Art Portraying Medicine

A number of art projects are currently tackling the medical domain. This activity stems from a perceived need to increase the transparency and democracy of the medical domain, and it often questions the power relations and the one-dimensionality in current medical practices. This article sheds light on how artists process medical themes, elaborates on research elements embedded in art making processes, and considers the relevance of artists' projects for researchers from other disciplines. It deliberates on the author's media and performance art practice in exploring the doctor-patient relationship and discusses the artistic methods and techniques employed. The article promotes the personal, imaginative, and figurative characteristics in the discussion and signification of the body in medicine

“On whose side are you?”: Artist-researcher positionality in a global public health challenge

This exposition discusses risks that emerge from the artist-researcher’s fluid position within artistic research. The research entails the artistic researcher interviewing vaccine-critical parents and a vaccine scientist about their opposing standpoints toward immunization and vaccination, while remaining ambivalent and sympathetic toward both views. The exposition uses concepts such as positionality, insider-outsider, and sameness to unpack the various risks arising from the stimulation and staging of conflicting voices about vaccines. These risks include upset participants due to unmet expectations raised partially by the artistic researcher’s understanding attitude, and the pervasiveness of the “voice” of the documentary film being created throughout the artist-researcher’s interactions with the participants

Conversations on Art–Science Collaboration and Vaccine-Hesitancy

Kaisu Koski, a Finnish artist-researcher based in the UK and the Netherlands, and Johan Holst, a leading vaccinologist in Norway, discuss their collaborative work exploring vaccine hesitancy in parents. The collaboration was initiated as part of Koski’s ongoing research in creating films for medical education. Together, the authors developed collaborative exchanges on vaccine-critical parents’ health beliefs and visualized them in a multimodal artwork series. Due to the authors’ different viewpoints on vaccines, this project raises questions about positionality in interdisciplinary research and the power of visualization in health communication.Kaisu Koski, un artiste-chercheur finlandais basé au Royaume-Uni et aux Pays-Bas, et Johan Holst, un vaccinologue de premier plan en Norvège, discutent de leur travail de collaboration explorant l’hésitation au vaccin chez les parents. La collaboration a été lancée dans le cadre des recherches en cours de Koski en vue de créer des films pour l’enseignement médical. Ensemble, les auteurs ont développé des échanges collaboratifs sur les croyances en matière de santé des parents critiques de la vaccination et les ont visualisés dans une série d’œuvres multimodales. En raison des différents points de vue des auteurs sur les vaccins, ce projet soulève des questions sur la positionnalité dans la recherche interdisciplinaire et le pouvoir de la visualisation dans la communication sur la santé

Challenging animal-based food systems: Citizen Surgery on vegan body simulators

This article discusses the voices of resistance emerging in the work of the Citizen Surgery Collective, an interdisciplinary practice-based research group I initiated in 2020. The collective consists of artists, critical posthumanists, anthropologists, and activists in the UK and the Netherlands. The collaborative work included in this exposition concerns the relationship between (non)human animal bodies and food, specifically through surgical simulation and sensory skills acquisition. These practices are geared toward multispecies justice, and they form a serial inquiry into ways of challenging animal-based food systems and meat-related cognitive dissonance. Reversely, they investigate ways to train surgical skills with food and by eating instead of using live or dead animal models. Our collective practices re-enact surgical choreographies and dialogue to analyze both the materiality and connotations of the food/body intersection and the process of dissolving interspecies boundaries by eating

Art portraying medicine

A number of art projects are currently tackling the medical domain. This activity stems from a perceived need to increase the transparency and democracy of the medical domain, and it often questions the power relations and the one-dimensionality in current medical practices. This article sheds light on how artists process medical themes, elaborates on research elements embedded in art making processes, and considers the relevance of artists' projects for researchers from other disciplines. It deliberates on the author's media and performance art practice in exploring the doctor-patient relationship and discusses the artistic methods and techniques employed. The article promotes the personal, imaginative, and figurative characteristics in the discussion and signification of the body in medicine

Picnic methodology: rethinking multispecies relationships through alfresco meals.

This essay introduces a speculative “picnic methodology” emerging from site-specific performance art practice with a herd of reindeer. The practice expands from the justice-oriented picnic tradition and stages picnic as a space to envision nonhierarchical multispecies relationships. The picnic blanket is offered as a meeting place to appreciate more-than-human ways of being, thinking, and knowing, starting with our relative, the reindeer. The essay draws from the short film City Reindeer (2022), documenting the durational picnics in the wintery Arctic. The performance art practice forms here a contemplative and playful intervention to decenter the human and give the reindeer a voice, with an underlying commitment to promoting veganism

Citizen Surgery: a framework for uncanny operations

This paper introduces an idea for emerging practices of “citizen surgery” in which individuals without surgical training engage with techniques, instruments and language of professional surgery. These activities may take place as participatory events as well as gallery or online performances, typically involving food or craft-based simulators and revolving around skills acquisition and dissection of surgical culture

HUG

HUG is a pneumatic garment that creates a sensation of a hug without the proximity of another person. It is inspired by “hugging” garments, used in so-called deep-pressure therapy, imitating the structure of embodied human empathy

Permafrost refreeze: the reindeer factor

Permafrost thaw plays a significant role in climate change, as global warming leads to massive amounts of organic carbon being released from the permafrost into the atmosphere. The article explores the so-called Zimov hypothesis, which involves non-human animals in mitigating permafrost thaw. According to the Zimov hypothesis, large herbivores such as reindeer and horse could prevent permafrost thaw as they compact the snow while grazing, keeping the ground temperature colder. Putting this hypothesis to test, the research introduces a speculative snow compacting experiment that utilizes the human body as a simulation for the reindeer body to measure the impact of snow stomping on the underlying ground temperature. Next to the impact of stomping, the preliminary results highlight the effect of rain on compacted snow