RETURN TO OLDER WORKS
SimMan, 2007
Single Channel Digital Video, Colour with Sound
Duration: 8:00min
Camera Work & Editing: Dave Dunbar
SimMan is the registered name of a life-sized, computer-controlled mannequin designed for use by medical students as a training tool. Equipped with interactive technology that can generate automatic performance feedback, the surrogate human enables the simulation and treatment of various scenarios. This allows students to practise without fear of risk to patients. Through a process of animation, in her video projection SimMan (2007) Borland Brings the creature to life, subtly enhancing its simulated functions. Clearly there are benefits to be had from such mechanised learning devices. Yet Borland’s unsettling humanisation of the dummy - perhaps alluding to the tragic outcome of Frankenstein’s endeavour - raises questions about our increasing reliance on a virtual world, in place of the idiosyncratic and multi-faceted reality of human life.
- Exhibition Guide, Social Systems, Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall, UK
SimBaby, 2008
Single Channel Digital Video, Colour With Sound
Duration: 9:00min
Camera Work & Editing: Dave Dunbar
The second in a trilogy of films made using recuss manikins. We are given the time and space to consider gender and identity in the context of the medicalised body. Borland’s slow scanning gaze across the form, every pore of the skin visible, is juxtaposed with the awkward noise, movement and eerie 'blue lips' of the technological breathing apparatus of an infant training manikin employed in midwifery and medical training scenarios.
Christine Borland’s SimBaby is a compelling and filmic observation of the eerie and uncertain boundary between human and human-simulation. SimBaby dwells on the vital qualities of a replicant body. The work seems to question what capacities we have for empathy and our attraction for constructing narratives of life & death. Borland’s humanizing work often explores scientific and medical ethics, the science of genetic testing and references forensic techniques and observation.
- Exhibition Guide, Biometric, New Media Gallery, New Westminster, Canada
SimWoman, 2010
Single Channel Digital Video, Colour with Sound
Duration: 11:00min
Camera Work & Editing: Dave Dunbar
‘SimWoman’ completes a trilogy of films which feature the hi-fidelity simulated patient manikins used in the Clinical Skills arena to prepare students for acute care situations. Unlike the previous films, ‘SimWoman’ does not exist as a commercially available manikin. The artist became very conscious that the only possibility for a female presence in this particular family of Sim’s was if rather unconvincing female genitalia were applied to ‘SimMan’. Christine Borland’s ‘SimWoman’ attempts to redress this with a more radical intervention, applying her own extremities to the manikin – arms, feet, chest and face cast in flesh tone wax. We are familiar with the idealised female wax forms of the 18th Century, here however the imperfections of the ‘real’ body are in sharp contrast to the original manikin’s uniform flesh-tone vinyl. The work invigorates an ineffective hybrid, introducing aesthetics and ambiguity to an arena dominated by function and objectivity.
- Exhibition Guide, Black Box, Institute for Genetic Medicine, Newcastle, UK.
