Justine Cooper’s timely new project Living in Sim is a mixed reality artwork that includes a website, online social media, photography, video and installation to explore the complexities present in the current health care environment and online social media.  On the Living in Sim website she deploys medical mannequins – typically used as patient simulators to train medical staff – as surrogates to present intricate relationships between our sense of identity, culture and health care in a technologically advanced society. She draws a playful and interesting parallel between our culture’s obsession with self-documentation and our presentation of individual identity through online media, with her fictional documentation of the mannequins’ identity and world.

At http://www.livinginsim.com, Cooper introduces a social community of characters, played only by mannequins, who blog and debate health care issues and medical incidents from both a pop culture and ethical standpoint. It invites public participation and dialogue. Set in a fictional Midwestern clinic the mannequins play the patients, as well as the entire staff including doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, insurance agents and visiting drug reps. They inhabit a fiction that we as potential patients and online users fully recognize. In videos, photography, and storytelling Living in Sim mirrors the role-play utilized in medical simulation scenarios but in an experimental and often tongue-in-cheek manner. Cooper states “The mannequins operate in a dysfunctional health care system, not much more far-fetched than our actual one, but at least theirs can offer us some form of actual pain relief, without a co-pay.”

Both the Living in Sim website and exhibition include two videos. The first is in the form of a music video where an unseen clinician serenades the mannequins with a brilliantly catchy pop ballad. Emoting on the depth of their relationship, she apologizes to the mannequins for what they go through in the name of patient safety and the improvement of her clinical skills, crooning the chorus “If it weren’t for you, I’d be sued.”  The second video is a 4 part satirical mini-soap opera depicting the woes at the axis of an absurdist medical industrial complex.

The gallery exhibition features imagery from the actual world of medical simulation and its population of mannequins and clinical devices, at once both familiar and foreign. A grouping of large photographs show images inflected with classical references. A formal family portrait of mannequins, bathed in ethereal light; a disconnected mannequin head lays like a modern day John the Baptist upon a stainless surgical tray; an anatomical still life resembles a botanical drawing. A chiaroscuro-like tableau appears to be unfolding with an MRI machine and limbs. Along another wall, a series of rhythmic small prints on canvas depicting the characters from the blog come to life in snippets of seemingly narrative moments.

Lastly, an installation with an actual medical mannequin occupies the gallery space. Intoning that while medical simulation may be an educational fiction, and online identities and communities may be virtual, we also inhabit a place where health care and medicine revolve around a failing physical body.

Accompanying the exhibition a compact education program of lively discussions staged around Cooper's multi-faceted practice including an exclusive meet the artist session will take place in the gallery and is guest curated by Sara Raza,  a former curator of public program at Tate Modern and current independent curator and co-editor of ArtAsiaPacific magazine.

From the Artist

The Living in Sim project is both celebratory and bleak. In reality the medical mannequins offer a positive and measurable improvement in health care providing a setting for better communication and reducing medical errors with actual human patients. However, in Living in Sim the mannequins also inhabit a fiction that we as potential patients and online users fully recognize. Our system regards it socially acceptable to profit from sickness. The insurance providers within our current health care system deem human beings to be commodities. It’s this clouded brutality in our culture, in which medical bankruptcy and death from preventable disease is not uncommon, that casts Living in Sim as both bellwether and balm.

I chose to mix the healthcare setting with an online community environment because the medical industrial complex and social media outlets are both places where we find the friction between our private identities and our public ones. Health care necessarily makes our personal space into a public site. We are opened up, inspected, under surveillance, recorded, intervened with, and manifested into something that becomes part of a system. Through online social networks and media we undergo the same process, largely self-imposed – publicly diarizing, endlessly snapping, uploading, tweeting, and texting. That sort of personal social documenting is given a voice through the mannequins’ blog where they mirror the constant public sharing that happens on countless social networks. Living in Sim depicts an interwoven existence between the largely intangible online communities juxtaposed with our corporal existence in the eyes of health care and its insurance providers. Living in Sim is the union of make-believe from both medical simulation and online networks.