Whereas media-theoretical debates impute the loss af referentiality to the
epistemic status of digital imaging systems, medicaldoctors, scientists,
and entire branches of commerce rely on these new image worlds to an
ever-increasing extent. This contradiction is condensed by the artist Herwig Turk
in his art projects into productive relationships of tension that are always accompanied
by a certain discomfiture. Through strategies of transgression Turk tries to
trace the complex requirements for the production of evidence in modern medical
and scientific practice, especially with regard to the difficulty of attributing reliability and socio-technological evidence to the imaging systems that are tied to these
highly important decisions. Given that the complex involved in the production of
knowledge in the life sciences is highly intricate, it is hardly surprising that for many
years now artists have been deeply interested in it. Turk implements a remarkable
mode of access to the laboratory as a location for the production of scientific facts.
Using diverse forms of artistic mise-en-scène of the material culture of the laboratory,
Turk tries to understand the complex interaction of instruments, experimental
praxis, and theory. He puts contemporary laboratory life under observation and
attempts to make it visually tangible. For a long time scientific instrumentation did
not receive much attention because science seemed to be mainly about ideas, and
instruments were regarded only as tools for measuring and observing.
