Gray's Anatomy:Uncanny Valley

Ever wonder what the pilot for "Gray's Anatomy:Uncanny Valley" would be like? Well, you're in luck!

If It Weren't For You (I'd Be Sued) from Justine Cooper on Vimeo.

Yes, that was a . . .

music video in which an unseen clinician serenades the mannequins used in medical simulation with an infectious rock ballad. Emoting on the depth of their relationship, the doctor or nurse apologizes to the mannequins for what they go through in the name of patient safety and the improvement of clinical skills, crooning the chorus "If it weren't for you, I'd be sued."

It turns out the video is just part of an online art installation called "Living in Sim" by artist Justine Cooper (creator of HAVIDOL), which also includes a blog ostensibly written by the mannequins.

At LivingInSim.com, Cooper introduces a social community of characters, played only by mannequins, who blog and debate health care issues and medical incidents from both a pop culture and ethical standpoint. It invites public participation and dialogue. Set in a fictional Midwestern clinic the mannequins play the patients, as well as the entire staff including doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, insurance agents and visiting drug reps. They inhabit a fiction that we as potential patients and online users fully recognize. In videos, photography, and storytelling Living in Sim mirrors the role-play utilized in medical simulation scenarios but in an experimental and often tongue-in-cheek manner. Cooper states "The mannequins operate in a dysfunctional health care system, not much more far-fetched than our actual one, but at least theirs can offer us some form of actual pain relief, without a co-pay."

Unfortunately, Cooper's "Indemnity General," a "4 part satirical mini-soap opera depicting the woes at the axis of an absurdist medical industrial complex," doesn't really strike me as either funny or shocking. It's too accurate. And I'm not sure what I think of the blog posts, which sound more like typical web fare than pointed satire. But the project as a whole is certainly. . . uncanny.

There's a talk by Cooper TONIGHT at Observatory in NYC. Read more at the Daneyal Mahmood gallery, where Living in Sim is showing through December 31, and Cooper is speaking December 10.