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additional credits:
Todd Holoubek, Actionscript
Jacob Burckhardt, sound
Bill Rice, voiceover

New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center Archives

NYU Medical Center Ehrman Medical Library

links:
http://www.annetteweintraub.com

 

 

Annette Weintraub is a media artist whose projects embed layered narratives within an variety of architectural constructs. Her work is an investigation of architecture as visual language, and focuses on the dynamics of urban space, the intrusion of media into public space and the symbolism of space. Recent projects have included Mirage (2001), a project on travel photography and cultural difference commissioned by CEPA; The Mirror That Changes (2001) a project on water and sustainability commissioned by The Ruschlikon Centre for Glogal Dialogue; and Crossroads (2000), an examination of Times Square through film, architecture and icons of popular culture commissioned by Turbulence.

Her work has been presented at the International Art Biennial-Buenos Aires, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes 2002, Buenos Aires, Argentina; The 5th Biennial of Media and Architecture in Graz Austria; The Whitney Biennial 2000; The International Center for Photography/ICP; The First Chiang Mai New Media Art Festival, Chiang Mai University Museum, Thailand; The International Film Festival Rotterdam; Thirteen/WNET TV’s Reel New York.Web and in numerous other national and international exhibitions.

Annette Weintraub was the recipient of a Silver Award in I.D. Magazine's Interactive Media Review and her work has been cited in many publications, including: Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, ArtByte, Newsweek, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, The Boston Globe, Leonardo, and Intelligent Agent.

Hall for dreamers or impersonal machine? Hospital architecture is an amalgam of elements derived from religion, the military and the factory. Life Support explores this symbolic coding of space and its underlying mythologies. Four spatial hybrids mixing 2D and 3D representation act as narrative containers for issues of hierarchy, mechanization, privacy and identity.

Life Support explores the subjective experience of space. It looks at the way in which medical environments affect behavior, perception and perhaps healing. The symbolism of space is deeply ingrained, perhaps physiological. Subtle aspects of environment influence behavior, mood and perception. We read the underlying messages of rooms dedicated to waiting, to sleep, to punishment or to death through their design, ambience and contents.

'Hospital' comes from the Latin hospes, the same root as hosptality and hotel, meaning guest or host. A contemporary hospital might contain vestiges of the cruciform design of the Renaissance hospital, the panopticon of the prison, and the compartmentalization of industrial factory. Life Support draws upon depictions of medical spaces in advertising, popular culture and film and their reintegration into this vocabulary of space.

Life Support creates a series of ‘rooms’ based on archetypal hospital spaces: a corridor, waiting room, patient room and treatment room. Each of these locations is associated thematically with a particular psychological state/adaptation response, and explored in moving images paired with short fictions and architectural commentary.

These spaces are hybrids of 2D and 3D elements in which the 3D spatial construct —a wireframe of a room —functions as a scrim for the projection of multiple images and as a container for the layering of audio elements. Movement through space and narrative movement are linked, as in a walking meditation.