Annabelle Payne
Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.” – Steve Jobs
I am in my final year of high school and studying photography. This year, I am exploring the growing use of technology, especially in the ever-evolving world of surgery. I want to explore technological developments in the medical world, where robots have begun to take over the tasks of humans. Advanced surgical robots have already begun helping doctors, and there is a high chance that, at least for simple, repetitive procedures, robots will soon be able to perform the whole procedure.
In my work, I have used a hooded character to represent technology. The hooded, faceless ‘hacker’ plans to take over the surgical field with their new technology, and slowly make human surgeons obsolete. This character is found lurking in the back of the surgical theatre while a human surgeon is performing. The distance between them slowly decreases, until the ‘hacker’ and their technology has taken over the tasks of the surgeon.
In the corner of my office, I have a sculpture on loan from artist Mike O’Kane. It confronts me every day with a wonderful juxtaposition of the themes of my work in neuroscience: how the brain works, and the personal experience of conditions that strike to the sense of self and the equilibrium of mood and emotion. An extremely prevalent example is anxiety disorder. Many of us have either personally experienced this, or know of someone who has.
Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is thought to account for 1-2 percent of acute coronary syndromes (ACS), ACS being medicalese for what most people would call ‘heart attacks’.
Philip Jarvis