Session 11: Madness and Creativity 2
2nd Global Conference
Monday 14th September – Thursday 17th September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford
Roomforthoughts: Labyrinth Psychotica
Jennifer Kanary
Independent Artist, and University of Plymouth, Department of Technology, School of Computing, Communications and Electronics Planetary Collegium – HUB: M-Node, Naba Milan
Psychosis: any of several major mental illnesses that can cause delusions, hallucinations, serious defects in judgment and insight, defects in the thinking process, and the inability to objectively evaluate reality.
In his award winning 2004 book Pure Waanzin: Een Zoektocht naar de Psychotische Ervaring [Pure Madness: A Search for the Psychotic Experience] the linguist Wouter Kusters tries to develop a language that is able to articulate what it is like to be psychotic. Kusters (2004, p16) argues that psychiatry is good at suppressing, controlling, healing and even preventing psychosis; but that it is unversed in understanding and describing the subjective experience of psychosis.
Starting from Kusters’ criticism, one might ask the question how to contribute to a better understanding of the subjective experience of psychosis? Which tools could be used? Might an art experience provide new ways of understanding something that is so difficult to describe? While studying current development of psychosis simulators, Jennifer Kanary’s artistic research (roomforthoughts) argues for the use of multimedia installation art as a creative tool of knowledge in approaching an understanding of what it is like to be psychotic. Inspired by Clark and Chalmers (1998) roomforthoughts elaborates on how installation art could be used as an active cognitive extension of mental ‘pretense’, which could aid empathic understanding of the subjective experience of psychosis. (Kanary, 2008, p162)
“When I say that installation art might be used as a creative tool of empathy, I envision the experience of installation art not so much as a simulation of psychosis, but as a network of emotions, thoughts and actions that provide analogous stepping stones towards understanding the complexity of that which is often described as indescribable.” (Kanary, 2008, p163)
During the 2nd Global Conference: Madness – Probing the Boundaries roomforthoughts will elaborate on how its research might provide an alternative investigative tool for understanding first person experience of psychosis in another. In particular, roomforthoughts will talk about the experience of fear, referring to films, the haunted house, and installation art in relation to the psychosis simulator ‘Paved with Fear’ developed by Janssen Cilag.
Music from another room. A Visual Investigation into the Silent Signs of Madness
Sandra Uray-Kennett
University of South Australia, Australia
From my witnessing of the hermetic and sublime symptoms of schizophrenia, I begin an investigation into a constellation between madness and its silent signs. I am interested in a world that is inaccessible, which by its very nature makes my investigation into the nexus of silence and madness an intimate confrontation with a relentless and unpredictable barrier. My intention is to highlight less apparent or obvious aspects of schizophrenia and visually represent their intervals and interruptions. I seek to develop work that can present, in another way, the silent signs in madness; thus promoting further understanding of schizophrenia as an illness and a human condition.
Susan Sontag argues that our most profound experiences come ‘from the rubbish heap of our observations’ . I have observed a quiet torment and wondered at this silent state of being. The premise for the body of work entitled ‘music from another room’ lies in my bearing witness to the silent, isolating symptoms of schizophrenia. I have experience of the illness through knowing someone who suffered/s this illness. Things are different when someone makes an observation; Werner Heisenberg stated that just by looking at something you change it. Do I change this silence just by looking? I observe a silence and approach this discourse of madness as one of a purely speculative nature.
‘music from another room’ is a visual work assembled from fragments; where the meaning is found within, as is the language of the silent signs of madness. However, the question remains; is it possible to represent the ‘seemingly paradoxical [and] the unsayable’ ?
Whilst there has been a plethora of texts on madness, visual art has an immediacy that communicates the unspoken world and unspoken word. Derrida describes the madman as the perfect stranger and asks for the face of this stranger not to be continuously overlooked . I intend this body of work to contribute to a greater understanding of the human condition by finding another way to represent the silent aspects of schizophrenia.
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