Illness Narrative with a Difference: Natalie Bookchin’s “My Meds”

Research Summary: Natalie Bookchin's “My Meds”

Category: Digital Media Art Installation / Video Narrative Project

Primary Subject: Online illness narratives and pharmaceutical self-disclosure through crowdsourced video diaries

Project Framework: Testament series (2009) — multi-channel video installation synthesizing fragments from personal vlogs into choreographed narrative patterns

Conceptual Mechanism: Employs Greek chorus structure to reveal how individuals collectively construct meaning around medication and illness through simultaneous connectivity and anonymity in digital spaces

Central Inquiry: Explores the paradox of intimate self-revelation within anonymous online communities, examining contemporary modes of health-related narrative disclosure

Methodological Approach: Editing and sequencing fragments as “streams and patterns” that echo, contradict, and iterate individual accounts into collective testimony

Scholarly Significance: Reframes pharmaceutical narrative beyond biomedical discourse into humanities-informed examination of digital culture, intimacy, and social relations in contemporary medicine

Natalie Bookchin, “My Meds,” Testament (2009) multi channel video installation

From the project web site: “Testament is an ongoing series of video installations made from fragments from online video diaries, or “vlogs” that explores contemporary expressions of self, and the stories we currently tell online about our lives and our circumstances. Clips are edited and sequenced like streams and patterns of self-revelation and narrative that flow and dissipate over space and time. As in a Greek chorus, individuals echo, respond to, contradict, add refrains, iterations, and variations, join in, and complete solo narrations. The project reflects on the peculiar blend of intimacy and anonymity, of simultaneous connectivity and isolation that characterizes social relations today.”