Ospedale a mare (Cover’s Comment)
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17022
application/pdf
2038-3460
17022
1
en
Andrea Napolitano
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
Seaside Hospital (Cover’s Comment)
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
3
Editorial
2012-06-16
2023-05-23
2012-06-16
2023-07-10
TS
Andrea Napolitano
2012/06/16
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17022
2038-3460
1
en
Seaside Hospital (Cover’s Comment)
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17022/15907
3
                                copertina / cover

Ospedale a mare, by Andrea Napolitano



“Seaside Hospital” [Ospedale a mare] gathers a set of dismissed and abandoned
medical-scientific instrumentations belonging to an old health facility in the Lido of
Venice. Among the gathered instrumentation I decided to fix, appropriate and re-
enact only those devices whose sound and use made them employ for medical
monitoring and reanimation. More in detail the installation is composed by:

Two blood pressure monitors, CRITIKON8100 and AO3316; two ECG monitors,
KONTRON 105 and SOXIL 8570; one oxygen concentrator, COMPANION
492A.

Through these tools I assembled a totem of machines able to track electrical
impulses at a close distance and elaborate sounds within a computer based video
interface. The operation of reactivation and transition from a former health facility
to an artistic performance made those machines “reanimated”, passing from a state
of abandonment to a “recovery” which gives them a new function. Any impulse
recorded by the totem is transformed in an audio-video signal projected on the wall
of the room. The projection, inspired at the devices original interface, takes place in
five different visual settings every 5 minutes: starting from a setting closer to the
primary devices use, the projection goes on gradually toward a more abstract
interface in order to retrace the two life paths of these objects.
“Seaside Hospital” is a site specific installation, realized for the Bevilacqua La Masa
Foundation in Piazza San Marco in Venice. It aims to rise the interest of the
audience, showing an often unknown or overlooked feature, yet fundamental: the
urban change taking place in Venice over time, which has stressed its spectacular
dimension, erasing history and ordinary experience. The public health facility of the
Seaside Hospital, built during the ‘30s of the last century in the Lido of Venice, has
been closed in 2003. The estate has been sold to privates for the construction of the
latest touristic resort. Thus, at the moment the hospital has become a sort of
abandoned city museum, where filing cabinets, microscope’s slides, obituaries and
medical relicts display themselves and inhabit a surreal reality of recent antiquity.
By showing the abandonment in which various sites and buildings lie in town, the
installation becomes a cue for critical reflection as well as civic tribute to public
spaces in the Venetian area.
