Soma Series: Somatic Metaphors Evidenced in a series of medical transactions?

Abstract

Aspects of the orthodox medical-gaze have long been the concern of artists, theorists and Complementary Medical Practitioners. This research explored an aspect of the pre-surgical transactional-interview related to the 'quest for prosthesis', as a specific paradigm of the way the medicalgaze implicitly disciplines its 'subjects'. A pragmatic feminist standpoint approach was engaged in conjunction with an Ayurvedic/holistic perspective, from which to observe and critique fieldwork and create visual outcomes from it, as it was observed to somatically affect both patients and medical team in an Orthopaedics Department of an NHS hospital. Soma-Series: Somatic Metaphors Evidenced as a Series of Medical Transactions? parodically explored aspects of role-play and behavioural patterns that were seen to manifest through body-language that rendered the interaction as a simulation of events that were in themselves already 'artificial' as a result of the orthodox disciplines that engaged it. Threedimensional images as interpretations of this 'evidence' were subsequently transformed into a 'scripto-visual' interactive hypertext. Through visual experimentation, new research was developed as www.soma-series.org.uk in conjunction with an exhibition of selected images as Soma-Series: Ten Constructs at the Northern General Hospital, Sheffield, U.K. [May 2002], for its Ethics Committee; fieldwork participants and members of the public. The thesis compared this 'evidenced-based' approach to art making with the work by two contemporary women artists whose visual work also juxtaposed socio-medical discourse with art-practice [Jane Prophet and Christine Borland]. The outcomes as website 'artwork' anticipated opening up links between aspects of socio-medical discourse, cyberspace and feminism. Inviting audience response to the site was a central part of the research paradigm, with a view to expanding the debate relating to quest for prosthesis and its implications for notions of a 'bionic' body