VJ Box

On the practical side my plans for a portable interactive VJ Box are coming together. I have purchased the electronic components, and the wood worker i have chosen to collaborate with is now free to spend some time developing the project. I need to look into patenting the design, with a veiw to possibly mass producing them one day. I have some 3D graphic designs of the box that i will try to post up here soon.

Happy new year i-dat!!!

I have been reading around my dissertaion topic over christmas and disscussing my ideas with Geoff Cox and my Dad (who is an academic). I am interested in drug induced hallucination and schizophrenia in art. Also i know that looking at this field in terms of “value” is useful as it helps to pin down the information. Then i have to ask: what kind of value? Social? Finincial? Initially I was thinking that financial value would be good because you can quantify it quite clearly, but then i realised that this was actually opening the paper up to all kinds of things, like ecomomics, that i am just not interested in. Maybe i can talk about the finacial value of hallucination/schizophrenia influenced art, in terms of social value. What is social value? How do i quantify it? I am still working on these questions. Here are a few (uncited as of yet) examples that i am aware of that initally inform my interest in this topic:

1) “Outsider Art” made by institutionalised schizophrenics in a European Country is sold at auction for high prices. Of worthy note is a late British painter, who suffered from schizophrenia, called Richard Dadd who despite spending most of his latter life in institutions is renowned for the painterly work he made during that time, some of which i believe was on display in the Tate Modern in London over the christmas period. This would indicate a high value for such art works.

2) Pencil portrait sketches made by an artist who was under the influnce of LSD, in a book i own by the famous LSD researcher Grof, are useful in revealing the degree to which such a drug can reduce an artists ability to make clear depections in his.her chosen medium, but are actually quite badly drawn pictures and as such would be of little value outside of this specific context. This would indicate that art made while under the influnce of hallucinogenic drugs is of little or no value.

3) Early man is belived to have made many of the cave paintings that we find still in existance today, while under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms. These works are reported to be of high value to the tribe as they belived the experiences, and art works generated there of  were part of a process to communicate with the “spirits ” that the tribe believed in, with a veiw to instigating the “spirits” help with things like crop production that would ensure the prosperity of the tribe. Wether true or not these hallucinatory communications with the spirit world are assumed to be of great value to the tribe. This would suggest a high value for art made while under the influence of hallucionogenics.

It is important to me to make distinct the categories of art made while under the inflence of hallucinogens/in the throws of a schizophrenic episode, and art made afterwards from memory of such experiences. I would like to rule out the category of art made by people who have never had such experiences and are simply drawing on the reports of others.

Hallucination/Schizophrenic art is popularly seeing as frivorolrus and/or of little value, but it is my intention to review the history of such artworks and asses their true value, with the belif that it has actually played an important role in art history.