of digitized versions of Hermann Rorschach’s
inkblots, where I silk-screened the images onto
painted canvases. The Rorschach tests led me to
consider the ideas of pathology and medicine.
Medicine became my metaphor for a culture
under stress in paintings about damaged hearts
and echo cardiograms. I continued my internal
examinations of the human body, and as a result, images of viruses and cancer cells appeared
in my paintings exhibited in 1991, again, with
Benamou.
In New York, there was enough resistance to
these techniques and the ideas they generated
that both myself and other artists, such as Joseph Nechvatal, moved to Paris to find a more
sympathetic audience. France had a telephone
computer call Minitel that was growing in use
and accepted as the future and the “new normal.” The critic Pierre Restany was supporting
les Nouvelles Technologies in his writings and
curated exhibitions. A waiter could swipe your
credit card at your table in a restaurant. Paris
was the place for the movement called fractal
art based on the writings of Benoit Mandelbrot.
In Europe there were exhibitions about new
technology and science that had little support
in the U.S. Paris was a sympathetic environment in which to develop, exhibit and sell this
work. That audience, in New York, was very
small.
In 1992, I began making portraits by using
new medical imaging technologies. In these
portraits, the sitter’s identity was no longer limited to outward appearance but viewed through
medical devices (X-ray, MRI, sonogram, EKG,
CAT scan, DNA). My series of painted portraits became an inspection of the organic
interior of the human body and an investigation
of the sitter’s state of health. Research for this
work was done in both Paris and New York but
my French dealer, Benamou, was the dealer who
could find a collector base for this work. This
was my third solo show in Paris.
Of course, in the U.S. there were the Experiments in Art and Technology in 1966; that was
initiated by a series of performance art that
was a collaboration between artists, Robert
Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman and the
engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer.
However, this was relatively brief and did not
catch on as an art movement. If you scroll
through the exhibitions, periodicals and books
36
on my web site (www.stevemiller.com) there is,
basically, a history of the SciArt movement