ARTISTS TALKING

# 10 [7 June 2010]

There is an interesting survey doing the rounds at the moment http://ki.se/ki/jsp/polopoly.jsp?a=100727&d=2637&l... which links schizophrenia and creativity by arguing that both groups have 'lower than expected density' of their D2 receptors. In simple terms this means that these groups are less apt at filtering the most useful information from the least useful, leading them to make unconventional associations. Some people (like neurologist Tim Crow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Crow) think that schizophrenia is the result of physical abnormalities in the brain. Others (like Richard Bentall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bentall) think it is merely at the extreme end of a spectrum of behavioral traits that some individuals develop to cope with or withdraw from difficult and threatening circumstances. Some people also think its both.... and lets face it this is a mighty complex issue and unlikely to be answered by a simple psycological/ biological polarity. In this survey, Professor Fredrik Ullen appears to support the first theory, that levels of psychosis or creativity displayed originate from chemical rather than developmental processes.

I have the distinct feeling that there might be a multitude of different ways of proving this theory, both psychological and biological. I had somehow always thought that developmentally a child evolves a creative brain in order to problem solve or imagine alternative realities where the world was better, kinder or easier than the real world that they lived in. For example a child who was lonely might conjure a vivid imaginary friend in order to alleviate loneliness, thus developing the power for creative thinking that carries through into adulthood. I don't think that it needs a tortured childhood to develop this capacity, more that creative thinking might be a strategy developed by the child to find ways of coping with the complicated world. Psychologists like Richard Bentall have argued that psychosis is an extreme from of a coping strategy or a way of dealing imaginatively with extreme hurts and disappointments in childhood. For example a child with an extreme persecutory farther may later in life develop a delusion where he is persecuted by imaginary voices.

What I think I am trying to say is that it seems a little simplistic to imagine that the creativity/mental health problem might be explained simply by the physical composition of the brain. There must be a combination of physical, circumstantial and psychological factors that impact on the development of creativity, no?

In other news..... here is my things to do lst for this week.......

1 - read & write to Gordana Novakovich

2- Check out all artists on Kim Noble's list of artist suggestions

3 - look up Veronica's suggestion Frank Wildman book on Feldenkrais

4- Write back to George and Maggie

5 - Somya's suggestions?

6- John's suggestions Sean Docherty and Nick Totton

7- Linda Hartley "Wisdom of the Boday Moving"

8- Read up on Welcome Collection and funding opportunities

9- contact New Media Curtating list for artist ideas

# 9 [4 June 2010]

Still very much in research mode. Loads of really nice and interesting conversations happening with different artists...... I could spend entire days writing and hitting ideas back and forth...

Here is an extract of an email that I wrote to Hans from Ubermorgen this morning in reference to his work Psych|OS that he made after he experienced a 6 month manic breakdown:

"Its interesting that the Psych|OS work is based on real experience. I am kind of interested that all of the artists in the show might have somehow experienced a kind of breakdown and regurgitated it artistically. Although this wont be a definite selection criteria, its somehow valuable in giving the show a sense of authority on it's own subject matter, if you see what I mean....?

Yes I agree with you about the impacts of technology on mental health. For me its more about what technology takes away: contactfulness, the body, core identity (as opposed to shifting and multiple identities) than its status as a mentally ill thing in itself. But I do see where you draw your metaphor between neural networks and online networks and am going to turn this over in my head over the next few days. If you have any ideas for more reading that I could do about this then please let me know. I am thinking more about writers than examples of artworks.

There are also lots of interesting examples (more none art) of therapists and scientists who are using the internet therapeutically to help assist with mental health issues. For example therapists are now using therapy via email to help with social anxiety. Also immersive virtual reality environments are being used to distract patients from physical pain during treatment for excessive physical burns. For me the impact is less about the technology itself and more in how you use it."

I fully intend to write more here at some point about therapists who are using internet and virtual technology in their work. Although this is not directly relevant to the show it might be useful for the programming that I intend to propose to Bisakha, somehow.....

In other news, Sid Volter sent me a link to a really interesting artist called Gordana Novakovich who keeps a blog on the topic of Neuroplastic Arts. http://www.neuroplasticarts.org/ I need to make some serious time to look at this rather dense blog and website as I think it's really interesting stuff that might tie in with the Thinking Through the Body project.

So much to think about......

# 8 [29 May 2010]

A very beautiful train of thought about care by George Khut....

http://thinkingthroughthebody.net/2009/06/care/

# 7 [29 May 2010]

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!

# 6 [12 May 2010]

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......

# 5 [11 May 2010]

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.

# 4 [4 May 2010]

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!

# 3 [27 April 2010]

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?.......

# 2 [25 April 2010]

To complete this inauguration of this blog, I just want to quickly talk about Kim Noble, whose work initially got me thinking about technology, psychology and being a 'mentalist' (his word, not mine). Kim is doing his performance 'Kim Noble Will Die" at the Bluecoat in Liverpool on the 14th May: come and see it if you can. The piece is described as a mulimedia suicide note and basically takes one of his manic depressive breakdowns as the subject of an hilarious and excruciating performance. I went down to Oxford University to hear him speaking as part of a panel on "The Inspired Illness: exploring the links between mental disorders and creativity in society". It was wonderful to see him present his controversial work in the middle of Oxford University, encouraging a slightly bemused Oxford student to call his Mum and ask her about his illness. Incidentally his Mum denies that he has an illness and says thats 'just how he is'. I wonder if its actually quite difficult for a parent to consider their offspring has a permanent mental disorder such as bi-polar?

Anyway, what's great about Kim's work is that he completely subverts the reality TV aesthetic of the media, giving us far too much 'reality' about his chaotic breakdowns. It exploits the 'fly on the wall aesthetic' of video blogging to the point of being highly disturbing. Check this link for a more eloquent commentary than mine. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/co... And follow this link to buy tickets for his show in Liverpool http://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/

# 1 [25 April 2010]

I am half way through this book: Touched with Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison. She's a manic depressive and psychologist based in the US, who clearly has an intense interest in documenting the relationship between creativity and psychosis. So far she has talked a lot about Byron and about that almost cliched supposition that artists are more likely to be affected by a mental illness. I distrust this perspective a little given that some of the most eloquent and capable individuals that I know are artists. She talks about one particular study where:

"The highest rates of psychiatric abnormality were found in poets (50 percent) and musicians (38 percent), painters (20 percent), sculptors (18 percent) and architects (17 percent)."

I guess my task through this blog and current thread of thought is extracting the outdated romantic perspective on the insane Byronesque artist and viewing it from a more contemporary perspective, both in terms of the artistic media used (digital and new technologies) and the way in which we understand the issues around mental health.