There's a small town on the edge of Arizona.
Its small neighbourhoods, constructed from shipping
containers are surrounded by desert.
There's one road in and out.
No one lives here because this town was never meant to be lived in.
Instead, it's a test city constructed
by the American military.
Everyone knows the place by its nickname, Yodaville.
You've probably never heard of Yodaville,
which was built in response to American military
deaths in the battle of Mogadishu.
It was designed, as one report put it, to be less
like the pristine villages of Northwest Europe and more akin to the chaotic
environments found in densely populated areas of the developing world.
Yodaville is many things at once.
It's a set of shipping containers and a target
and a military resource and a workplace and a classroom.
It was also Mogadishu and Port au Prince, and later Mosul and Kandahar.
It is one single place,
but it's also a flexible stand in for any number of places in the world.
It stands in for the world out there.
It provides the promise of creating controllable renditions
of an unpredictable and unknowable world.
We live in a world of intermediaries,
where some objects, places and people are more than themselves.
They have the authority to represent something else,
to serve as its faithful delegate.
They act as stand ins, proxies, to help us, to navigate everyday life,
to prepare, to practice and to understand.
Proxies are all around us.
Hidden in plain sight.
They're on our streets, in our homes and on our screens.
They influence the rhythms and patterns of everyday life.
Proxies help us make sense of the world and how we should behave within it.
Proxies don't always just stand in.
A proxy may begin as a make-believe surrogate for the world out there,
but what happens when it starts to act not as if,
but as the world?
As part of their training, doctors
learn to identify and evaluate symptoms to make a diagnosis.
The standardised patient program uses actors,
performing scripted roles to simulate illness and disability.
In doing so, the actor becomes a learning tool for the student
and as they stand in for a real patient, the programme compels
the student to embody the role of doctor.
The standardised patient program depends on actors and students
to act as stable proxies for the pain and suffering of others.
Scripts and scenarios are given to the actors
to standardise how this is presented.
The student investigates the patient's body and history, comparing them
to the many patterns of symptoms they have been trained to recognise,
using their senses to make comparisons and inferences.
The standardised patient program relies on the belief
that illness and suffering can be represented by performance.
But what happens when pain can't be expressed
or doesn't conform to prescribed norms?
Gendered, raced and stigmatised forms of suffering become invisible
when proxies don't account for them.
Standardisation is a process of forgetting.
We are given permission to ignore
complexities and variabilities of everyday life
and take refuge in the stability of what we agree is normal.
Proxies are vital.
We need them to generate and pass on knowledge.
Proxies are necessary.
They provide shared understanding.
They help us navigate the world.
Proxies control.
They include and exclude, tell us what's normal and what isn't.
They define what we should aspire to and what success looks like.
They set the average.
Proxies are controllable.
Proxies are made and remade.
They can make the world better.
To do so, we must question to who or to
what do we delegate the power to represent the world?