On the boundary of visual and performative arts and biomedicine

Ever noticed that the uniform resource locator (a.k.a. url) of this blog is www.corporeality.net/museion? I’ve just realised there is a url-alike in the same business as ours, namely www.CORPOrealities.org.
CORPOrealities is the website of a research project “situated on the very boundary of visual and performative arts and biomedicine”, which free-lance Viennese sociologist and artist Christina Lammer has carried out together with a team of visual artists, curators, historians and caregivers at the Medizinische Universität Wien (MUW) during the last five years.
The project is interesting in a ‘Biomedicine-on-display’-perspective because Lammer and her co-workers have used video as an ethnographic method for translating human experiences of illness and suffering into aesthetic expression. She claims that these visual ethnographic and body art interventions can “enhance complex processes of translation and mediation and strengthen the empathy, sensitivity and emotional competence in health care work” (quoted from C. Lammer, ‘Translating experience: The creation of videos of physicians and patients in the environment of an Austrian university hospital’, Int. J. of Multiple Research Approaches, vol 3: 264-75, 2009, abstract here).
Would like to see more of that kind of studies, because its feeds into the ‘Health Promotion and Innovation’ research program that we are developing together with the ethnologists here at University of Copenhagen within the frame of the Center for Healthy Ageing (see announcements for phd and postdoc positions here).
The CORPOrealities project is scheduled to end this October. Then Lammer is planning two other projects: one called ‘Features: Vienna Face Project’ and another called ‘Surgical Wrappings’. Keep an eye open!