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.

Healthcare Interview – Lena Shuaila, Naturopathic Doctor

Posted on October 30, 2013 by aaronsherwood

My third interview was with Dr. Lena Suhaila, a board certified naturopathic doctor at Cancer Treatment Centers of America in Phoenix, AZ. You may have guessed, but she specializes in treating patients with cancer. At this hospital cancer patients all get an oncologist, a naturopathic doctor, and a dietician to consult. Lena didn’t want to tell me specific stories, as this breached confidentiality. So she spoke generally about the patients she sees, as well as her work with them.

Most of the patients’ lives are completely derailed when they arrive to see her the first time. Many of them are terminal, but even the ones who are not, feel like their lives are out of control. Lena gives them the analytical consultations they need, but more than that she feels her role is to assuage them with a compassionate bedside manner, with kindness. The amount of suffering that she sees regularly is staggering, and hard to handle.

Her specific role as a naturopathic doctor is to give the patient a more holistic look at their condition. She will give them ways to help counter the side effects of chemotherapy, perhaps recommend acupuncture, or other forms of therapy. She tells the patients that there are no magic shortcuts. They won’t be able to eat one healthy meal, but still keep eating fastfood and softdrinks, and expect to become healthy.

One great thing about where she works is that patients somehow amazingly start forming a community amongst themselves. The bonds become so strong that when some patients get better, they are sad to leave the community they’ve formed there. This strikes me as as something really special.