Cast a cold eye on life, on death: the Remake: Medicalised Death in ICU

Abstract

A medicalised death in an intensive care unit (ICU), a particular event in a particular site, is the starting point for this thesis. This specific event and the associated site, materials, processes, and critical definitions will be examined using an auto-ethnographic methodology within a practice-led research process. Looking first at the definitions of death and the process of that death being medicalised, there are many ways to determine when it occurs and when it is irreversible. Death is traditionally called at a point in time. My proposition is that in a medicalised context death is a period, not a point. It is a process. The manner in which a specific death is medicalised, being constructed as a medical problem, reflects a level of intervention within the economic, social, cultural, and technological contexts of an ICU. In ICU, breathing, circulation of the blood in its closed system and renal performance are the basics of keeping the patient alive. By keeping the heart pumping, maintaining the blood pressure and stopping leaks, a complex process of medicalisation is introduced into the care of the patient at that tipping point between life and death. Surveillance or monitoring within an ICU is both observation of the body and collection of data and its visualisation. The economics and the market conditions behind the supply of blood, blood products, and body parts frame the experience of this situation. Creative Component Art-making as a practice is the force driving this research process and the exhibition of the artworks is the public presentation of that research. My art and exhibition-making combine object, sound, moving image, installation and performance to demonstrate and make perceptible to others the practice-led research into the emotional landscape of this specific event, in this specific site. The exhibition embodies the temporal nature of a medicalised death in ICU; the initial adrenaline rush and feeling of time speeding up in the shock and panic of entry to ICU, the boredom of the liminal spaces when you are excluded from the ICU and the slow slide to acceptance. A performative lecture within the exhibition further engages the viewer with these concepts.