Materials: VR Headsets with headphones, wall paintings, shadow lamps, medical swivel stools, 6 drawings and sunflower heads.

This work addresses hallucination and embodied viewing in relation to our current social and economic constructs regarding attitudes to the elderly and social care in Britain. It is also concerned with the hallucinatory condition of filmic mediums (here specifically Virtual Reality) which feel closer to how the mind itself works rather than how this is conveyed in the more historic film mediums. Alongside the medium itself the work questions the dubious cultural conventions/constructs we live by and their incoherence. As an editing method it follows the fragmentation of consciousness as opposed to the usual narrative constructs derived from literature/main stream cinema. Care(less) steps back into what underpins identity politics to address its true substrate - human consciousness itself in this case struggling to make sense of a subject that is almost impossible to conceive of - death. In the 360° perspective the journey through the work will inevitably change each time for each person, as the mind finds differing narratives embedded in the visual perspectives. The embodiment that comes with VR (a potentially dangerous medium which has been aligned with addiction) evokes an odd sense of reality that makes real the virtual. This will probably be like nothing you have seen in VR before...

From February 2019 - June 2020, The OPCARE Commissioning Partnership, comprising University of Brighton (as Lead Research Team and representative of University of Lincoln and University of Birmingham research teams); Fabrica and Ikon galleries and Threshold Studios (producers of Frequency Festival, Lincoln) are commissioning British artist, Lindsay Seers to produce The OPCARE Commissioned Artwork, a new work for exhibition at Fabrica in October 2019 and sites in Solihull/Birmingham and Lincoln/Lincolnshire.

Funded by Wellcome Trust (Research Enrichment), the OPCARE Commission is concerned with representing the meaning and value of care in human relationships. It provides the opportunity for an artist to work directly with the Research Teams to expand the public conversation about care and open up a space to explore the universal human dilemmas that we may all face but not want to think about until they happen.

Public debate on care is typically limited by policy concerns about the economic costs of an ageing population and the anticipated impact on health and social care resources. It is also underpinned by an intrinsic fear and distancing from ageing inherent in our contemporary culture and the idea that independence and autonomy are to be valued above all else. This is often internalised by people as they age - that needing help essentially lowers our value as human beings and the ultimate goal should be that we remain totally independent of others when this is no longer realistic, possible or desirable.

From February 2019 - June 2020, The OPCARE Commissioning Partnership, comprising University of Brighton (as Lead Research Team and representative of University of Lincoln and University of Birmingham research teams); Fabrica and Ikon galleries and Threshold Studios (producers of Frequency Festival, Lincoln) are commissioning British artist, Lindsay Seers to produce The OPCARE Commissioned Artwork, a new work for exhibition at Fabrica in October 2019 and sites in Solihull/Birmingham and Lincoln/Lincolnshire.

Funded by Wellcome Trust (Research Enrichment), the OPCARE Commission is concerned with representing the meaning and value of care in human relationships. It provides the opportunity for an artist to work directly with the Research Teams to expand the public conversation about care and open up a space to explore the universal human dilemmas that we may all face but not want to think about until they happen.

Public debate on care is typically limited by policy concerns about the economic costs of an ageing population and the anticipated impact on health and social care resources. It is also underpinned by an intrinsic fear and distancing from ageing inherent in our contemporary culture and the idea that independence and autonomy are to be valued above all else. This is often internalised by people as they age - that needing help essentially lowers our value as human beings and the ultimate goal should be that we remain totally independent of others when this is no longer realistic, possible or desirable.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/29740