Curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, the biennial, titled "Are We Human? The Design of the Species" revolves around one provocation: design itself needs to be redesigned.
In "Going Fluid" Common Accounts approaches the design of the human body through a new angle, arguing that the design of one's physique translates into the design of the city. "When you choose your new nose from a clinic catalogue, you're funding, commenting on, like-ing, favorite-ing, editing, and subscribing to - effectively producing - an urban district," they say. Igor Bragado and Miles Gertler argue that bodies are maleable and they are subject to transformation under external elements in any given environment. However, "what is going on in Gangnam is an infrastructure for body modifications at the scale of the city which go far beyond the scalpel of the surgeon. The body modification protocol of the district spans from policies of gestures (with catalogs of how to smile in order to modify your face in a determinate manner) to designing the patients' means of participation and exposure in the social milieu of the cosmetic community which are enforced through contracts."
Description of the installation "Going Fluid: The Cosmetic Protocols of Gangnam" by Common Accounts
Introduction
Who—or what—designs the human? The architectural, infrastructural, and urban technologies of Seoul’s Gangnam district—here understood as the attendant technologies that allow the human to participate in and shape the urbanism throughout the surgery process (pre-, during, and post-op)—are responsible for the design of the human as a parallel operation to those involving the surgeon’s scalpel. That is, the design of your face is designing the city, and vice-versa. When you choose your new nose you’re funding, commenting on, Like-ing, Favorite-ing, editing, and subscribing to—effectively producing—an urban district. Your new nose demands a protocol at both technological and urban scales: tubing, smoothies, neck pillows, automated beds, cushioned vans, hotel rooms, convenience stores, beauty salons, and shopping centers. If all these actors are equally and simultaneously feeding the urbanism of plastic surgery, we might well ask: what actually constitutes plastic surgery?
Gangnam is arguably the area of the world most densely populated with plastic surgery clinics. According to the Gangnam Local Government and South Korea’s National Tax Service, more that 500 of Korea’s 671 registered clinics were located in Gangnam by 2016 [1]. Many of these businesses operate at the scale of the multi-storey tower, clustered around Sinsa and Apqujeong subway stations. Today the neighborhood’s doctors attract no less than 55,000 annual foreign patients, and in a single year, half a million people can be rendered wrinkle-free with the amount of imported collagen.[2] Seoul's Banobagi Clinic operates on roughly 28,000 patients annually in a 15-storey building, while another 70,000 come through their doors for consulations.
This exhibit presents an ecosystem of both the radical and mundane logistics of body processing amidst the reverence of a number of Seoul cultures that worship the image of the body as much as images of bodies. Gangnam constitutes a cosmetic urbanism where the technologically enhanced face of the patient becomes yet another televisual surface for reprogramming and playback. The transmedia exchange of images, travelling freely between billboards, screens, and faces, demands a sophisticated set of design protocols, accounted for here. To that end, this installation documents the many agents simultaneously designing the body and city in the two weeks of de-swelling following surgery. These diverse actors—knowingly or otherwise—enable the regular transformation of the human; this as a plastic urbanism in which the constituent parts are themselves plastic surgeons.
[1] http://health.gangnam.go.kr/info/hospital/list.do?mid=482-496
[2] Plastic Surgery Boom Reaches Alarming Proportions, The Chosun Ilbo, http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2009/11/21/2009112100182.html, Nov. 2009.
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Reflexive Prostheticism: Inside the Recovery Room
The recovery room is ground zero. Healing, whether it takes months, weeks, or days, begins here after many of the most common plastic surgery operations. Before the patient fully emerges from their anesthetized semi-somnus, they are directed to a small private bedroom only a minute or two’s walk from the OR (operating room). The recovery room—the patient’s home for the first twenty-four hours of rehabilitation—provides an array of hi-tech substitutions for the various functionalities temporarily inhibited by swelling. The post-op patient is wired, cooled, tubed, flushed, and shaped in a close embrace with valves, machines, and devices that infrastructuralize the systems of the body into which they plug. It is this technical apparatus that connects the re-designed subject to architecture and the city at large.
Briefly bionic, the patient boasts an arsenal of silicone tubing, neck pillows, suction evacuators, absorbent towels, firming bandages, codeine-laced painkillers, pharmaceutical de-swellers, pressure monitors, silky blankets, monocryl sutures, air conditioners and bedside tissues that determine how the body encounters its tumefaction and ultimately confirms the design put forth by the surgeon’s scalpel. Healing matters in the shaping of your body and the urbanism of valves, air feeds, pumps, coolants, tanks, and placebos that bind patient to building and building to city (as a single, multi-scalar composite) sets up a reflexive prostheticism necessary for not only healing, but for survival. Furthermore, the attendant nature of the bionic healing apparatus analogizes the very condition of the plastic subject: composite, attachable, customizable. It sets up the condition of exposure between patient and city as highly mediated by technological bricolage. In this way, Seoul’s plastic surgery urbanism is born in the spatial nexus of the recovery room, where new faces take shape.
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Access as Design: The Lobby in the Comment Section
The late 1990s and early 2000s marked the period of consolidation of plastic surgery towers between Gangnam and Sinsa subway stations. During that exact time span Cyworld “virtual homes” (1999), Daum Cafe (1999) and Naver Knowledge Search (2002)—the first Korean social media services based on the construction of an avatar or a new self—as well as Youtube (2005) and Facebook (2006) became part of daily life of millions in South Koreans.
The cosmetic skyscrapers are unique examples of socio-technological ensembles that simultaneously engage the extreme conditions of radical isolation and hyper connectivity to urban networks.
The towers isolate themselves in several ways. Ornamented or screened facades often veil their innards; they consolidate a number of retail programs within, reducing the need to leave the premises; and ground floor lobbies are reduced to the minimum area required for elevator access. The isolation of the tower from its context in the city seems to contradict the notion that cosmetic surgery is a form of ordinary shopping and lies rather within the logic of bodily control. The swollen post-op subject is susceptible to discomfort, pain, and errors in healing beyond the reach of the protocols programmed by the tower.
In contrast to this isolation, the fluidity and connectivity that the plastic surgery towers demand in the city’s public realm are critical to their survival. In Korea—the fastest and most web-connected country in the world—an extreme body-consciousness and the rate at which body images circulate in social media have pushed clinics like Regen Plastic Surgery to redirect advertising from subways, streets and buses to expand their presence in KakaoTalk groups, Youtube vlogs, Daum forums, BabiTalk posts and with Instagram micro-celebrities (in other words, among virtual communities). The urban space for casual encounter, discussion and participation in an outward display of lifestyle—what we might describe as the material and social aestheticization of one’s daily life—might as well be located thousands of kilometers away from Gangnam. The bedroom of an indonesian lifestyle blogger is one of the backdrops where the cosmetic agora opens up, where people meet, negotiate, and argue about past, future, and hypothetical bodily updates.
The paradoxical condition of simultaneous social hyperconnection and physical isolation collapses in a single space - the lobby. This is the site where enhancement aspirations of bodies, individual and collective, virtual and physical, collide. Traditionally understood as the space for sociality as well as the portal that welcomed the urban realm into the building, the ground floor lobby of the plastic surgery tower is now a residual space entertaining a minimum amount of public interface.
At street level, the 16-storey high BK Plastic Surgery tower has a single 4.5 square meter lobby. The 15-floor Regen Clinic is accessed by a 1.4 meter wide and 12 meter long corridor. Both of these towers, as well as many others, provide lobbies on higher floors where check-in desks greet patients right out of the elevator, but they aren’t kept at a height for the spectacle of a view across the city. Often, venetian blinds obscure the world outside in cases when lobbies are even provided a window.
In part, the lobby no longer has to occupy the streetside storefront since most patients already know exactly where they’re headed after having made their appointment online. The need to appeal to the passerby has been obviated in the material realm with the advent of the virtual. And, although plastic surgery is a somewhat public affair in Seoul, the hidden lobbies keep patients well within the confines of the tower, surrounded by the encouragement of befores and afters, uniformed nurses, and framed portraits of benevolent looking surgeons. Essentially this is a reproduction of the virtual communities that clinics seek to foster with vlog-based endorsements and day-by-day patient diaries. Gangnam’s sustained participation online amounts to a form of reality television: a web series, with the consultation, surgery, and recovery rooms as the set for a patient’s solo show.
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Indeterminate You: The Emergent Subject
Swelling marks the moment at which the re-designed body comes into a close and violent encounter with the genetically determined human original. The post-op body is abnormally enlarged by the overproduction of fluid cells, inhibiting the very functionality of the areas in question. The body’s new form remains hidden until swelling subsides and functionality returns. Bandages designed to hold firm to the desired contours of your new face not only hide the temporarily swollen subject, but signal a state of fluidity in which identity is unresolved. In fact, the patient has at their disposal an arsenal of masks—cosmetic, medical, bandaged—that, like the ink of the surgeon’s marker, announces a condition of indeterminacy. On the one hand, they are the scaffolding that allow the work of healing to be done. On the other, they are the shroud that hides the unfinished work from outside eyes. Even at the scale of the dressing, the clinics of Apqujeong design not only the body of the subject, but its means of social participation and exposure in both the urban and virtual milieu.
While computer models may attempt to visualize your post-op self, or even the anticipated extent of your swelling, their very existence confirms the restless acceleration exhibited in the re-shaping of every facet of the material realm. This is a context in which the ability to modify is coveted and exercised as not only a given, but as the principal condition characterizing daily urban life. One might theorize a link between the rapid regeneration rhythms in the city where faces are most likely to change and the low average age of buildings—close to 20 years—in Seoul. In Gangnam, the condition of change is manifest in both face and facade.
Gangnam’s plastic surgeons are the architects of an abject state of limbo that serves the construction of a new subject: while the recovering patient lingers in Gangnam, bruised and swollen and unable to return to work and daily life, they are likely to shop, frequent a salon, or project the persona of their choosing online, and insodoing they are casually engaged in the refashioning of the collateral aspects of their new identity. Thus, leisure, retail, and social media are the programmatic counterparts to the surgical.
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Going Fluid: States of Matter
Fluidity begets fluidity. It demands it. While the body processes the trauma of its own reconstruction, its operability fails, demanding simplified digestion of the inputs and outputs that fuel its healing. Meekly flavored soups, juices, congees and smoothies constitute the menu for patients who can no longer chew, if the patient eats at all. The body in its abject state—bruised, semi-solid, and malformed—is magnetized toward the dominant material state of its own constitution. To that end, soothing ointments, de-swelling gels, and dermatological creams are always within reach, many often having been included in toiletry kits handed out to patients before surgery.
The urban apparatus of pump rooms, cafes, pharmacies, and convenience stores all serve the body and its profusion of fluid cells with liquids. The more liquid the patient, the more liquid their urbanism.
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Cozy Crusade: Philias and Phobias
The rearrangement of genetically determined organic matter and the merging of this matter with elements alien to the body experienced by patients submitted to Angular Jaw Surgery, Genioplasty, Zygoma and Ptosis Correction, is an act of acute violence. One of the crucial protocols of Gangnam is to pair each condition of pain with an experience of total pleasure. In effect, violence—contained to the surgery room—can only be permitted if countered by an environment that constantly negates it.
De-swelling massages are provided after removing the facial bandages for the first time; A patient experiencing headaches and nausea is free to visit the third floor salon to get their nails done; And a client with heavy facial swelling may recline beneath the warm glow of a Smartlux light therapy system. The constant injections of comfiness and cuteness—also in the pastel interior coloring and rounded corners of clinic corridors and waiting rooms—form an arsenal, mounting a cozy crusade against their violent counterparts: blades, blood, and syringes.
For every phobia, a philia. And for every condition, an appliance, treatment, or ointment: Gangnam’s clinics are manufacturing an economy of comfort as much as they’re producing discomfort, violence, and a client hungry for both.
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Procedural Rites: The Christening of the Next You
Given the fluidity that dominates the de-swelling process, one might wonder when the former you becomes the next. In that regard, the procedural has replaced the ritual. Medical, social, and bureaucratic operations now mark the most crucial points of transition:
Naturally, revisions to the face—the default instrument for day-to-day personal identification—produce systematic errors for institutions relying on physiological consistency. To that end, Seoul’s plastic surgeons have been licensed to stamp official forms that confirm that a patient who no longer matches their passport photo is indeed the bearer of the travel documents in their name. This form is often issued two weeks into healing, once sutures have been removed and the new face emerges from the veil of tumefaction.
The removal of sutures is another such indicator. After a week or two of subsiding pain, the excavation of the remaining stitches can be the most painful operation compared to the anaesthetized slumber of the initial surgery. The procedural specifications of this last operation depends somewhat on the techniques and materials employed by the surgeon. How did they tie their knots? Was a dissolving suture chosen over a permanent strand? How much has sensitivity subsided around the area in question as a result of those two decisions?
Ultimately, it falls on the patient to decide when they’re ready to re-emerge in the public sphere of daily life. An uploaded photo without a bandage or mask may indicate their re-emergence as a newly formed subject in social space. Nonetheless, the contemporary plastic surgery subject is an individual for whom change is always an option. There is no “new” you; there is only the “next” you.
Description of Alkaline Hydrolysis Aparatus by Common Accounts
Alkaline Hydrolysis System for Human Disposition, LT-28: Resin model by Common Accounts, from Closer Each Day: The Architecture of Everyday Death.
Data for the Alkaline Hydrolysis Machine:
The alkaline hydrolysis system for human disposition combines water, heat and a lye solution in a pressurized chamber to accelerate the breakdown of biological matter. The technology liquefies dead human bodies into a fertile solution. Originally limited to the disposition of animal remains, the technology has recently been made accessible for human bodies in response to the limited capacity to bury or cremate urban populations, and amid concern over the ecological impact of traditional means of body disposal. Alkaline hydrolysis opens up the potential for a productive afterlife in the fertilization of the plant material of one's choosing. The resultant solution can also be used for its drain-clearing "bug particles" in municipal sewage lines. Depending on the model, these human disposition systems can process up to seven bodies every two days.
Manufactured by Bio-Response Solutions Inc., (Pittsboro, Indiana, USA).
Inventors: Wilson, Joseph. and Wilson, Lucas.
Patent Number: JP2013508285A, Filed 2011-04-29.
