which was published in 1997 by Richard Douglas and Geoffrey Holmes, and claims to be the first downloadable digital graphic novel. And Scott Frazier’s TRANSCENDENCE which the author describes as: partially animated, partially illustrated and partially text. It will, hopefully, stretch the bounds of multimedia and become something new, more than a mere fusion of comic and animation.
And thanks to friend Douglas Wolk, the absolute authority on graphic novels (and one of the smartest and nicest guys I know) for the following recommendations: “Patrick Farley’s, “The Spiders,” is wonderful and uses the medium nicely. Dylan Meconis’s, “Bite Me” is pretty much just scanned images, but she serialized the whole thing online, and she’s like 19 years old and super-fun.”
I hope this serves as a useful beginning for discussion on graphic novel as illuminated manuscript. I’m relying on readers to help me flesh the idea out.

So . . . .about two weeks ago I had a dream, (actually more of a nightmare) in which I was asked to judge a contest to choose “the best photograph of the Gates” from among three million orange photos. Over the next few days, however, the more I thought about it,I became intrigued by the idea of seeing people’s different creative solutions to photographing the gates.
[Note: I loved the Gates. Ashton (partner-in-crime) and I were in the park almost every day we were in the city, we even gave a party for 150 friends who came from all over the world to walk through the park at dawn (see nifty video by alex itin, orange you glad).
On the last day Ashton and I walked through the park for seven straight hours with Rebeca Mendez and Adam Euwens — talking almost the whole time about the phenomenon of the Gates — as an art work that requires significant effort on the part of its audience; like all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work, it requires you to be at a certain latitude and longitude at a specific moment in time; you need to see it from different vantage points at different times of the day; as Ashton said, “there are as many views of the Gates as footsteps in the park.”
And of course you talk endlessly to the people you meet along the way.
Early that last day, high up on the Harlem Meer, we came upon a big man with red orange hair who was quickly slipping a big coat over his obviously naked body. His friend had just as obviously been taking pictures. Ashton and Rebeca immediately realized that they were taking pictures of his orange pubic hair against the backdrop of the Gates. Impulsively I mentioned that I was planning to sponsor a contest for the best amateur photograph of the Gates. Surprisingly they wrote down a URL for the competition I made up on the spot. A few other times during the day I mentioned this to people who seemed to be taking interesting photos. Without any prompting, they also wrote down the URL.
So the next day, Monday, while sitting around the table with Kim, Dan, and Ben, my colleagues at the Institute for the Future of the Book, I mentioned the whole Gates photo idea and to my delight everyone thought it would fit in perfectly with our experiments in the area of open-ended networked “books.”
Voila — the beginning of the Gates Memory Project which we are launching today at gatesmemory.org. It’s quite a bit more ambitious than the original (and impossible) idea of choosing “the best photo.” Now we are aiming to to harness the creativity and insight of thousands to build a kind of collective memory machine — one that is designed not just for the moment, but as a lasting and definitive document of the Gates and our experience of them. As Ben Vershbow says in the press release announcing the project, “The photographs are a jumping off point for further exploration. Ultimately, we are interested in collecting anything that can be shared over the web – film, audio, text – parodies and remixes.”
While the photos and stories are being collected, the institute will encourage discussion and debate on how best to present the archives in hopes of finding new, unexpected ways to view and bring meaning to the content. The institute also welcomes the possibility of collaboration with designers, developers and web curators. This project is the beginning of a long-term exploration for us. Through this work, we are asking: how do we use social software to create works that are in the spirit of the web – i.e. free-form, ad hoc, always evolving, and driven by people’s enthusiasm to share – but are also edited and shaped into something of lasting value? It is that tension – between frozen and fluid works – that we aim to explore. We are excited to see the ideas people will bring to the table.
See the complete call for the project HERE.

Last month, I had the good fortune to speak briefly with Peter Lunenfeld at the Scholarship in the Digital Age conference at USC. I was surprised to learn that this famous digital media theorist is currently obsessed with a print-based initiative. His new Mediaworks Pamphlets are “theoretical fetish objects for the 21st century” – elegantly produced collaborations between designer and writer, intended to break serious media theory out of “the hermetically sealed spheres of academia and the techno-culture” and into the public discourse, much like the famous collaboration between Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, “The Medium is the Massage.” By shifting reading, writing and design practices to the screen, Lunenfeld argues, digital media have effectively “taken the weight off” of the print codex, enabling its tactile qualities to flower anew. There is room now to play and invent in the realm of paper, and a resulting emphasis on the pursuit of pleasure and grace in the experience of book objects. As evidence of the resurgent fetish book, Lunenfeld points to the immaculate productions of McSweeney’s, which has made its mark by coupling serious literary output with elegant design at relatively low cost to the reader.
Another sign of this resurgence is the Moleskine phenomenon – those indelible oilskin-bound notebooks reissued in 1998 from the classic French design, famously employed by Chatwin in his travels, and, if the packaging is to be believed, by Hemingway, Van Gogh and Picasso as well. Nowadays, Moleskines are favored by aesthetes and design sophisticates with a propensity for jotting things down, and is especially beloved by the blogging and techie communities, further evidence that this renewed fetish interest is intimately linked to the experience of networked, digital culture. In fact, Moleskine culture is a flourishing niche on the web, with blogs, art sites, and a full Wikipedia entry devoted solely to the flights of invention (Moleskine hacks etc.) and cult of personal record-keeping arising from this little black book.
Returning to Lunenfeld’s fetish theory with McSweeney’s as exemplar, it’s almost too perfect that McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers’ new book of short stories, How We Are Hungry, should be bound exactly like a Moleskine, complete with elastic fastening band. But whereas my notebooks have held up admirably through miles of travel and years of abuse, the elastic strap of my copy of the Eggers book broke after a single day’s jostling in my bag. Take note, McSweeney’s…