Am I at a point of completion where I am satisfied the work does what I want? If only…It’s a race against time.
The space is still evolving. We only had electricity connected last week – for the first time I can plug in kit to experiment with projections!
What I stumbled on almost a year ago, was a disused space, an attic of five interconnecting rooms that were almost completely empty. Groping around the semi gloom and cobwebs felt slightly scary, as if I had to make peace with the ghostly presences there.
Now, having filled the emptiness with antiques and bric a brac, and watching health and safety signs and emergency lighting mushroom up, I do sometimes wander what I’ve done, how do the ghosts feel about this invasion?
Andrew Byrant (comment 7/4/09) is interested to know what research and experiments I have done. A lot of reading (biographies of Jenner, A.David Napier’s Age of Immunology), rooting around the museum’s archives (a treasure trove of early 20th century photographs of smallpox patients) and testing ideas and early edits of text, images, sounds on willing museum staff. I have now started taking volunteers around the attic to see how they react and get their feedback.
Andrew asks how encouraging the viewer to feel the work (a right brain experience) will then lead to a questioning of ethical principles. Thinking about the question made me wonder, is ethical thinking a right brain or left brain activity?
When I was working on this project, I went to see Ari Folman’s film “Waltz with Bashir”. It begins with Folman’s rational question: why don’t I remember anything about fighting in the Lebanon war of 1982? He realises this when his friend talks about being haunted by a recurring nightmare from the war. His own memory is blank. So he begins his journey, talking first to a therapist, who advises him to seek out former comrades. All very left brain and rational. But as the movie unfolds, it begins to take on a more dream like state. Sometimes it’s just details (Folman remembering the scent of patchouli his Israeli commander would put on before a raid so the men could follow his smell). Then Folman himself starts to have recurring dreams. He realises he must have witnessed the infamous massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp. Finally he remembers watching the Palestinian survivors stream out of the camp. Their faces, he says, their faces had the same look of those holocaust survivors staggering out of Auschwitz.
That moment of empathy, that imaginative leap that enables one to see the other’s point of view…is a right brain experience.
I believe that ethics, the answer to the question “what should we do?”, needs to be informed both by our rational mind as well as our sense of empathy, our sense of common humanity.
