Body cartography

Human embryonic development

I have been looking at the work of the body cartography project. This is something that has been underway for some time but I have only just discovered it. Perhaps this is because I have only recently begun to look more closely at how dancers work, however as artists of the body, they are finely tuned to somatic experiences. Body maps have interested me for a while, and the body cartography project bases its focus on the developing of experiential tools that are derived from somatics, (sensation-based movement practices), dance and choreography. The background scientific research they have done, because they are focused on movement and change rather than static facts, is focused upon embryology; the branch of animal biology that studies the prenatal development of gametes, fertilisation as well as the development of embryos and fetuses. 

Carla Bottiglieri, a project researcher for the body cartography project, has stated;

"With embryology, anatomy ceases being the static, achieved geography of structures – a stillness that is primarily borrowed from the cadaveric inertia of the dissected body – and reveals what moved and still moves our seemingly silent interiors. Learning through embodiment may start from a choreographic-like mind, the one that takes images as maps, maps as diagrams, and everything as scores. In the case of embryology, the term score seems almost to be closer to music than to dance, and in fact lines and directions describing the all too busy movement of the forming embryo, in order to be “correctly” read, need kinematics being paralleled with dynamics: a play of intensities, rhythms, simultaneous events, different speed rates."

This statement immediately drew my attention, because I have for a while been working to develop a way of making images about interoceptual experiences that are not reliant upon static anatomy illustrations from medical textbooks, or some sort of fixed map that tries to pin down where things occur. I have been looking for various ways to open up my own and others awareness of the body's kinetic inner perception of its own sensations, which hopefully might bring about a more nuanced sense of our presence in the world and the experience of being.

Embryology Sections

Tree with root system

The study of embryology also includes an awareness of the evolutionary history of the human body and the bodies and forms of other living creatures. For instance our cranial bones are developed in the mesenchymal tissue surrounding the head end of the notochord; a process that begins in the foetus by the end of the first month of pregnancy. Most of the cranial vault and a portion of the base of the skull arise as membranous bone. However there are two types of evolutionary origins or paths that are operating here and they occur simultaneously and complementary with each other in the formation of the completed cranium. We are a type of primate, and the development of the primate skull consists of neural and visceral (branchial) components. The neural portion consists of the brain case and the capsular enclosure of the special sense organs. The visceral portion is derived from the embryonic counterparts of the branchial arches, which, in fishes and tailed amphibia, support the oral and pharyngeal regions. These visceral components function in respiration and mastication. The formation of the primate palate being an innovation which permits infants to suck and the adult to chew while respiration continues. The neural and visceral components of the branchial arches include Branchial motor neurons that are located in the brainstem and which supply with nerves the muscles formed by the branchial arches. The branchial arches are a series of six paired arches that form in the head and neck of an embryo during the fourth week of gestation. The arches are made up of four tissue components: cartilage, aortic arch artery, nerve, and muscle and they will eventually develop into the face, neck, and oropharynx (soft pallet, tonsils, and part of the tongue).

Fetal skull

So why is this so important? The structure of the primate palate means we can't breathe and eat at the same time, but we can coordinate breathing and swallowing to allow for eating. The pharynx is the shared route for both functions, but it's used differently for each activity. When breathing, the pharynx dilates to keep the airway open, but when swallowing, it constricts to push food down the oesophagus. When at rest, the epiglottis is upright and allows air to pass into the lungs, but when swallowing, the epiglottis folds backward to cover the larynx's entrance, preventing food and liquid from entering the lungs. Swallowing is therefore a complex process that involves coordinating more than 26 muscles and 6 nerves. When swallowing, breathing temporarily stops, and becomes more irregular and this can lead to problems, some of which I have had to face myself at times. As part of my own process of self awareness, I have to make sure I am calm and relaxed when eating, if not I can easily find myself with muscle tension in the throat, which leads to a difficulty in swallowing due to a globus sensation (a persistent but painless feeling of having something stuck in your throat when there is nothing there). that I can experience because of anxiety. The complex interconnection of interoceptual experience, (somatic feelings) and the autonomic nervous system that mediates unconscious activities, is hard for me to understand and yet I have begun to think that it is very important. So for myself, my own body map has one of its focal points around the throat, and since I have had problems with plantar fasciitis, another is the base of my left foot.

Trying to visualise plantar fasciitis

By owning some sort of visualisation of these sensations, I can help myself move on and not be stopped in my tracks by them, as I have literally been in the past. I.e. I can to some extent try to adjust my mental state in order to maintain some sort of 'homeostasis'. (The process of keeping your body in balance by noticing changes and then acting upon them to regulate your systems). There are many ways to track your environment and spot any changes, some are very obvious, such as seeing something dangerous in the distance, or hearing a loud noise coming closer and then you can act appropriately, but an awareness of other more subtle changes can be more intuitive, and they may be 'felt' sensations, or beliefs, which are harder to pin down, but they are still perceived experiences. We have a wide range of equipment that extends our body's perceptual abilities, such as microphones, telescopes, microscopes and radar, all of which can be used to predict external changes, but as yet we have few mechanisms that can measure internal change and it is the complex arena of our inner lives that fascinates me and that I have been trying to visualise.

Anatomical diagram of the throat

Visualisation of interoceptual awareness of swallowing air

However, one of the most complex issues facing embodied awareness is the status of the other creatures that inhabit and make up what I think of as my body. As far back as 1991 Lynn Margulis had introduced the idea of the holobiont, a term used to describe a host organism and the microorganisms that live on or within it, such as bacteria, viruses, and fungi. The holobiont body, is a body, like our own, where over 50% of the cells are microbial symbionts that are integrated into the physiological, anatomical, developmental, and immunological processes of the body. Therefore the actualisation of the body only occurs through the support of teams of species and in consequence an idea like 'immunity' can be thought of as a holobiont function, wherein microbes and zygote-derived cells cooperate for mutual defence. The zygote cell undergoes cleavage, or cell division and when it does, the new cells are called blastomeres, which are smaller cells that form a compact mass called the morula, which is the solid ball of cells that form the early stages of embryonic development in mammals. There is an elliptic visual connection here in that the word "morula" comes from the Latin word morus, which means mulberry, fruits that do indeed look very like the blastomeres and this year our mulberry tree has fruited abundantly for the first time. As Shakespeare knew, you don't pick mulberries as they will break up in your hands, you put sheets down under the tree and shake it, then collect all the fruits that have fallen.

Now humble as the ripest mulberry

That will not hold the handling.

                                        Coriolanus

Mulberry

A: The morula.  B: A cross section of a blastula

If we die, all the creatures that live on and within us die too or have to move elsewhere, just as if and when the Earth dies, all the creatures that live on and within it will die too. In order to maintain some sort of 'homeostasis', an environment of co-habitation needs to be fostered, and this needs to be about mutual intra species processes of symbiosis, something that can be suggested by the processes of the visualisation of feelings, even if it cant be depicted from observation. The flow of movement that suggests the processes at work here is what the body cartography project is most interested in and it points out that the body is in its peak flow mode during the first few weeks of its life. Many of the signals that are sent out by an organising fetal entity are intra-species, a microbial life is being ushered in just as much as a mammalian one. The more we understand this, the less I would hope that we are bothered that some mammals are darker in skin tone than others.

The body cartography project uses dance as a form of embodied learning and communication. I posted recently on Katia Heitmann's work, whereby a dancer will observe others and then attempt to mimic their body movements as a form of archiving. The body cartography project is similar, in that a dancer wants 'to pay attention to and to move with things that are invisible yet also and therefore, invisible in the sense that you’re not seeing the same body structure and also invisible in the sense that things that are very patterned or repeated or are not very apparent sometimes, forgotten, like the sensation of wearing your clothes'...

Taken from a record of a conversation during the Fluid Spaces Event: Teknisk Museum, Oslo in 2022.

It seems to me that the dancer was searching for a way of communicating things that are on the edge of our awareness, in a similar way to how I am searching for a way of making myself and others aware of some sort of interconnected flow of energies, a flow that I could hopefully visualise in either drawing or ceramics.

From a developing animation

This way of thinking is not new, and if you have been reading my posts over the last few years, you will have seen that I am fascinated by the various theories that emerged during the 19th century as ways to explain what was going on in the world. The emergence around 1800 of the science of embryology was at the time a theory based on the epistemology of rhythm. At the time the concept of rhythm was crucial to many fields of knowledge, including the study of life and living processes. This led to an understanding of the living world in terms of rhythmic patterns, rhythmic movement and of course rhythmic representations, and it echoed Schlegel’s statement that, “All art should become science and all science art; poetry and philosophy should be made one.” The Romantic ideal was that the aesthetic approaches of art and literature could reveal patterns and meaning in nature that couldn’t be uncovered through rationalistic philosophy and science alone and this argument is something that I still have a great deal of faith in.

A link to more embryology images here

The illustration that describes the transition of a dot, as in drawing A, its extension and growth through to a recognisable form at point G, is as much poetry as science. At no point is a body ever either as it is represented at B or at G or at any other point, all the images above are figments of the imagination of an artist. 

B and G

Perhaps what I'm really interested in is the idea of 'becoming'. Becoming is a process that eludes observation and is hard to represent, which is why it is interesting to myself as an artist. Things that are directly analysable or measurable can reasonably easily be depicted, but there is a hard cognitive and perceptual struggle to be had, if we are to visualise processes that are continuous and often invisible and felt with senses other than the visual. This it seems to me is a worthwhile task, and it keeps driving me on to make the images I do and to believe that at some point these images might actually become useful.  

References:

Richards, R.J. (2010) The romantic conception of life: Science and philosophy in the age of Goethe. University of Chicago Press.

Wellmann, J. (2017) The form of becoming: embryology and the epistemology of rhythm, 1760–1830. Princeton University Press.

Wellmann, J. (2021). History of Embryology: Visualizations Through Series and Animation. In: McCallum, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4106-3_22-1

See also:

Maps made by our nervous systems

Drawings as aesthetic transducers

Katja Heitmann and embodied learning.

Eco awareness and OOO

Parascientific visions and Rayonism

Dr. Hippolyte Baraduc's theory of iconography,

Benjamin Brett's idea of geometric psychology,

Besant and Leadbeater's Thought Forms,

Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright's Synchromism movement,

Edwin Babbitt's 'chromo-mentalism',