M.E. Spaces: Global

To visually complement and expand upon the personal impact of ME (as represented in the project 'Portrait of an Invisible Illness'), I explored the lesser-known fact that there have been numerous outbreaks of ME-type illnesses documented around the world. Canadian ME specialist Dr Byron Hyde and his team recorded in excess of 70 such outbreaks in schools, hospitals, convents, and even whole towns. In order to illustrate examples of these outbreaks I utilised Google Earth Maps to visualise and map the impact of ME’s social, medical, and political invisibility upon communities worldwide. By viewing locations of outbreaks from an aerial perspective all affected individuals can also be metaphorically ‘seen’ by the viewer in a single glance. By incorporating contemporary culture’s panoptic, data-mining gaze (Dietz, 2006) into my practice through Google Earth, the visualisation of ME outbreaks provides another useful tool to encourage thinking, debate, research, communication, and understanding of ME. In so doing, it provides opportunity to promote exploration and possible collaboration in the quest to find answers to questions such as: What caused the outbreak? What are the similarities/differences between outbreaks in different parts of the world? And, why are the outbreaks limited to certain locations? The circular format emphasises the gaze of the medical community through a lens or microscope upon a worldwide issue. It also represents a connected community of ME sufferers throughout the world who use the power of the Internet to reach out to others for support, recognition, and in some instances, to affect change. In this instance maps are ideally suited to aid in forming a broader connection of ME sufferers worldwide since they affect behaviour by binding people to each other through the territory they mutually inhabit (Wood, 2012).