Healthcare – Medicine Wheel

Posted on October 30, 2013 by aaronsherwood

After lighting upon the medicine wheel I realized I had found my vessel for the final proposal. My mind immediately came up with a form for it. I thought of a large circle perpendicular to the ground that people could walk through. It would be covered with acrylic tiles showing peoples stories in health care. The acrylic was hard to see so I wanted something underneath of it. The visuals I had experimented with before were nice, but not logistically possible. I thought back to how I felt about going to see the doctor: that the industry thinks of me as blood work data, as statistics, as a bottom line really. How could I interweave this into the project? Maybe I could put the acrylic overtop of healthcare data, global, and personal?

I thought it would be great to have the data there as the base, since that’s the industry, that’s the story that the world tells. But healthcare is not about these numbers, its ultimately about us living and dying, getting sick and healing. These stories should lay overtop of that base. People could walk through the circle, and lights from within it would shine through the various layers, light being such a multi-faceted symbol: feeling lighter or heavier, shining light on a subject, healing light, etc.

I tried it out on top of my bloodwork report…. and unfortunately you can barely see the acrylic images at all:

My mind searched more, but I really liked this idea. I thought about trying out etching the images on black acrylic, and then perhaps trying the words on opaque acrylic. In this video I’ve taken an etching in black and put it on top of laser cut text from my blood work report. I then shine light through it.

I knew I had it. My proposal would be a large circle people could walk through and trigger light to shine through multiple layers of acrylic, telling multiple stories, called the Medicine Wheel. Part of the circle would be uncovered and unfinished, to signify that we can and are still writing this story. Our health, our societies, our places in the universe are in constant flux… perhaps the Medicine Wheel can once again help guide their direction.

Healthcare – lateral shift

Posted on October 30, 2013 by aaronsherwood

I was pretty pleased with the acrylic on screen experiments and thought maybe my proposal was going to be making a big screen of these tiles that could be placed over top of a screen at times square. I slowly yet quickly came to my senses. At this point I was feeling like I had done some nice experiments but that I didn’t really know where it was all going. Something Marina said in class triggered an earlier direction that I had shrugged off. She said something about a shaman when someone was inquiring about how to make a lateral shift, which is a direction I almost took early on, and was drawn too because of this poem by Gary Snyder. It doesn’t have much to do with healthcare, but medicine man, medicine woman, was an avenue I could start pursuing.

I was trying to find some sort of image that I could use for the final proposal to work with that would tie everything together. I found this symbol for medicine man, but could not figure out something I wanted to make with it:

At some point something clicked and I shifted from medicine man to medicine wheel. This opened up a flood gate of interest for me. The medicine wheel is a native american symbol/stone sculpture. It’s hard to define what it means exactly, since every tribe prescribed slightly different meanings to it. Generally it was a symbol for healing, for growing, for finding one’s place in the universe. The stone sculptures themselves actually point to various astronomical points.

The medicine wheel also falls into Jung’s archetype of a circle, or self. He postulated that the circle symbolizes wholeness of self. The circle can be found symbolically in many cultures:

Jung had his own symbol for it. The dot in the center symbolizes the ego, our known world, what we are aware of. The outer circle represents everything else in our being, the totality of everything we are, though not aware of. Look familiar?

Healthcare – acrylic on screen

Posted on October 30, 2013 by aaronsherwood

I next thought I’d like to see what it looked like if I put my acrylic etchings on top of a computer monitor and ‘map’ some visualizations underneath them. I decided to do the same thing I had done to the medical symbol with the Raspberry Pi at Starbucks to these images and then put that underneath the acrylic:

I also tried a more abstract visualization too:

Health Care – Stencils, Etchings

Posted on October 30, 2013 by aaronsherwood

Continuing my thread of guerilla art, I decided graffiti was the most well known and expansive type of this art. Me not having any kind of drawing skills at all was a little bit of a set back, but I thought at least I could make stencils and then paint some of those. Continuing with my story thread as well, I started asking people to give me two images: the first thing that pops into their mind when they hear the word healthcare, and the first thing they imagine when they think of someone needing treatment, but didn’t have any insurance. The two my wife gave were a mother holding a baby, and a homeless person, respectively. I searched online and found these images:

Using the laser cutter I then made stencils:

The paintings left something to be desired though, it wasn’t exactly want I was hoping for.

In order to make the original images seen better I decided to try putting a laser etched version of the picture on top of the painting. I tried etching a few different ways. It was a little bit clearer.

Guerilla Pi – Broken Health Care

Posted on October 30, 2013 by aaronsherwood

Working within the scope of my call of creating guerilla art I set out to create an art intervention between people and the internet. I turned a Raspberry Pi into a server and a wifi hotspot.

I named my hotspot starbucks free coffee and headed to Starbucks.

When people (wanting to get on the internet) selected my hotspot, no matter what link they typed in, the browser displayed content I created.

I chose to create something that illustrated our broken health care system. I took a healthcare symbol and made it flicker like a broken TV. Each time the mouse is clicked the image is rendered in a different way.

Click here to try out the content I displayed:

I was only able to go do it once, but I’d like to do more. It was also hard to document. I did see someone throwing their hands up in the air when they were directed to that page.