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All, Fieldnotes (Bellevue Hospital)

Fieldnotes No. 4 (2/18-2/19/10): Care, Control, and Vision: Medical Structures of Sentiment (Bellevue Hospital): The Dream, 11:30 PM-12:30 PM

I wake up at 11:30 PM with an image in my head of the Bellevue as a body. My past obsessions with light photons and their travel through the eye into the brain and manifesting in action resurfaces and grafts itself onto the Bellevue project. I draw it as best as I can which leaves much to be desired.

Bellevue as Body: Attempted Drawing

Link to drawing: here.

Bellevue as Body: The Face

The office building facade, steel “curtain” facing with wide slabs of windows. Steel frames as bone structure. 

Bellevue as Body: The Eye

The modern wing of the Bellevue Hospital main lobby is an eye, gathering visual data from the people that enter. People are light photons in this image and as they walk in, they are sent as visual data, as electrical impulses down the “optic nerve” of the Bellevue, that long hallway that connects to the entrance of the old Administration building encased within the new modern wing, the “Eye”. I think to myself how people are electrical impulses, driven by voltage, producing voltage, as if we are batteries, amalgamations of light bundled together. The three white floors of the modern wing are in fact shaped like an eye looking out to the city, to the busy 1st Ave moving by.

Bellevue as Body: The Brain

Beyond the facade of the old administration building and through the curving hallways of the “optic nerve”, one enters the “brain” of the Bellevue, that multi-storied, multi-purpose construction, the hospital apparatus. The photons (people) move in and through the “brain”, moving in and through the collection of buildings. Off to the side of the brain sits the Old Psych Ward, the darkened corner of the “brain” where more than questionable things have occurred.

Bellevue as Body: Action

Through the actions of the “brain” what then occurs? What are the emotions engendered, allowed? I equate emotion with action. The processes of the “Eye”, the “Optic Nerve”, the “Brain” as creating emotions, engendering emotions, denying or promoting particular affective states.

People are seen through the “Eye”. In entering, they are processed continually by the “Body” of the Bellevue. The “Eye”, in effect, not only sees but processes, frames the ways in which people see and move.

This dream stays with me for weeks afterwords. It will greatly inform the way in which I present my final work.

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