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The Scars site was initially developed in London by Anne Baker artist/designer, Dr Will Clayton Laser Clinician Department of Dermatology, Royal Free Hospital and Julian Baker designer/programmer. These three provided the starting background context for the work respectively: Art, Medicine and Computers.
Since 1998 it has been accepting scars from people all over the world.The site is now archived in the form of a Chronicle of scars collected up until 2003.
Thankyou to all those who contributed and helped in this project.

Background:
Art for centuries has represented images of the human body; in agony, in ecstasy, in torment, at war, and in death. From the martyrdom of St.Sebastian and Artemesias' beheading of Horlofornes to the contemporary Chapman dummies the ritual, accidental, and institutional wounding and scarring of the body has been an omnipresent theme in the fine arts. "Scars" continues the art obsession with the body but in an information gathering as well as creative or illustrative context.

Medicine and art have long had a fertile relationship. The surgeon will have been trained with heavily illustrated texts, and in return provided anatomical insight for artists training. For the patient the surgeon delivers a strange mixture of repair and damage, the whole experience being wrapped emotionally in the experience of illness. This is a potent mix and there is always a story to tell, given the right environment. The mystery and magic of the surgeons art has often placed them in a Godly firmament, here is an opportunity to feedback More mortal experience.

Computers sort and catalogue information, unlike traditional media such as books and video they are not limited by linear narrative, computers allow facts or strands to be linked together in a 'web' of links. Computers allow a complicated relational structure to be presented, manipulated and navigated simply by a viewer. A unique ability of computers employed here is to allow the viewer to add to the work by submission and by participating sliding from consumer to author and becoming part of the story itself. Scars are not catalogued as single items in a long chain, each is a single object in itself. Each scar object will have characteristics that are shared with all scars but are unique instances of that scar itself, such as the gender of the owner, its cause, its length or size, its story, its image.