Editor's Note

Carolyn Lazard’s Improved Techniques, 2014, begins with a painful, anxiety-inducing drone accompanying a black screen and then views of a parking lot. For the video, Lazard cut and compiled footage she took in secret at various clinics and healthcare facilities. All of the expected markers of waiting rooms and doctors’ offices are there—the soft-green walls, seemingly endless stacks of paperwork, nondescript reproductions of painted landscapes—and Lazard questions the authority of these often mundane signifiers through her clandestine recordings. Drawing on her personal experience living with the diagnosis of multiple chronic conditions, Lazard investigates the ideas of progress and healing as they pertain both to her own symptoms and to advances in medical technology at large.