HEAL is an ongoing project that studies the properties of the digital flat bed scanner by capturing at high resolution a self inflicted bleeding wound on the artist’s left heel.

The artist peeled a portion of his own skin from his heel and placed his left foot on a flat bed scanner. The fresh wound kept bleeding on the glass surface while the machine scanned the sole. Two images were captured, a rectangular portrait of the foot that appears floating on a black vacuum, and a square detail of the wound.

The scanning took 11 minutes and 31 seconds to capture the large picture of the foot, and 2 minutes and 35 seconds for the smaller square detail of the wound. This process reminds us of the earlier photographic techniques that required minutes of exposition in order to imprint an image onto a negative or plaque. The scanner behaves as a slow digital photography method, but also, because of the 6400 DPI high resolution, it behaves as a microscope, revealing what seems to be invisible to the naked eye.

The general image looks like the foot of an unidentified corpse in a morgue and at the same time it reminds us of the foot impressions performed as a method of identification on newborn babies. In these impressions, the layers of skin appear as an abstract composition of flesh colors and blood, revealing the veins and different layers of the dermis.

The wound stopped bleeding 5 minutes after the scanning was over, the pain was gone after two days, the artist stopped limping after three days and the sole/soul finally healed after four days, with new skin growing and smoothing the surface of the heel a week later.

In a world that requires instant digital gratification in the form of voice messages, emails, IMs, electronic conversations, the healing process of any sort of wound – whether of the body or of the soul - is a slow and very personal experience. By using the scanner as a slow method of photography, and by creating logs of the entire technical procedure the artist challenges the notion of digital speed and forces the viewer to reflect on the nature of pain.

The resulting product is a combination of two images: a large 3 feet wide by 7 feet tall digital print, and a 3 x 3 feet impression, both on high quality photographic paper.

 

 

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