Therapy-Poesis: Prosthetic Care for Damaged and Undamaged Bodies

Finding oneself with a missing limb is, on several levels, a devastating and traumatic experience. This is compounded when treatments and the adjustment of body-part replacements are determined by stakeholders in marketing and the health insurance industry, who often adhere to technological solutionism and the objectifying clinical gaze, which detaches the syndrome from its body. This transdisciplinary project, spanning philosophy, medical design, and performance art, investigates the needs of arm prosthesis wearers and integrates the notion of ‘feeling’ as a novel paradigm in medical engineering. Our hypothesis is that the experience of an alien limb is aesthetic rather than functional, contrary to what is largely presumed by the healthcare industry. Therapy-Poesis therefore proposes an artistic laboratorial framework to better understand the psycho-physical phantoms that haunt prosthetics development, and, perhaps on a larger scale, our post-prosthetic (actual and virtual) bodies.