Former Self (version 1)

I recently graduated from National American University with a degree in Health Information Technology. I will soon take the Registered Health Information Technician (RHIT) board exam so that I can be fully licensed in this field. I will then be looking into prospects involving health information management, billing, coding, information, and informatics in the health care field. I mention these things here on this blog post because this image captures a fragment of the information I grew accustomed to studying before I graduated.

Perhaps there’s not much of an exciting story to divulge here, but something must be told to fill the empty spaces that this image exemplifies. Actually, the spaces in this image are not truly empty. You can see variations of grey, like in the grey of a cloudy sky. The text comes from a printout I made of a PDF I downloaded from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) concerning the International Statistical Classification of Diseases Revision 9 (ICD-9). In fact, you can see an upside down “2009 ICD-9-CM” in the upper right hand side of this picture. ICD-9 and ICD-10 are official codes sets the healthcare field uses for billing and reimbursement purposes. They’re also for demographic research purposes.

For some reason, I really am fascinated with technical and scientific text as background filler in my art. It just looks so alien and foreign to the average eye. I also enjoy flipping text around so that it’s even less legible. I like making these images look random, like you’re walking through a laboratory, and you see some files laying on the ground as if they fell from a table or file cabinet.

The red hemispherically divided circle and the concomitant triangles contained within two braces, one on the left and one on the right, make the drawing look even more mysterious. It’s like some entity decided to ignore the information on the page he found and drew a scientific alien symbol on it; perhaps as a fiducial marker for the purpose of locating it in the future; and to communicate a message to anyone else who may stumble upon it.

The printout I made as a background for the drawing put upon it was actually a double printout. I first printed out the CMS PDF, then I printed out a page for one of my assignments for one of my online classes. I just liked the effect it created. These kinds of ideas give visual form to rewritable discs. While CDRWs are becoming a thing of the past, as zip drives take over the personal data storage market, they still give me this idea of sedimentary layers of digital and analog archives coded through time.

So this is part of why I titled this piece as Former Self. It’s like we all update ourselves in this day and age on a daily basis now, as information pummels us from all directions; even in our sleep. There are many forgotten and remembered parts of ourselves that we have to let go of, suppress, deny, and try to forget about in order to survive in this world, be acceptable, and get along with others. With my art, I like capturing the many subtle layers that compose our psychologies much like the many intricate layers that form the structures of our bodies.