Transplant (excerpt)

Book chapter and 22-minute excerpt from the video Transplant, first published in the book, Transplant, edited by Victoria Hume.

This video makes use of photographs and audio recordings collected by John Wynne and Tim Wainwright during their year as artists-in-residence at Harefield Hospital, one of the world’s leading centres for heart and lung transplantation. Moving back and forth between documentation and an abstraction, the video piece provides a unique insight into the intense and fascinating experience undergone by the most vulnerable of patients.

Through all the differences and similarities of sound and vision, seeing and hearing, looking and listening, a rapprochement emerges in the collaboration between Wainwright and Wynne. Meaning arises out of fades and overlaps, sudden appearances and vanishings, fusing and disparity. Distinctions of the senses are less important than their indivisibility. Are we seeing or hearing, and how much of either perception is a consequence of the other? (David Toop)

About the book:

'Beyond text? Critical practices and sensory anthropology' is about the relationship between anthropological understandings of the world, sensory perception and aesthetic practices. It suggests that if different sensory experiences embody and facilitate different kinds of knowledge, then we need to develop new methods and more creative forms of representation that are not based solely around text or on correspondence theories of truth. The volume brings together leading figures in anthropology, visual and sound studies to explore how knowledge, sensation and embodied experiences can be researched and represented by combining different visual, aural and textual forms which it demonstrates through an accompanying DVD.

The book and DVD make an argument for a necessary, critical development in anthropological ways of knowing that take place not merely at the level of theory and representation but also through innovative fieldwork methods and media practices.

(Source: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719085055/)