Medical Agency / Healing Body Assets

with Elin Laut
wearable
 

Our medical system is based on authority and history of institutionalized knowledge. Procedures, that we ourselves cannot fully understand or conrol, are being done to our body, data is being captured and analysed and potions are being injected into our organisms. This creates a bio-political power relation between doctor and patient.
In our project we tried to approach this medical authority question and create an individual therapeutic tool, that should allow the patient to heal own body through a somatic sound experience. With the help of repetitive movements and sounds, mapped with the use of AI, the patient regains agency over personal healing process by travelling in the individualized soundscapes.

We started our try-outs with woven pieces, hand made bandages and sport protection to explore which sound-movement connections we can introduce. Further, inspired by aesthetics of medicine and care items, we developped an idea of a piece that is meant to resemble a patch or a bandage, which is so close to the body that it becomes invisible and merge with one’s own skin. The mapping of different body areas with different sounds and stories was motivated by body heat and emotion maps as well as by the eastern medical philosophy of acupoints, where specific points on body are responsible for healing specific organs and illneses.

The garment induces self exploration, that we hope could open new forms of body expression and body dynamics for the patient. It can also be shared with others who want to repeat the healing procedure.
As ultimate goal we would like to be able to create a procedure and an interface, where individualized healing sounds could be upoaded by patients and prepared by the experience designer/medical personal.