Cutting is one of the oldest cultural practices. It is a fundamental way for human beings to enter into correspondence with materials. With these specific gestures and tools, people alter and reshape material boundaries and intertwine different entities. Those activities span across wide forms of tacit knowledge, from ancient craftsmanship to current high-tech procedures. In the domain of art, the cutting of text, music or film material produces new compositions that can provoke new insights. Similarly, in the domain of medicine, surgeons cut the body to understand and to heal it. Embedded in the way we think, write and speak, the act of cutting is ubiquitous: it means distinguishing and choosing between ›good‹ and ›bad‹ in a multitude of symbolic ways. A key component in cultural techniques, cutting is located at the interface between analog and digital technologies. Selecting this operation as a starting point opens up new perspectives, interactions and functions, whose limits and possibilities must be understood both practically and theoretically.
To this end, researchers in this project, from Anthropology, Biology, Computer Science, Design, Media Studies, Medicine and Physics jointly explore the entanglement of humans, materials and information. In diverse experimental settings, we explore the epistemological trade-off between precision and uncertainty in the preparation and execution of the cut on different scales and in new modes. In the following three primary settings and accompanying subprojects, we explore these new perspectives with the goal of contributing to a new repertoire of tools and practices that are renegotiating the divide between analog and digital.
Adaptive Digital Twin
The Adaptive Digital Twin project focuses on neuroscientific questions and predictive models concerning patients with brain tumors from different disciplinary perspectives. Subject-specific adaptive digital twin models are concepts that allow us to evaluate and simulate the effects of pathologies or tumor resectioning on the anatomy, function and connectivity of the central nervous system. In several subprojects, we explore new solutions for these specific questions in order to investigate practices of modeling, visualization, simulation and design. Interdisciplinary perspectives raise fundamental questions about the limits and possibilities of these methods beyond their concrete application, for example from an ethical, philosophical or sociological perspective.
Precon: Pre-conditioning of the human motor system by non-invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation (to reduce risk in neurosurgery). Copyright: Lucius Fekonja
Sensing Knife
The experimental setting Sensing Knife addresses specifically the sensing in the cutting and the cutting in the sensing. We evaluate the possibilities of creating an instrument that feels and acts “like the hand of a surgeon”, yet at a microscopic scale. The working case is the adaptation of the scanning force microscope, a technology currently used as a nanoscopic probing tool by physicists, into a knife for neurosurgery.
Scanning electron microscope image of the scanning probe microscope Silicon nitride sharp probe. At 99300x magnification. An apex radius of just 7 nm is typical. Copyright: Mohammad Fardin Gholami and Johannes Müller
Virtual Dissection
The Virtual Dissection setting aims to conceive a prototypical toolbox for experiencing anatomical information in virtual environments through its parameters of spatiality and resistance. The datasets to be employed are drawn from evolutionary biology and medicine. This approach is inspired by contemporary 3D scientific illustration practices and by the haptic dimension of knowledge in the historical practices of dissection.
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