JUSTINE COOPER | 'LIVING IN SIM'

October 22nd - December 31st, 2009

Artist talk and public program with Justine Cooper: Science, Fiction and the Visual Arts (December 10-12)

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 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, If It Weren't For You, 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, Indemnity General, 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.

Acknowledgments: The artist would like to thank the Greenwall Foundation for their support of this project. The project was fiscally sponsored by New York Foundation for the Arts. The residency at the Center for Medical Simulation was funded with a grant by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Special thank you to my hosts at the Center for Medical Simulation, along with the many other simulation centers which granted me access. (full list see gallery site or livinginsim.com)

Follow Living in Sim on Twitter & Facebook.

Justine Cooper, Best In Show, Village Voice, (Robert Shuster) November 2009

Justine Cooper, boingboing, Living In Sim: Justine Cooper's medical mannequin soap opera art, Feb 2009

Justine Cooper, Seed Magazine, The Awe of Natural History Collections, Feb 2009

Justine Cooper, Human Repair, Trace212, May 2008

Justine Cooper Explores Art, Science and the Million Dollar Mannequin, Lipsticktracez.com, April 2008

Dispute over Europe TV drug plan, BBC News, May. 30, 2007

Saved By Science: pix of the storage areas at the Natural History Museum, Boing Boing, Apr. 9, 2007

Designing a disease -- and its drug, The Scientist, Mar. 23, 2007

"Terminal Happiness" With Havidol Page 3.14, Mar. 1, 2007

Consumers fall for Havidol pharmaceutical parody that promotes a fictitious anxiety disorder NewsTarget.com, Mar. 1, 2007

A drug for everything when you have nothing, The Journal News (New York), Mar. 7, 2007

Message in a bottle, The Columbus Dispatch, Mar. 3, 2007

Review of Havidol, Saatchi Gallery UK

These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA, Post-Gazette (Pittsburgh), Mar. 8, 2007,

The cure for everything if you have something, The Journal News, Mar. 7, 2007

HAVIDOL, NOTCOT, Feb. 26, 2007

Disease Mongered Illness & Pharma Solution Parody Gains Attention as Real, Consumercidal Happenings, Feb. 25, 2007

Disease mongering video reviewed in British Medical Journal, Media Doctor, Feb. 24, 2007

The Last Laugh Better Living Through Chemistry, The Age, Feb. 20, 2007

If you don't Havidol, you'll want to get it soon... Reuters, Feb. 16, 2007

Fake drug, fake illness -- and people believe it, Reuters, Feb. 16, 2007

A new way to have it all, Reuters, Feb. 15, 2007

Havidol: When More Is Not Enoungh, Village Voice, Feb 14-20, 2007

Havidol when more is not enough, Shortlist, Culture Cuts Feb. 12, 2007

Watchlist 4: Justine Cooper, rebel:art, Feb. 9, 2007

Archive Montage Network, Art & Australia, Victoria Lynn, pp 421-425

Art Papers, review, May/June 2006, p.72

Museum: A secret stash of rich research relics, Emily Carlson, Discover magazine, May 2006. p.74.

Museum Muses: catalogue, Barton Lidice Benes and Justine Cooper, National Academy of Science, 2006

Forum: Justine Cooper, Ian Perry, Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 2006. pp. 6-21

Archiv Des Lebens, Hubert Filser, Wissen (Germany), 2006, pp75-79.

Justine Cooper and Barton Lidice Benes, John Gayer, Art Papers, May/June, 2006. p.72.

Year in Science: Icons - Justine Cooper: Carbon-Based Artist, Dan Keane, SEED, Dec/Jan 2006, p.70.

Australians work outside the New York label, Jacqui Taffel, Sydney Morning Herald, July 5, 2005

An Artist Goes Behind Closed Doors, Ruth Graham, The New York Sun, v.121, no.10, p.14, April 29, 2005

Interzone: Media Arts in Australia,Darren Tofts, Craftsman House, 2005. p.11 & p.63

Behind Closed Doors, Mary Knight, Natural History Magazine, June 2005, pp.40-43

Justine Cooper, Saved By Science, Voice Choice, Village Voice, June 1-7, 2005

Good Morning Alabama ABC TV and 6pm Fox Newscast, January 11, 2005

State of the Arts, Review TULP

The Makers, ABC Radio National interview, September 26, 2004

The Body Speaks, Sandra McLean, Courier Mail, September 18, 2004

Work guaranteed to get under your skin, Joyce Morgan, Sydney Morning Herald, January 16, 2004

TULP: The Body Public, Harriet Cunningham, Sydney Morning Herald, January 17, 2004

TULP review, Rosemary Duffy, State of the Arts magazine

A Visceral Experience, Carina Dennis, NATURE, v.427, no.6975, p.587, February 12, 2004

The darkness that yields light, Keith Gallasch, RealTime, RT59 - February - March 04, 2004

Rapt, Ashley Crawford, Sunday Age, January 11, 2004

Prefiguring Cyberculture, eds. Tofts, Jonson, Cavallaro, The MIT Press 2003

Justine Cooper: new media alchemist, Real Time, #55, June/July 2003, p.4

Cartography in the Age of Digital Media, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd 2003

Scientific Serendipity, eds. Julianne Pierce + Caroline Farmer, Australian Network for Art and Technology, introduction and interview by Kathy Cleland, August 2002.

Future Bodies, eds. Angerer, Peteres, Sofoulis, Springer-Verlag, Vienna 2002

Artlink review, vol.22, no.2, p. 83.2002

Now I Talk Like This, Stephanie Radok, Art Monthly Australia, April, 2002, pp.9-12

ConVerge:where art and science meet, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, catalog, Thames & Hudson, Melbourne. 2002

Studios in the Sky, Stephanie Cash, Art in America, March 2002

Medicine as Metaphor, NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, Catalog 2002

Oxygen Media, television profile, January, 2002.

hybrid life forms: Australian new media art, Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam, catalog 2001

Out of Australia: International Exposure, Linda Wallace, Artlink, vol.21, no.3, 2001, pp. 53-55.

Interfacing Art, Science and New Media, Anna Munster, Artlink, vol.21, no.3, 2001, pp.19-23.

Probe, Julian Scarff, ART Asia Pacific: new media issue #27, June 2000

Interface: visions of the body and the machine, Kathy Cleland, ART Asia Pacific, issue #27, June 2000

Justine Cooper, Australian Art Collector, Patrick Crogan, Issue 12, April-June 2000

The Genetic Esthetic, Barbara Pollack, ArtNEWS, pp 133-136, April 2000

CCTV (China Television) 20" documentary on Probe, November 1999.

HighTech High Touch, John Naisbitt, Broadway Books (Brealey, London edition), 1999

Insides Out: Speculations on the Body in 3D Computer Animation, Patrick Crogan, Paper delivered at the Society for Animation Studies Conference, August 1999

Rapt, Robyn Donohue, Photofile, # 56, May 1999.

Art and Science Sing the Body Transparent, Vicky Goldberg, New York Times, December 19,1998

About Justine Cooper:

As an interdisciplinary artist, Cooper renders each project in the way most befitting to her idea, whether minimal, baroque, or hyperrealist, she uses a variety of methods, including MRIs, large format photography, video, animation, web, or installation. While a polygamist when it comes to aesthetics and mediums she has continually been devoted to her inspiration from science and medicine. Though these subjects are at times institutional and abstract they also deal with very real, fundamental issues of our failing bodies and planet. She is most interested in exploring the frictions found in the public and private ways these disciplines are a part of us, as individuals and as a culture. "It's a complex relationship that has engrossed me for more than ten years. In my pursuit of some bright new form of art experience, I have come to believe that science, medicine, and art do mesh."

Selected Exhibitions & Screenings

2009

Impact by Degrees, Australian Embassy, Washington D.C.

Collected Fragments, Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, United Kingdom

The Museum Effect, Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, Australia

Superhuman, curated by ANAT, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia

Show Off Video 08, Talents Le Cube Archi & Design, Paris

HAVIDOL, Jan Manton Art, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

2008

2008

Terminal, Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York

The Leisure Class, Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland, Australia.Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, Australia

2007

Goodbye Privacy, Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria

The Art and Artifice of Science, The Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Eye to "i" - The self in recent art, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery

HAVIDOL, Daneyal Mahmood Gallery, New York

2006

National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C.

Strange Attractors, Zendai MOMA, Shanghai

Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Australia

2005

Saved By Science, Mary Place Gallery, Paddington, Sydney, Australia

Your Sky, GAS, New York, New York

Saved by Science, Kashya Hildebrand Gallery, New York, New York

Beijing Biennale, The Millennium Dialogue, Beijing, China, Second International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium

RAPT I and II, Visual Arts Gallery, University of Alabama, Birmingham

WetLab: The New Nexus Between Art and Science, The Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sacred Heart University

2004

Transfigure, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne curator Alessio Cavallaro

The Nature Machine, Queensland Art Gallery, Australia, 2005 curators

Lynne Seear and Kathryn Weir

TRANS: Australian artists in New York, Dumbo, NY

TULP, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Australia

2003

How Human, life in the post genome era, International Center of Photography, New York

Science Fictions, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore

Excite/Moist, Julie Saul Gallery, New York

Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award Exhibition, Melbourne

Genetic Expressions: Art After DNA, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY

Divine Fragments, Center for Photography at Woodstock

2002

PhotoGENEesis: Opus 2, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California

MOIST, Multimedia Art Asia Pacific, Millennium Monument, Beijing, PRChina

Microviews, Urban Center Galleries at The Municipal Art Society, New York

Corps + Machine, Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal

Other Views, QCA Gallery, Queensland, (curator Timothy Morrell)

Den Haag Film and Video Festival, "Oor(g)/See[h]ear"

ConVerge: where art and science meet, Adelaide Biennial, The Art Gallery of South Australia,

Medicine As Metaphor, NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, Japan

World Views, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

2001

Steel Fracture, Dir. Gail Kelly, Australian Technology Park + Performance Space (video commission)

Figure It, Plimsoll Gallery, Centre for the Arts, Tasmania

Theory or Faith, LIMN gallery, San Francisco

Hybrid forms: Australian new media art, Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam

2000

Gwang-Ju Biennale, Korea

Foreign Bodies, Untitled Space, New Haven, Connecticut

Pivot V: About Photography, Carnegie Gallery, Hobart, Tasmania

Wired Body/Mediated Body, Pacific Cinematheque, Vancouver, Canada, and Goethe Institute, Toronto

1999

Probe: Australian Embassy, Beijing, China

Videodrome, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

Romancing the Brain, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts

Sci-Art 99, MAAP, Queensland Sciencentre, Brisbane

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, American Museum of Natural History

Kasseler Dokumentarfilm Und Videofest, Kassel, Germany

The Self, Absorbed, Bellevue Art Museum, Washington

4ième Manifestation Internationale Vidéo et Art Électronique

Peripheral Visions, Museum of Sydney

Anemone, Imago, Western Australia tour

The Universal Machine, Powerhouse Museum, Sydney

WRO International Video Art Biennale, Wroclaw, Poland

Women in the Director's Chair Video Festival, Chicago

Persona, Institute of Modern Art, Queensland

Digital New Wave, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands

1998

Skin/Deep, Julie Saul Gallery, 560 Broadway SoHo, New York

Videomedeja, 3rd International Video Summit, Cultural Center of Novi Sad, Yugoslavia

ArtRAGE, ABC

MUU Media Festival, Helsinki, Finland

Surveillance show, Artspace, Sydney

Rapt II, Center for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy, Melbourne

Viruses and Mutations, Experimenta, St. Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne

Maap (Multimedia Art Asia Pacific), Brisbane

National Digital Art Awards, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, September 1998.

VideoBrasil, Sao Paulo, Brazil

D.art, Sydney Film Festival

Cell, Gallery 19, Sydney

Selected Screenings

2004

Flicker, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York

2003

oZone,Centre Pompidou, Paris

Another Planet, Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, New York + Chicago Institute of Art

Future Perfect, D.art, Sydney Film Festival

Corps + Machine, Museum of Contemporary Art, Montreal

2002

Den HaagFilm and Video Festival , "Oor(g)/See[h]ear" , Netherlands

2000

Wired Body/Mediated Body, Pacific Cinematheque, Vancouver, Canada, May 2000 and Goethe Institute, Toronto 2000

1999

Videodrome, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival, American Museum of Natural History

Kasseler Dokumentarfilm Und Videofest, Kassel, Germany

4ième Manifestation Internationale Vidéo et Art Électronique , Montreal

Peripheral Visions, Museum of Sydney

Anemone,Imago, Western Australia tour

WRO International Video Art Biennale, Wroclaw, Poland

Women in the Director's Chair Video Festival, Chicago, USA

Digital New Wave, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Netherlands

ArtRAGE, Australian Broadcasting Channel

1998

Videomedeja, 3rd Intnat'l Video Summit, Cultural Center of Novi Sad, Yugoslavia

MUU Media Festival, Helsinki, Finland

Viruses and Mutations, Experimenta, St. Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne

MAAP (Multimedia Art Asia Pacific)

National Digital Art Awards, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

VideoBrasil, Sao Paulo, Brazil

D.art, Sydney Film Festival

Residencies, Grants, Scholarships and Prizes

NYSCA Individual Artist grant, 2005

Greenwall Foundation Grant 2003, 2005

The Harries First Place for the National Digital Arts Awards, Australia, 2005

Australia Council New Media Fellowship, 2004

Australia Council Visual Arts and Crafts Board Grant 2004

Australia Council Visual Arts and Crafts Board Grant 2003

Greenwall Foundation Grant 2003

Multimedia Art Asia Pacific Artist in Residence at Central Academy of Fine Art, New Media Department, Beijing, PR China September-October 2002

Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico, February 2002

Bellevue Art Museum Artist-in-Residence, Washington, December 2001

Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT) deep immersion: scientific serendipity grant for artist-in-residency at The Museum of Natural History, New York 2001

World Views, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Artist-in-Residence Program at the World Trade Center, New York 2001

Harvestworks Artist-in-Residence Grant, New York 2001

Australia Council New Media grant 1999

The Harries First Place for the National Digital Arts Awards, Australia, 1998

Australian Film Commission New Technologies Grant 1997

Collections

Currently held in collections in Australia, Europe, and New York, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Powerhouse Museum, Australian Center for the Moving Image, Griffith Artworks and The Queensland Art Gallery, Monash University and the Queensland Health Centre.

Public Lectures

Science & Art, Sydney Festival, Domain Theatre, Art Gallery New South Wales, January 18, 2004

Guest Speaker, Distinguished Visitors Program, School of Art and Design, University of Michigan, November 5, 2003

Cartography in the Age of Digital Media, Symposium, Yale School of Architecture, April 5, 2002

ConVerge:where art and science meet, Genomics Symposium, March 3, 2002

Science for Art's Sake, presenter, American Museum of Natural History, June 13, 2001

Scrambling Space, Elastic, artist talk, February 27, 2002

The Art of Imaging, Keynote Speaker, Australian Institute of Medical and Biological Illustration's Conference AIMBI 2000 -, June 2000

Seminar on Science and Art, Australian Network for Art and Technology Summer School,1999

Imaging the Virtual Body, Future Screen seminar speaker, Powerhouse Museum, Nov 21, 1998