This is a very fast post. On Monday I have to post the final version of my AHRC application off to the London Consortium, for consideration for a grant. They pick one person from each year for said grant, so the competition will be huge!
I’ve done a complete overhaul of my proposal – because I did not think the last version was strong enough to qualify. Here it is. If anyone has an suggestions on how it could be improved in the next two days – please give me a shout!
The dissolution of the linear mind? Archiving mental health symptoms using new technology.
A man nurses an erection through his trousers, while waving out of his window. On a rooftop outside a group of builders go about their business, oblivious. This autobiographical clip, shot on a shaky hand-held camera, documents a moment of desperate isolation and a failed attempt at communication.
It belongs to the huge archive of video footage, emails, text messages and recorded telephone conversations that is at the heart of Kim Noble Will Die, an acclaimed work of performance art/comedy, subtitled by one critic as ‘a multimedia suicide note.’ Within Noble’s pathological index there are unanswered emails to the self-help guru Paul McKenna and a telephone recording in which his ex-girlfriend confesses infidelity. Not only is Kim Noble Will Die a record of one man’s mental health symptomatology, it also represents a zeitgeist in which technology is becoming understood less as a simple tool for communication and more as an aggregate of human psychology.
In her new book Alone Together, academic and psychologist Sherry Turkle, employs empirical case studies to frame technology as a placebo for satisfying the deepest need for human symbiosis. Technology, she says “proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies.”[1] Her words are part of a wave of recent speculation about the impact of technology on the human brain, which finds its zenith in journalist Nicholas Carr’s prophesising the “dissolution of the linear mind.” [2]
Historically there is a myth of fear that stretches from Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein to Stelarc’s flesh hook artworks and draws association between technology and deviant or pathological behaviour. Writing in the Guardian in August 2010, Tom McCarthy has linked technology and depression, beginning with Freud’s book Civilisation and its Discontents. He says that “for Freud, all technology is a prosthesis: each technological appendage, to a large degree, embodies an absence, a loss.”[3] But beyond the artistic imagination, these speculations find some solidity in scientific practice. In the 2004 Journal for Clinical Psychology, Michelle G Newman’s essay on email psychotherapy asserts that: “when questioned about sensitive areas such as criminal history, alcohol blackouts, sexual disorders, and suicidality, clients will disclose more substantive information to a computer than to a clinician.” [4]
I propose a dissertation in two parts:
Part one: The historical relationship between technology and pathological behaviour
· How is Nicholas Carr’s prophesy of the “dissolution of the linear mind” embedded historically within the artistic imagination?
· Where is the point of contact between artistic speculation and scientific practice?
Part two: Archives of mental health symptoms, made using new technology
· How are communication technologies being used to document pathological behaviour and symptoms of mental ill health?
· How might these documents function in opposition to more conventional archives of mental health symptoms such as medical records and doctor’s notes?
Case studies of mental health archives covered in part two:
· Hans Bernhard, an artist who blames a psychotic breakdown he suffered in 2002 on his use of the Internet
· Kevin Whitrick, the first British man to broadcast his own suicide online
· Kim Noble artist and stand up comic with bipolar disorder
[1] Turkle, Sherry, Alone Together, Why we expect more from technology and less from each other, p1
[2] Carr, Nicholas, The Shallows, How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, p1
[3] McCarthy, Tom, ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ The Guardian 24.07.10
[4] Newman, Michelle G, ‘Technology in Psychotherapy: An Introduction.’ Journal of Clinical Psychology Vol 60 Issue 2
