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 leave behind their standard views of the body.

How to Hack Medical Product Engineering for Artistic Research and User Benefit

This work happened within the INTRA research project “Towards an Aesthetics for Prosthetics” at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, and joined artistic and philosophical practices with design strategies as a novel paradigm for the development of medical products—in particular arm prostheses. As a research group, we proposed 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.

The workshops aimed at raising 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 does this envision its idealist limits by asking how much further the damaged body can feel, and whether the medically imposed task to un-feel one’s body in prosthetics wearers can be a commonly shared experience, but we recognized parallels in the promises of the industrialized fabrication of objects that virtually touch the body (as they are worn directly on the skin and are incorporated in body movement), and today’s commercial production of evocative art objects. In both, we see a need to exorcize an aesthetics that has lost touch with the ‘pathological’.