Its been a really busy few weeks. I had a nice time. I passed my driving theory test, I saw art in London, fell over while drunk and met my long time heroine Coco Fusco http://www.thing.net/~cocofusco/work.htm. Now my pockets are empty and it’s raining outside. To avoid sinking into a stupor (my recent habit on days like today) I’ll attempt to do some research.
At present I have two options for the theme of this show.
1) Looking at new media arts and it’s use in therapeutic contexts for the exploration of mental health issues. There are some super NONE ART examples of this. The only ART example I can think of at the moment is George Khut but there must be more.
2) Depictions, representations and self portraits of ‘madness’ in using new/multimedia type artforms such as video and the internet. I can think of a few more examples of this and also it seems that I could somehow talk about the bits and bobs that lead me to get excited about this topic such as internet suicides (ie people who kill themselves in chat rooms). AS AN ASIDE: When I was talking to Coco Fusco on Wednesday I brought up the topic of internet suicides. She concluded quite simply that people take their lives online because it gives them the feeling that someone is listening to them. A rather simplistic interpretation, but I suspect that she is right. Anyway I think an allusion to listening or being heard would make a rather nice title for the show…..
ANYWAY, the way I propose to move forwards is to think maybe about taking the first idea as something that I can bring to the conference in December with Bisakha and developing the second idea into the visual arts event/show that I mention in the intro to this blog…….
Lets see how it develops!
TO DO LIST:
Write to George Khut re the use of bodily therapeutic principles in new media and interactive arts practice. http://thinkingthroughthebody.net/
Contact Ubermorgen http://www.ubermorgen.com/CATALOGUE/ re depictions of psychosis in interdisciplinary arts practice
Try and find out a bit more about Bonkers fest esp what was in the gallery programme http://bonkersfest.org/home.html
COOL!
I am heading to London this afternoon, to spend a couple of days checking out galleries and having a bit of a mooch. I will be taking things steady given that yesterday afternoon found me at the hospital having a small cervical biopsy due to some dodgy looking cells that the doctors have found. The procedure is a total trauma that leaves me feeling faint and delicate. None the less when I wondered out of the hospital after treatment yesterday I had to stop and think…… what would I do if the worst happened and these dodgy cells did become cancerous? Suddenly life seems a little more urgent and a lot more precious.
I met an amazing artist on Friday who felt like a real embodiment of some kind of wonderful life force and someone I could instantly admire. Being somewhere over 50 (!) Bisakha Sarker of dance company Chaturangan http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~ef/Bisakha/ is still dancing, programming and cooking with a fervor would put most of us younger artists to shame! She has proposed to host an event at the Bluecoat in December called Memory and Meaning : On Dance and Dementia. Dementia is a subject that sits very close to my heart, given that both of my Grandmothers developed it in the latter years of life. What I remember from that period of time was the strain not only on my Grandmothers but on the families around them: on my parents and even on myself at a small age. Bisakha’s conference programming seems progressive and interesting both in it’s structure and content and in the way that she wants to consider how the arts might be used to offer support to the families of dementia suffers as well as the patients directly.
I am hoping to work with her quite closely on the conference as I believe it will help invigorate this Group Therapy project, which I have not really got my teeth into as quickly as I would have liked! A period of intensive research and consideration of a strategy for approaching a couple of mental health charities is needed when I return from my London trip. HOWEVER…. today is my birthday and I am off to pack my case and go outside into the sunshine. Maybe with a slightly new outlook on life……
Im going to a Feldenkrais workshop on Sunday http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feldenkrais_Method This is a form of body therapy used to help improve problems with physical movement and patterns of negative thinking. It was first brought my attention when I came across the work of George Khut and his project Thinking Through the Body http://thinkingthroughthebody.net/about/ where it has been used as a method of augmenting the interface between body and technology and opening up the role of the body in new media arts practice.
The workshop is happening next Sunday and I am hoping it will sort me out after the two days that I have just spent bed ridden with a miserable hang over. Its approaching my 27th Birthday and I am wondering if I am beginning to feel my age….eight glasses of wine was clearly too many!
It will be nice to get to grips with something practical, to think more about how physical and creative forms might come together, but using my body rather than my head! I’m all too aware of my tendency to live in my head and to withdraw from physical experience, something that I think is happening more in society in general. Artists like George feel really important in the way that they combine technology and body therapy as an anecdote to the desensitisation I think we all feel to some extent through spending endless hours sitting at computers, driving in cars and watching TV. It feels to me that integrating the body and the senses to our relationship with technology is absolutely vital, drawing emphasis away from what technology can do and toward how it can make us feel.
I’ve been thinking about what I would ultimately like to achieve through this blog and the project that it documents. I think that the arts/technology/mental health is a fascinating topic that I would like to develop through further study and in my professional life as a producer and curator. This is certainly a topic which I can be passionate about and I have already proposed to contribute some programing on dance and mental health to the Bluecoat later this year, which I am excited about….
More importantly, I think I’d like to open up an opportunity for artists and audiences to talk about mental health and all of the colour and darkness that a bout of mania or a slow slide into depressive disorder can cause. This is still absolutely a taboo issue and I know this because I’ve been terrified to tell any of my professional (and even personal) contacts about my own experiences. I wont subvert the taboo with one show, but I might start a discussion that will help make a slight shift.
I read Darkness Visible by William Styron over the weekend. Styron was the author of highly acclaimed books such as Sophie’s Choice and fell into a bout of serious depression in his early sixties. He’s pretty convinced of the link between artists and depressive illness, identifying long lists of his fellow writers (Albert Camus and Anne Sexton among them) who have been affected. I am still looking for scientific evidence of this link as most of my reading so far has been anecdotal, but Stryron’s a powerful author and this book made compelling reading. The most entertaining part (of what is an otherwise a very dark text) was his story of being so exhausted and haphazard on the night when he won The Prix Mondial Cino del Duca in Paris, that he lost the cheque for his prize money worth £25,000!
Today I came across this video by Sid Volter. Its called Seamless and I love it for the fact that it overlays a narrative about loss of contact with the real world over google mapping footage: the ultimate device for total strategic control over our environment. The text documents the decent into depression “its like a kind of falling, falling out of sync with things. Its as if everyday life has a rhythm. But you don’t normally notice it, its seamless”. You can see it here http://sidvolter.blogspot.com/
I suppose that we take technology for granted as a means of exerting more control over the world around us, for connecting more quickly with the important people and places in our lives and pulling them into closer proximity. However the omnipotence of technology has also been subverted in quite sinister ways by people who have taken their own lives live via web cam or mobile phone. I wonder if technology can actually help us to loose touch with reality at times?…….
