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2022 Phantom Lab Workshops
During our research period in summer 2022, we conducted three workshops involving students from the Academy of Fine Arts and professors from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, as well as stakeholders from prosthesis development, and arm prosthesis wearers. They all were introduced to the PHANTOM LAB, a temporal experimental set-up for damaged and undamaged bodies, giving them the opportunity to explore and share their bodily experience. Experiments involved the Rubber Hand Illusion, Sagittal Mirror Exercises, Homunculus Mapping as well as individual mapping and altering of body schemes in the mirror cabinet and drawing without hands. We created a safe space for all participants, which gave them the opportunity to…
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We are active … and busy
In the last couple of weeks, we have been busy with testing our workshops setting: Both in the fields of bringing Art, Design, Philosophy in Conversation (ADPC), and with opening dialogues with protagonists from the various fields that are involved in Prosthetic development, usage, and aesthetics. It has been a very insightful time, and we are currently working on bringing everything together. To stay tuned with what happens, you can have a few first glimpses into our work. Just follow our Instagram to have some direct and unfiltered insights: fantom.lab
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2022 Towards an Aesthetics for Prosthetics
INTRA Project @ Angewandte Vienna January 2022 – January 2023 This research project integrates artistic and philosophical practices with design strategies as a novel paradigm for the development of medical products—in particular arm prostheses. We propose a framework for medical engineering that considers performance art practices as a means to get a better understanding of the needs of traumatized and damaged bodies. We raise attention to marginalized bodies in medical design processes and question the foundations upon which aesthetics itself, as a theory of feeling, is based on. Not only do we envision its idealist limits by asking how much further the damaged body can feel, and whether the medically…
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2021 PRACTICE(!)WEEK @Angewandte Performance Lab
APLxZFF – Practice!Week Workshop/Laboratory Kick-off for PHANTOM LAB. This workshop revealed and reflected upon the psycho-physical phantoms that haunt technologies connected to the human body. They were made tangible through interactions with various prosthetic arm products. The participating art students were invited to physically relate to familiar and unfamiliar protheses, to stage and orient themselves with them, to play with a newly experienced body image, and to communicate with each other. This unveiled the subtle rhetoric of our bodies. Direct video and photo documentation are used to collaboratively analyze interactions. We raised painful and controversial questions: How much humour can illness tolerate? What makes an ideal patient? What is “sick”,…
