This great bit of footage from Brazil, where a little bit of re-hosing has a magical effect, is the first post in my 'classics' category. The 'pneumatic tube classic of the week', following from the 'pneumatic tube map of the week', will be a post about a classic book, film, cartoon, TV show or other media about pneumatic tube systems.
Please send in any of your favourite pneumatic tube classics to be potentially included on the list!
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.
An important part of Orwell's 1984-future, at the organisational level, was communication via pneumatic tube.
"With the deep, unconscious sigh which not even the nearness of the telescreen could prevent him from uttering when his day's work started, Winston pulled the speakwrite towards him, blew the dust from its mouthpiece and put on his spectacles. Then he unrolled and clipped together four small cylinders of paper which had already flopped out of the pneumatic tube on the right-hand side of his desk" (p40).
The pneumatic tube was one of three important 'orifices' in Winston's office space - the other two were for newspapers and the waste-disposal slit, or memory hole. It is from the pneumatic tubes where most of Winston's work arrives; the work of rewriting history. One day there is fragment of paper which blatently documents the lies behind this history work, rolled up with the other papers in the tube.
The pneumatic tube system is part of the invisible workings of the Ministry, part of the invisible work of totalitarian control:
"What happened in the unseen labyrinth to which the pneumatic tubes led, he did not know in detail, but he did know in general terms" (p42).
In many ways, pneumatic tubes are still part of the invisible work of organisations, retaining that historic/futuristic feel that Orwell captures incredibly well in 1984. It is this invisible work, the work that happens backstage, that makes pneumatic tubes such an interesting site of analysis and a technology which captures the imagination of writers and the public.
