The visual claim within medical science and popular culture

Abstract

Looking at different types of images, as medical images and those of computer games, they do not seem to have much in common. If there is an analytical access within the cultural sciences to these technical pictures, it is usually that of a reference. Thus, diagnostic images, for example those of the virtual coloscopy, are quickly assumed to use a computer game aesthetics. In fact, these images are similar in their structure and aesthetics, but to reduce this similarity to a simple referential relationship falls too short. Both types of imaging are aiming on a human understanding. The basis for both image types are digital data, which, based on specific algorithmic revisions, are transferred into moving images. This transformative process is the execution of an anthropological claim, which is elementary to all technical pictures. With the help of a phenomenological analysis that is strongly oriented to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, this assumption is to be investigated and substantiated. By analysing the inner intuition of man (as an anthropological claim) and the given illustrativeness of the technical images, we will show, that Husserl’s concept of the experience of world is fundamental to an analytical comparative understanding of technical images.