On Hospital of angels

Recently, I’ve been thinking about organs and bodies as systems. Living things connected to living things, with smaller living things inside of them, that are made up of smaller living things. This relationship exists between people, too. The interconnectedness can be an explanation for what happens to us and what we do to each other. Our scientific and medical accomplishments are accomplished through a process driven by human interests and desires; in our system of living that we’ve built, any sort of large-scale consequence will affect people living within that society. This effect has also informed idealized and aestheticized views of personhood and health. Therefore, a medical authority’s view of a human body creates the division and definition of what is natural, and also creates certain guidelines on determining who has autonomy, or what autonomy means in different contexts. In a way, these ideas question what it means to be human.

The evolution of human society is shaped by human desires. Our sciences cannot truly be free of bias, for human interests are what results in our research findings; our inventions have continuously modified the way we live, especially in the medicinal field. Our research produces standards which we base further research off of, which creates further bias in the ways we investigate our world. As beings that depend on each other, we have built a society where we can easily affect one another, leading to a system of control that manipulates the physical body via convoluting our identities. More than ever in the present, we exist in a feedback loop of desire and invention which fuels the capitalist economy, the stimulus. Aestheticized ideas about innovation —that new things are what bring pleasure— lead us to believe that we have some degree of control over our future, but as we change each other, we are changing what it means to be human; we cannot be completely sure of the consequences of our actions. In the face of capitalist terror, we are searching for autonomy from a humanist political view, marking a turn away from the artificial and more towards the natural; what we believe to be real. Authentic. We want to be saved by these things. But this, too, has been lost to the market. Perhaps, our prosthetic illusion of control is a symptom of our addiction to desire. Even our cures for aesthetic sickness are reinforcements for it. Hedonism and beauty are incapable of making us get well.

All that is to say that I, too, am curious about inventions. In creating this work of speculative fiction, I am not interested in creating moral parables about our present politics using the illusion of the imagined future. I find often that these sorts of stories are unfulfilling because they misrepresent reality through their messaging by depicting it through the lens of displeasure. The message of Hospital of angels is not that it critiques the immorality of capitalism and its consequences. Rather, it is political in the sense that it is an exploration of human desire - an exploration of human engineering and how our own creations change each other - not because it is presented in a setting that people might see as dystopian. While the work may contain a multitude of interpretations by the viewer, its foundation, for me, is the violence of learning to be human despite everything violent. We create the knowledge we desire. Whatever it is we think we want, we will invent.

I want to encourage the viewers of this project to be curious. I chose a website as the medium of this piece for non-linear storytelling; my hope is that the audience will formulate their own narratives and ideas.

Thank you's

I would like to thank Heather Mease and Francis Wilson, for all their help and valuable teachings; and the rest of the TIMARA department at Oberlin for their continued support these four years; Chase Olson, for teaching me organ; my friends, for their companionship and kindness towards me and valuable feedback on this project; to my family: thank you for working so hard so that I could grow up to pursue the arts - it is the best thing that has ever happened to me; anyone who has ever taken the time to teach me or explain something to me.