BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    Medical archives and digital culture

    Biernoff, Suzannah (2012) Medical archives and digital culture. Photographies 5 (2), pp. 179-202. ISSN 1754-0763.

    Full text not available from this repository.

    Abstract

    When BioShock was released in August 2007, reviewers praised the moral complexities of the narrative and the game’s dystopian vision of what Ayn Rand dubbed the “virtue of selfishness.” What critics overlooked was the extent to which the disturbingly realistic artwork and musical score relied on found images and sound, including a recording of distressed breathing from a physician’s website, and digitized First World War medical photographs of soldiers with facial injuries. This article examines the implications of these acts of appropriation from a range of critical perspectives including Susan Sontag’s commentary on the representation of suffering; recent literature on the ethics of computer games; and an online discussion forum in which players of BioShock discuss the moral “grey areas” of the game.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: The research for this article was supported by a Wellcome Trust Research Leave Award [grant no. 082864]
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): body, art, digital, archive
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies
    Research Centres and Institutes: Gender and Sexuality, Birkbeck (BiGS), Social Research, Birkbeck Institute for (BISR)
    Depositing User: Suzannah Biernoff
    Date Deposited: 22 Nov 2012 10:51
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:00
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/5649

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    0Downloads
    6 month trend
    324Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item Edit/View Item