The Glass Witness: Visual and Tactile Engagements with Online Medical Crowdfunding

Donation-based crowdfunding platforms invite people to tell stories of unmet health needs in a hybrid form—using both words and images—but research to date has not addressed the role of visual practice in this setting, in any detail. In this Photo Essay I present an art installation responding to this gap and informed by empirical data from a three-year study of medical crowdfunding in Aotearoa New Zealand. Through a feminist new materialist lens, and connecting to scholarship on visuality and the gaze, I used the medium of stained glass to evoke and connect the experiences of both campaigners and audiences. I briefly discuss the design process, alongside reflections on the role of graphic medical imagery in an assemblage of witnessing; on disability, shock, and the economic function of voyeurism; on non-normative bodies and subjectification through the gaze; on biases in audience recognition; and on paradoxes of intimacy and distance through digital technology. I highlight that both the content and the context of images have a role in shaping the ‘response-ability’ of networked publics to the suffering of distant others; in the case of medical crowdfunding, with significant consequences for healthcare access.