Posthuman pathology: a postmodern art project located in critical care

Abstract

My art project POSTHUMAN PATHOLOGY is a postmodern examination of the resolutely modernist culture of critical care medicine. I use conceptual art practices in conjunction with the techniques of anti-aesthetics in order to dismantle, open out and critique ideas which are foundational to the culture of critical care. Always my ideas have originated with concepts drawn from the acute clinical space and then I have gone on to research their histories and their futures. It is a cultural project that forms a web of relationships with ideas that exist beyond the environment of critical care. It asks the reader to navigate this web in order to contest the notion that critical care belongs only to the world of science. As such it is not ostensibly about critical care, it is also about the ideas that are foundational for critical care. It traces ideas as varied as the body as machine, normality and pathology, from dissection to transplantation, autopsy and death, visualisation, seeing the unseen, taboo and the abject, sadism and masochism, hi-tech technology, trauma, cyberculture and the posthuman. It also includes images of my artwork. All the selected works have been exhibited and I use the information sheets from the exhibitions to help contextualise them. The proliferation of hi-tech options in critical care medicine in conjunction with the visual-scopic drive has far-reaching consequences in a digital era where the body has become increasingly transparent and the boundaries between life and death are expanding. I have turned to cyberculture in order to frame my investigations into the contemporary aspects of critical care practice. Cybercultural discourses examine the implications of the increasingly intimate relationships between computer technology and humanity. I would like to introduce POSTHUMAN PATHOLOGY as both a term and a strategy for contextualising critical care within cyberculture. Posthuman theory, as a subsidiary of cybercultural theory, takes a futuristic look at the possibilities that arise when human characteristics are augmented and connected by technology. When the boundaries collapse between machine and organism, the cyborg (cybernetic-organism) is formed, which is networked into distibuted cognitive systems of information that constitute the posthuman. I present the posthuman as a way of conceptualising the articulation of staff and the critically ill with intelligent machines. The cyborgian relationships between critical care nurses, the critically ill and hi-tech medical technologies are premised on co-ordinated circulating flows of information directed by complex feed back systems which interface to produce the posthuman state. As a result of my research, I make a claim for the incongruous situation of art practice affecting clinical practice in critical care. I endorse and advocate for the use of photography and diary keeping in the critical care unit in the hopes of lessening the problems of memory loss after critical illness. In the process of making and exhibiting artwork, unexpected meanings and insights have cropped up, like the realisation that although patients' bodies are being looked after, who knows where their minds may be, and that an overarching sense of anxiety is present in critically ill patients' dreams. This is a postmodern anti-aesthetics art project that critiques the modernist culture of critical care medicine. My hope is that when critical care medicine realises it is part of the information age, and advances from its modernist roots, it will embrace its own culture and anti-aesthetics, then art projects like this will become routine. Like any posthuman information system, this is a beginning as much as an end.