hospitals at night

Hospitals are one of those buildings that, like the patients inhabiting it, never really falls asleep. Around the clock there are blood samples taken, observations recorded, new patients admitted, emergency operations performed. Pneumatic tubes remain in constant use throughout the night, part of this nocturnal activity, moving matter around the place, part of the activity.

While life goes on in the hospital, something changes at night. I remember as a patient being terrified of the night-time, feeling so particularly lonely when the lights went out (but never all the way out). Sounds* play a part of this changed atmosphere. I have just finished reading Tom Rice's rich ethnographic account of sounds and listening in hospitals called Hearing and the Hospital, where he documents the nocturnal soundscape of this institution.

Rice describes how on the cardiothoracic wards at St Thomas' hospital, where he conducted his fieldwork, the lights were dimmed at around 9:30pm and there was a corresponding effort to lower sound levels. Nurses spoke in gentler tones to one another and to patients than they had during the day. Curtains were pulled in such a way that the hooks did not scrape too loudly along the rails. He also describes being a patient at night himself, hearing the distressing cries of an agitated patient nearby. The patient was given a sedative to help maintain calm, a form of what Rice describes as "auditory surveillance".

Pneumatic tube systems are also part of this night-time noise, as capsules rattle around into baskets on wards. Adjustments are constantly being made, in regards to new inventions and tinkering in the hospital, to make these systems quieter.

Night-time in hospitals not only sounds differently, but looks differently too. This week a photoessay that I worked on with Thomas Fuller about The Night-side of Hospitals was published in a wonderful journal called Places, in the Design Observer Group. The essay follows the traces of migrant doctors who are delegated to the margins of Australia's healthcare system, witnessing their movements photographically through a hospital at night. It was an absolute pleasure to work with the editors of the journal, Nancy Levinson and Josh Wallaert on this piece, and to see it published in their journal, which focuses on contemporary architecture, landscape and urbanism. The essay fits within their current interest on public-private spaces.

*On the topic of sounds I can't help but here also mention my collaborator on the photoessay Thomas Fuller's terrific recent series of blogposts on love your bicycle, about bicycle sounds, here, here, here and here.

Image by Thomas Fuller

hospitals of music and flowers

A beautiful series of photos in Colossal has been making the blog rounds recently, of Anna Schuleit's installation Bloom. This moving work involved the careful placement of twenty-eight thousand pots of flowers in various wards of a closed mental health hospital in New England, USA.

Usually photos of closed hospitals highlight decay, disuse and disrepair. Schuleit's installation on the other hand tells a somewhat more poignant story. Asked to create a sit-specific work for the closed hospital, which would be open to the public for four days, she chose to inundate the space with flowers, to reflect on the sad absence of flowers in psychiatric settings. After the exhibition closed, the flowers were then delivered to nearby shelters, half-way houses and psychiatric hospitals. This is not the first time that the artist has produced a site-specific work in a hospital. In 2000 she created a sound installation in another disused New England hospital called Habeas Corpus, where visitors listened to a recording of Bach's Magnificat pouring out of the shattered window panes.

Image from trendhunter and thanks to Daniele for sending me this link.

wiki who?

For a long time Wikipedia has been treated by academics with some scorn, lecturers crossing out students' Wikipedia references in essays with enthusiastic relish. It seems as if it is becoming increasingly difficult however for even these tireless teachers to deny the ubiquitous nature of Wikipedia in our lives. Nonetheless, academics, scientists and other 'experts' still contribute very little to this project ... and Wikimedia wants to find out why, in this anonymous survey (with more background here).

In my field, Science and Technology Studies, there has been much dismantling of the boundaries of expertise, and questioning of the kinds of categories that Wikimedia is using to distinguish between contributors. Even so, their survey raises the interesting subject of who contributes to Wikipedia, from where, why, and so forth. This is a topic which the Digital Methods Initiative in Amsterdam is studying with vigor (for example see this project about Wikipedia as a place of controversy), and the topic of an upcoming paper I am looking forward to by René König at the Participatory Knowledge Production 2.0 workshop at Maastricht University.

So I wonder, who contributes to the Wikipedia entry about Pneumatic Tube systems? What are their motivations, their connections, their interests? What sources are they drawing from? Why are some images included and not others? Why is the popular culture section much longer than the historical section? Have you contributed to this page? If so why, and if not, why not?

Stereoscopic image by Prof.Dr. Nemo Klein.Gelegenheitsbenutzer at de.wikipedia [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons.

natural history museums and boundary objects

Recently I have been re-reading work by the sociologist of science, Susan Leigh Star, for a paper I am writing with my supervisor. Sadly Susan Leigh Star died this year, unexpectedly, leaving a great sense of loss in her personal and professional worlds.

One of my favourite papers by Leigh Star (and James Griesemer) was 'Institutional ecology, 'translations' and boundary objects: amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907 - 1939' (Social Studies of Science 19(3): 387 - 420), which discusses the ways in which members of different social worlds coordinated their efforts in building the museum. Leigh Star and Griesemer's ethnographic study was ecological, in the sense that it included the perspectives of administrators, amateur collectors, professional trappers, farmers who served as occasional fieldworkers and zoologists. In this paper, the authors introduced the concept of the 'boundary object', which they explained as that which facilitates common understandings between multiple social worlds. It is a concept which has been used widely in the discipline of STS, and other areas of research, ever since.

I could not help but also think of this study when visiting the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart with my mother (see her own blog post about the visit here Home Tweet Home: Museum Visit). At the museum we did fieldstudies: I took photos of the zoology exhibits and mum sketched some beetles and butterflies for inspiration for her ceramics. Whilst we were photographing and sketching, we had a number of conversations - one with a visitor and another with a gallery guide – about the animals that we were picturing/drawing, and other tales of flora and fauna. The taxidermy was a boundary object in the very similar, almost literal, sense used by Leigh Star and James Griesemer, as something which facilitated an interaction between our different worlds of experience and interest.

This led me to wonder whether pneumatic tube systems are boundary objects? I am not sure if anyone has any thoughts on that? In many ways, the technology serves to facilitate multiple transactions between different worlds. For example, in hospitals, pneumatic tubes are considered, and used, quite differently by engineers, pathologists and nurses. But I wonder whether pneumatic tube systems are really 'plastic' in their adaption to local needs, or are they more structured?

Photos are my own.

correspondances pneumatiques

Some pneumatic post arrived in the mail last week, from my sister's fiancé, Jarek ...

... filled with wonderful photos from the Museé de la Post in Paris:

I love post with personality!

Thanks Jarek (and Dad for scanning the images).

artists in residence

I've often thought it would be great to work with an artist on project about pneumatic tubes in hospitals. A couple of months ago I started talking to my brother-in-law about a sound project here in Melbourne (and would love to continue the conversation Andy!). Sociologists are increasingly working with artists at their fieldsites (see this blog about ethnography-art collaborations) to explore themes about medicine, science and technology amongst others.

There are arts-based projects in hospital contexts such as Hearing Voices, Seeing Things, the two-year program of residencies with staff and users at North East London Mental Health Trust led by artists Bob and Roberta Smith and Jessica Voorsanger, and Transplant, a collaborative piece of work from Tim Wainwright and John Wynne. Both of these projects explore themes central to many sociological studies of health and illness. Katerina Cizek's filmaker-in-residence project at St Michael's Hospital in Toronto was also incredibly sociological.

Artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Christina Lammers, Bill Viola, Heather Spears and Christine Borland have had residencies in hospitals, akin to hospital ethnographies. Barbara Hepworth produced a wonderful series of fenestration drawings of her time in ENT theatres, whilst Bill Viola's installation Science of the Heart is from his time at Memorial Medical Centre in Long Beach, New York. Heather Spears spends her residencies in neonatal intensive care units whilst Christine Borland spent a week at the University of Alberta Hospital, producing a piece of work presented in the exhibition, Imagining Science, at the Art Gallery of Alberta. Borland worked with two patients having kidney biopsies, taking photographs at the start of the procedure, then accompanied the tissue through its journey through the many processes of the Pathology Laboratory. It is a work which I think has a lot of relevance to the role of pneumatic tube systems in hospitals for the artwork brought the patient into the laboratory and the experience of the laboratory to the patient:

“Throughout the week (of her residency) the artist tread a path between the lab and the wards, building an intense, personal relationship with the patients and staff at each end. For the patients the ‘end product’ was a 10 minute long, self-running PowerPoint presentation of the hundreds of images documenting their journey through the hospital and laboratory system. As the patients watched this for the first time, entirely absorbed while it was presented to them on the artist’s lap-top, they were filmed from a tiny camera embedded in the frame of the laptop screen which captured their reactions and expressions in the most non-mediated way possible”

Artists are also taking up residencies in genetic research institutes and natural history museums, and their work is being shown in hospitals and other medical sites.

Artistic representations explore research topics in more ambiguous and incomplete ways than academia often allows, this work evoking different stories on common subjects. There are many parallels between artist-in-residencies and ethnographic fieldwork which are interesting to think about. No doubt ethnographers can learn from artists and vice versa. Collaborative work between sociologists and artists raises a number of theoretical and methodological issues which are challenging and potentially rewarding to investigate. There is a lot of exciting work happening in this area, and pneumatic tubes is only one topic, amongst many, that could be explored.

The photo was taken by Thomas, as part of a photographic study of overseas doctors' practices in Australian hospitals, in collaboration with my ethnographic work at this site.

following a pneumatic capsule

How do you follow a capsule in the pneumatic tube system, during its travels around a hospital in one day?

Two of my favourite academics, Annemarie Mol and Jessica Mesman, talks about the limits of following actors, in reference to actor-network theory and a hospital ethnography:

J had read that she should follow the actor. But after following the medium care neonatologist around for a day, J came home exhausted because the man walked so fast. And what about the pieces of paper that travel from ward to the dispensary? J couldn’t enter the hospital’s postal system with them, for its plastic tubes were big enough for forms, but far too small for human bodies (Mol and Mesman 1996, p422 – 423)

I have been thinking about the challenge of literally following a capsule. There have to be other ways of mapping the life of a capsule as it traverses a hospital system, that do not involve being shrunk to the size of a pathology sample Innerspace style.

In a previous post I referred to a German video where a camera had been sent on an explosive journey through a pneumatic tube system. Perhaps another method may be to attach a GPS tracker to a capsule? Take for example artist Jeremy Wood's 'Traverse me: Warwick campus map for pedestrians'. The intricate GPS drawing is a personalised tour of the university's campus, compiled over 17 days of walking with a GPS device. The map has also been superimposed over photographs of some of the locations Jeremy Wood visited on his travels. Is this one way to draw a day in the life of a pneumatic tube capsule?

Image 89 or is that 68?, originally uploaded by pathlost on Flikr.

flickr-ing tubes

There is some great Creative Commons-licensed pneumatic tube content on flikr that I am looking forward to exploring, such as this photo from Thomas Hawk's incredible hospital photo set.

A Series of Tubes, originally uploaded by Thomas Hawk.