More dissertaion thoughts

At the moment my theoretical enquiry and my practical project seem to be going in quite different directions but hopefully they will marry up somewhere down the road…

Anyway, here are some of my thoughts on my theoretical enquirey, and again i have a worry that i am deviating out of the sphere of fine art and into psychology/psychiatry/sociology/anthropolgy etc, but then again i have heard it said that fine art at its best is a kind of applied philosophy and philosophy literally trnslates as “the love of knowledge”.

So researching into the understanding of schizophrenia I found some interesting points. Firstly there is huge contraversy over teh diagnosis of the condition for several reasons: first, it would seem that everyone in the world has “schizophrenic” thoughts and beliefs from time to time and that in the end the only thing which classifies some one as “ill” and some one as “well” is the degree to which they hold their “unfounded beliefs”. So the diagnosis is based on a sliding scale rather than crossing a definate line. Then there is the fact that there is neither a known physical/biological root cause for the condition or any known physical/biological test that one can do to identify the illness, and infact all diagnoses are made on the basis of patient reports, making the diagnosis highly subjective. Add to that the fact that the term schizophrenia seems to encompase a number of conditions, several of which can have distinct and exclusive symptoms, and then the idea that an empirical diagnosis can be used across the board comes into question.

a pertinant example of the difficulty in diagnosing the condition comes from the history of the DSM manual which is the american psychiatry guide to classifiying mental illnesses. When a study was done comparing the US diagnosis and frequency of diagnosis with that of the UK a huge disparity was found which ended up causing the whole of the DSM-2 book to be revised into a new version, DSM-3, just over the  problem of diagnosing schizophrenia.

Then just to add to the trouble diagnosing the condition as an illness, several countries have used the termas an excuse to silence political dissedents:

“The diagnosis of schizophrenia has been used for political rather than therapeutic purposes; in the Soviet Union an additional sub-classification of sluggishly progressing schizophrenia was created. Particularly in the RSFSR (Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic), this diagnosis was used for the purpose of silencing political dissidents or forcing them to recant their ideas by the use of forcible confinement and treatment.^[43] In 2000 there were similar concerns regarding detention and ‘treatment’ of practitioners of the Falun Gong movement by the Chinese government. This led the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on the Abuse of Psychiatry and Psychiatrists to pass a resolution to urge the World Psychiatric Association to investigate the situation in China.^[44]“

From wikipediea

Schizophrenia is regarded as “the greatest mystery of modern psychiatry”.

While it is known that there is some connection between dopamine transmission in the brain and the condition the exact relationship remains shrouded in mystery as researchers have experimented with blocking the very dopamine repceptors in the brain to which the correlation was traced, with little or no effect on the condition of the patients.

Here is another extract from the wikipedia on shizophrenia which further illustrates my points:

“

Schizophrenia as a diagnostic entity has been criticised as lacking in scientific validity or reliability,^[29][30] part of a larger criticism of the validity of psychiatric diagnoses in general. One alternative suggests that the issues with the diagnosis would be better addressed as individual dimensions along which everyone varies, such that there is a spectrum or continuum rather than a cut-off between normal and ill. This approach appears consistent with research on schizotypy and of a relatively high prevalence of psychotic experiences^[31][32] and often non-distressing delusional beliefs^[33] amongst the general public.^[34]

Another criticism is that the definitions used for criteria lack consistency;^[35] this is particularly relevant to the evaluation of delusions and thought disorder. More recently, it has been argued that psychotic symptoms are not a good basis for making a diagnosis of schizophrenia as “psychosis is the ‘fever’ of mental illness — a serious but nonspecific indicator”.^[36]

Perhaps because of these factors, studies examining the diagnosis of schizophrenia have typically shown relatively low or inconsistent levels of diagnostic reliability. Most famously, David Rosenhan’s 1972 study, published as On being sane in insane places, demonstrated that the diagnosis of schizophrenia was (at least at the time) often subjective and unreliable.^[37] More recent studies have found agreement between any two psychiatrists when diagnosing schizophrenia tends to reach about 65% at best.^[38] This, and the results of earlier studies of diagnostic reliability (which typically reported even lower levels of agreement) have led some critics to argue that the diagnosis of schizophrenia should be abandoned.^[39]“

So how does this relate to my dissertation?

Well i’m not sure all I know is that there seems to be some kind of link between schizophrenia and the experiences gained from the shamanic use of strong halluciongens, such a the DMT found in the shamanic brew “ayahusca”.

And its is often stated in academic shamanic texts that “the shaman swims and the schizophrenic drowns in the same mystical waters”.

The place where this correlates to my practice is that i am trying to develope electronic immersive tools that either siumlate, stimulate or at least augment the hallucinatory experience.

A final point is that there seems to be a huge cultural revival in interest shamanic and hallucinatory practices, happening in the world at the moment with books on shamanism and inductory courses springing up with greater and greater frequnecy and popularity.

In the end i think my enquiry will be to look at the value the the hallucinatory experience and the schizophrenic experince hold for the course of fine art and technology, and culture in general.

Update

So I completed the VJ box project and gathered video documentation of the project (unfortunately filmed on an NTSC camera – doh! – so have sent tape off to be converted to pal).

The project was a real success, as far as I am concerned. I think the reason I was given a relatively low mark for the project was because the theortical side of it seemed a bit flimsy and tenuous. And infact, although I had always seen the project as a kind of simulator for a halluncinatory state of consciousness, as the project neared completion and as I dialogued with my tutor chris speed, and started reading up on the “philosophy of mind” I realised that there were deeper implications.

Infact it got me thinking along the lines that I could start building models out of plastic and electronics (and audio/video equipment) that exemplified well defined stances in “the philosophy of mind” such as “material dualism” which states that mind is merely a product of the matter of the brain. So for that stance I could create a model which had a physical basis like a big white box, signifying the “body/brain”, and that the “mind”, signified by a video projection could emanate from that structure, much like the current box project. Or as another example there is the “mental idealist” stance which asserts that the physical world exists only in the mind, in which case i could create a video projection which created an illusion of a 3D object. And so these basic examples show how the different philosophical stances on the “mind/body” problem can be represented with different physical and “projection based” interactive models.

But the more i think about that kind of stuff the more boring it sounds. I am a very practical thinker, and as much as i love deep thinking and art work with real meaning, at a fundamental level i think if a work is not fun and sensually appealing then it is a waste of time because it will never draw in an audience inthe first place to then concider the work on a deeper philosophical level. Its got to be fun dam it!

And at the same time another practical idea has occurred to me (characteristically ambitious):

A pair of gloves, that are covered in LEDs and bio sensors. I have to research whether these things have already been doen to death or whether there is still a foot hold left for a cowboy like me to make an  origional(ish) intervention.

So the glove has flex sensors in the fingers, which detect the flex of the fingers, and buttons on the end of the fingers which can be pressed against the thumb or other opposable objects to trigger an “on” signal. So the dynamic degree of flex mesured in the fingers, and the binary on/off signals of the finger tip buttons is sent to an arduino chip which then sends the signal to a “Xeebee” chip (which allows data to be sent wirelessly across a network) which sends the information to a reciever which sends it into a computer and into max/msp which interprets the data into midi and uses the midi data to control VJ software. The data is also analysed by the max/msp patch and sent back to the glove to light up the leds in a certain sequence, in correspondance to the origional data gathered by the glove. So as the fingers extend to their fullest from a closed fist, a sequence of white LEDs could light up one by one along the fingers untill at full extension of the fingers the LEDs had lit up all the way to the ends of the fingers.

The glove could also gather other bio data which could also be represented by LEDs in the glove and audio visual displays coming from the networked computer terminal.

Then if the glove was used as a performance tool or a social/personal development tool in a group communication context in conjunction with immersive video projections and a mediated enviroment then these gloves could enable people to start developing new non verbal languages as they discovered new and innovative ways to communicate.

Then the glove would serve as a prototype for a full body suit.