Abstract

Through artistic interventions into the computational backbone of maternity services, the artists behind the Body Recovery Unit explore data production and its usages in healthcare governance. Taking their artwork The National Catalogue Of Savings Opportunities. Maternity, Volume 1: London (2017) as a case study, they explore how artists working with ‘live’ computational culture might draw from critical theory, Science and Technology Studies as well as feminist strategies within arts-led enquiry. This paper examines the mechanisms through which maternal bodies are rendered visible or invisible to managerial scrutiny, by exploring the interlocking elements of commissioning structures, nationwide information standards and databases in tandem with everyday maternity healthcare practices on the wards in the UK. The work provides a new context to understand how re-prioritisation of ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ births, breastfeeding, skin-to-skin contact, age of conception and other factors are gaining momentum in sync with cost-reduction initiatives, funding cuts and privatisation of healthcare services.

Highlights

  • Living Computational Culture This paper discusses the making of the artwork The National Catalogue of Savings Opportunities: Maternity, Volume 1: London (2017) by art collective the Body Recovery Unit founded in 20171

  • The savings catalogue raises new questions regarding computational vision: what does it mean to be visible or invisible to a database and what are its ways of constructing views on maternal bodies? We discuss the implications of such data-driven visibility in the context of maternity healthcare and explore how feminist art methodologies may carve out new positions for looking at the social and political implications of data and its increasing relevance in healthcare governance

  • Through experimentation with visual tactics, we explore which data is collected in maternity services, and the lines of actions this affords, rather than what the data can make known by itself, as artefact seemingly separated from the context of its production

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Summary

Alexandra Jønssona and Loes Bogersb

Through artistic interventions into the computational backbone of maternity services, the artists behind the Body Recovery Unit explore data production and its usages in healthcare governance. Taking their artwork The National Catalogue Of Savings Opportunities. Volume 1: London (2017) as a case study, they explore how artists working with ‘live’ computational culture might draw from critical theory, Science and Technology Studies as well as feminist strategies within arts-led enquiry. This paper examines the mechanisms through which maternal bodies are rendered visible or invisible to managerial scrutiny, by exploring the interlocking elements of commissioning structures, nationwide information standards and databases in tandem with everyday maternity healthcare practices on the wards in the UK.

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