In 2020, artist Barbis Ruder, philosopher Lona Gaikis and industrial designer Walter Lunzer, founded the Phantom Lab to bring their disciplines – arts, design, and philosophy – into conversation in order to look from their transdisciplinary artistic viewpoint at the blind spots that haunt medical engineering. They focus on the example of hand prothesis development.

In this text and poster the set-up and learnings of the Phantom Lab I-III workshops in the artistic field are described.

INTRA Project: Towards an Aesthetics for Prosthetics: How to Hack Medical Product Engineering for Artistic Research and User Benefit

In 2020, artist Barbis Ruder, philosopher Lona Gaikis and industrial designer Walter Lunzer, founded the Phantom Lab to bring their disciplines – arts, design, and philosophy – into conversation in order to look from their transdisciplinary artistic viewpoint at the blind spots that haunt medical engineering. They focus on the example of hand prothesis development.

 

Phantom Lab I-III Setting

Prior to the workshops Phantom Lab I-III (2022) the research team participated in hand prosthetics development workshops at Otto Bock Healthcare (2020-2022) and conducted a workshop in artistic research at the APL x ZFF Practice(!) Week (2021) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Following these experiences, the Phantom Lab settings, I-III were set up as the following:

The workshops were designed for mixed groups of prothesis wearers, artists (students, teaching staff, professors), medical engineering development staff (medical engineers and designers, physiotherapists and orthopaedists) to undergo a performative medical situation that tackles different test-settings connected to our research question:

“How to hack medical engineering for artistic research and user benefit?”

The space was framed according to the aesthetics of a doctor’s office: a waiting area, a reading corner, a separate testing space (from where strange noises came from), various arrangements of appropriated neurophysiological experiments (e. g., a sagittal mirror-cabinet offering different prothesis gloves, hands and artistic prothesis/gloves), and an open table offering drawing materials.

Three workshops with different group structures were invited for half a day each. These labs took place at APL [FLUX 2], and consisted of three elements:

• LAB EXPERIMENTS: Re-staged existing (and historical) test-set-ups such as the rubber-hand illusion, the sagittal mirror experiment, and homunculus-mapping.
• RENDERING FEELING: Support a heightened body awareness by offering physical exercises.
• ARTISTIC RESEARCH: Playful and open performative elements, both on self-awareness and as a way to exercise different re-forming the body with prosthetic elements.

The workshops were documented through photographs, interviews, drawings, and texts.

 

Lab Dramaturgy

 

“Experiments are purposely staged dramas, to intensify some concept, so it may be recognized; so, it requires a notion or concept before it can be staged.” (A. N. Whitehead)

 

The research space and dramaturgy of the workshops mimicked the setting of the medical research lab situation. It was composed of seven steps.

 

1. Welcome to the Phantom Lab
   • Participants turned patients, and were greeted by the research team performing to be the doctors, they were seated in a waiting area to wait for a long time. One by one they were called up for the first experiment which they weren’t allowed to see.
2. Loss of the limb (Experiment I)
   • The rubber hand illusion: The proprioception of patients is modified by hiding the actual hand with a wall and replacing it with a rubber hand on a table. A medical cover is draped according to the body’s new limb. The artificial limb is tickled with a brush leaving behind a virtual feeling of that experience. The participant’s nerves are maxed out, when a hammer is smashed on the rubber hand (yikes!).
3. Physio
   • after this first experience of a “loss of a hand” the patients were invited to do a soft movement exercise to loosen up again
4. Sagittal Mirror Cabinet (Experiment II)
   • A table of prosthetic hands, rubber gloves, artistic gloves is offered to patients. They are invited to pick a new hand and try it out.
5. Embodied Limbs (Experiment III, (augmented neurophysiological experiment)
   • Visual: Now the first step of self-realization with the new body part using two sagittal mirrors standing opposite to each other. This illusion lets the patients step outside their bodies, and enables the illusion of integrating the new hand as an own body part.
   • In practice: As the artificial hand is integrated in proprioception, there is an invitation to play with the gestures, angles, movements, and further modifications
6. Comparative and Open Drawing Studies (Experiment IV)
   • Comparative: A drawing exercise is conducted with and without various constellations of bodily impairments (open eyes, blindfolded, open eyes with the self-awareness-prosthesis, blindfolded with self-awareness-prosthesis)
   • Variation: drawings were conducted with different tools and body parts available. A playful element was added by giving unusual tasks to perform with newly fitted or taped-on prothesis.
7. Open Workshop (Experiment V, appropriated neurophysiological experiment)
   • Homunculus body mapping. Patients tested the sensibility of certain body areas to map their personal Homunculus. The tool visualizes the virtual perception and representation of body parts within laid out in the brain [brainmapper.org].
   • Reflection: on a round table impressions, thoughts, ideas, and feedback were collected.

 

Findings

A Performative Protocol on How to Hack Medical Engineering –

In this setting, we mimicked a typical situation in the medical field, with a doctor’s office and its waiting room area. This hack of medical product engineering copied a clinical lab setting and created as performative protocol a doctor-patient relationship between the researchers and the participants in an artistic way. The aim was to deconstruct the hierarchic medical gaze with a humour. Moreover, this staging of familiar settings was set up to help the participants orientate themselves and find security in a yet unknown, and, at the same time, open and playful space.

The sterile – yet familiar – framing loosened gradually over the course of the workshop day, so did the patient’s (now participants) openness to exploring movement and appeal of artificial limbs with their bodies. It also followed the purpose to help the participants that did not know each other and what to expect to ease into the setting and feel safe as and in the group.

Sensual Instruments: Body-Object Connections

One main objective was to render “feeling” in order to find tools (Sensual Instruments), for able-bodied, or undamaged persons to feel and empathize with those who have lost a limb. Our team stipulated that when medical engineers develop an embodied and situated understanding of limb-loss, prothesis design will benefit more the wearers needs.

The workshop’s aim was to introduce body awareness and integral moments of experiencing oneself with an artificial limb. This heightened participants’ sense of body awareness, which comes natural to performers who work with their own body. A sense of this bodily knowledge could be shared with the participants.

 

Learnings

As the project brings together the three disciplines, art, philosophy, and design, re-viewing the scientific discipline of medical engineering, the findings and outcomes of this research are quite heterogenous and – partially – allusive, hence we called it the Phantom Lab.

There was a vast range of aspects in the given research setting, and conclusions and focus can be drawn for each discipline and their potential areas of knowledge transfer:

For example, the research influenced the processes in the designer’s workspace so prosthesis users are invited to the development sessions.

In the artistic research field the finding include the insight that there is a great realm for new objects that create sensibility, especially for the investigation of the connection between body and object.

Sensible touch objects open a space for investigating tractions and resulting movements within the body and how they influence “Haltung”.

Looking and researching the quality of the shaft and to the self-experience prosthesis both holds design and artistic research material for a practical application.

 

Summary

Phantom Lab I-III were experimental workshops that opened an interdisciplinary space between arts, design, and philosophy that went in conversation with medical product design and engineering. Many topics were tested and mixed in interdisciplinary groups. The settings worked well in terms of acceptance and openness of the participants. It also gave a broad overview of the potential by bringing together different disciplines in research.

The open workshop setting helped in terms of bringing together the multiple aspects of the field in a playful and practical way. Artistic potentials in staging research projects and in deepening the understanding of body-object connections have been discovered.

 

 

11.9.2023, Barbis Ruder (author of this text)