Two decades ago, Jakob Senneby—one half of the artist duo Goldin+Senneby—slid into an MRI machine and was turned into a “specimen to be mined for data.” After intense bouts of vertigo and numbness, he got a scan that showed white spots on his brain, signs of multiple sclerosis, a chronic, debilitating disease. In the following years, Senneby cycled through experimental (and largely ineffectual) treatments. As he was scanned and prodded, lectured to and prescribed treatments, he began to suspect that pharmaceutical companies were raking in profits by targeting the image of the disease (while erasing the perspectives of patients).

Published by Triple Canopy, these publications are part of an ongoing body of work by Goldin+Senneby that considers the language of autoimmunity—the fraught notion of a body at war with itself—and the stakes of reengineering life to defend against biological or environmental peril.

This essay is accompanied by a series of blockchain-based works by the duo, and an excerpt of a novel-in-progress by Katie Kitamura.