Preservation of a Muse was published in JER, the Journal for Embodied Research, and it feels very much at home there. This touching and thought-provoking piece of videographic research was prompted by a body and its defects. Multimedia artist Lili Süper was photographing the body of a male friend and collaborator to recreate him as a digital 3D model when he told her of his cancer diagnosis and the bleak prognosis he had received. That strange convergence of events and images (the artistic scan Süper was making and the medical scan that revealed the disease) triggered the making of this video essay.

Yes, all this high-tech imaging technology is used for rational purposes: bringing disease into focus and bringing the universe within reach. But this video also brings to the fore the often-forgotten emotional power of that same technology: it can help us mediate and mourn our mortality, or ponder our place on this planet and beyond. Süper also attends to the ethics of image-making, and to the role images can play as sites of memory. She generously, and movingly, opens the piece to the voice and reflections of her ailing friend, who has his own thoughts on the power of images. He points out that while one kind of scan (the medical one) brought him devastating news, another (the artistic one) made him love his own body more.

Lili Süper chose the desktop video format for this piece, and it’s an apt choice. (She seems to love the aesthetic, as her website also uses the same kind of Windows-inspired design.)

Here, the various windows visually connect the personal to the universal, the inner space of the body to outer space. The recurring mise-en-abyme effects are a great way to visualize how these imaging technologies can turn the gaze back on the viewer, reversing the act of literally looking out into one of metaphorically looking inside.