I hope you’ve enjoyed unpacking the Jarvik-7 with me! I tried to open up the topic by keeping it broad while exploring the biology, symbolism, and history of the natural and artificial heart. Even in these initial explorations, I found lots of fun directions to go by consulting the tin man from the wizard of oz and breaking up the entire history of the world in relation to the Jarvik-7.

After that, the cyborg theme was something I certainly couldn’t miss, so I did a more traditional literary analysis, looking for general themes I’ve observed in society and their relation to artificial hearts.

My last endeavor with Barney’s life after Jarvik-7 was also the most difficult. In essence, I was trying to show that the media’s portrayal of Barney Clark’s life with the Jarvik-7 might be a superficial representation of his actual feelings and emotions during the time.

Let me elaborate a little- the American public embraced Barney Clark as a true American pioneer, and he came to represent our own fighting spirit as well as the exciting potential of man-made technologies. Likewise, the surgical team (Dr. William DeVries) and the designer (Dr. Robert Jarvik) also represented traditional American values that appealed to the public.

Thus everyone was rooting for Barney and the Jarvik-7 from the start, but he must have felt a slew of complicated emotions and doubts during this time. I thought that the Jarvik-7 was doing very unique work in this sense- primarily, pumping blood for Barney, but more importantly, publicly sustaining American hope in medical technology and privately challenging Barney to deal psychologically and physically with its intimate existence.

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That’s it- thanks for looking through this project!

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Ten Things 2006: Projects > Tammy Wang: A New Heart to Heart > Hearts: Let's Begin!