Role Playing Egas (Moniz): Net. Art Project under a workshop at Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon (CCB 2005)

Co-workers & Funding

ROLE PLAYING EGAS / WORKSHOP / Centro Cultural de Belém (CCB, 2005, NET. ART Project with Nuno N. Correia and others).

Egas Moniz was born in Portugal in 1874. He went to Coimbra University Medicine Faculty and received further education at Bordeaux and Paris and became Professor at Coimbra University in 1902. In 1911 was transferred to the new Chair in Neurology in Lisbon where he remained until his death. Moniz also worked for a time as a physician in the Hospital of Santa Maria, also in Lisbon, and entered politics in 1903, served as a Deputy in the Portuguese Parliament until 1917 when he became Portuguese Ambassador in Spain. Later, was appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs and was President of the Portuguese Delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1918.

Moniz discovered cerebral angiography or angiogram in 1927, a method of performing a radiographic examination of blood vessels by injecting radiopaque contrast into the intravascular environment. The name comes from the Greek agghéion (vase) and grapho (to write). The goal of this procedure is to provide a vascular "map", which will facilitate the location of vessel abnormalities and thus the diagnosis of certain pathologies.

In 1935 Moniz develop, in a team with the surgeon Almeida Lima from the Lisbon University, lobotomy, from the Greek λοβός (brain) and τομή (cut), also known as prefrontal leucotomy, a surgical intervention in the brain in which the pathways that connect the frontal lobes to the thalamus and other associated frontal pathways are sectioned. It has been used in the past in severe cases of schizophrenia. Egas Moniz was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work. Although the procedure horrors it was practiced with excessive enthusiasm in many countries, notably Japan and the United States. In the latter it was popularized by surgeon Walter Freeman.
Egas Moniz personality is very controversial due to his creativity and capacity of connecting science with politics. Ahead of his time he was also able to create a network of people around the world who supported his visions. Moniz died in 1955.

Role Playing Egas project (2005) was an interactive box for the web compiled with flash software. This project was authored by Patrícia Gouveia (concept and visual art) and Nuno N. Correia (sound and programming). The project received contributions from a team of people: drawings and illustrations from Gonçalo Varanda and Restart School Students did a film capture of a talk about the controversial personality of Egas Moniz from queer scholar António Fernando Cascais from Nova University Social and Human Sciences Faculty, FCSH/UNL.

The interaction was meant to be an exploratory path in a web screen box where the interactor could jump between bits of Egas Moniz strange life story mixed with drawings, sounds, texts, and images from films such as Suddenly, Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1959), Lilith (Robert Rossen, 1964), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, 1975) and Frances (1982). In a nonlinear fashion the work meant to reflect about cultural depiction of female madness and its dubious history. The aim was to highlight a feminist ambivalent perspective where a sexist patriarchal culture can drive women insane when embracing sexist notions of inherent female instability and narcissism. So, the work meant to show how madness was emphasizing gender discrimination and alienation. According to troubled ex-soldier Vincent Bruce (Warren Beatty) at Lilith movie beginning: "Somehow insanity seems a lot less sinister to watch in a man than in a woman, doesn't it?" Role Playing Egas invited us to contemplate what is so threatening about female madness and how medicine used women and minorities as sources of experimental procedures.