SciArt Magazine - All Issues | Page 36

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