Electronic Art, Altered States, Catharsis and Care
Chanced on this clip after following up on some links about binaural beat frequencies and the use in the entrainment of brain wave rhythms.
I really enjoyed looking at the faces of the people interacting with the work – the generosity they brought to it – giving themselves over to this peculiar light experience – and the strange sense of expectancy on their faces. Its not something you see people doing very often in contemporary art spaces these days.
Thinking back, I’m reminded of Ulf Langheinrich’s stroboscopic ‘Waveform B’ installation at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art – mesmerising and deeply unsettling at the same time.
There’s a strong history of artists working with technology to access/facilitate radically altered states of consciousness. The machine in this clip was designed by Brion Gysin, a contemporary of William Burroughs. I’ve been very interested in this territory for a long time now – ‘fringe’ media technologies – is a term I’ve used for want of a better name – to encompass the range of devices and systems developed to facilitate/entrain alternate states of being. I’m totally aware that this encompasses a whole host of totally out-there New Age practitioners, UFOlogists etc., and its interesting to look at how these practices are altered by their placement within or beyond official ‘contemporary art space’ contexts i.e. at a dance party, new age workshop, psychology lab etc.
I’m curious about how I can model these different contexts, and interested in how each of these contexts offer different terms and conditions for audiences to enter into various forms of transgressive, cathartic or otherwise transformational experience.
At a practical level, this has relevance for how we present body-focused experiences – in public or private space: how to support certain extremely intimate forms of engagement and reflection, and examining the boundaries of such an experience – how long should/could the interaction last, what is the artists/curators/practitioners duty of care in rellation to individual participants, and what resources should we ensure are on hand for followup/debriefing when eliciting potentially cathartic experiences. Knowing a few people who have had serious psychiatric problems after leaving intense meditation retreats, I’m all too aware of the potential risks involved with these types of experiences.
This connects in with some of what Somaya has talked about re post-traumatic-stress-disorder. My intuition tells me to focus on minute sensations, rather than lightning bolt sensorial overload. Somatic bodywork methodologies have a lot to say on this subject – build on the clients capacity to sense, notice, compare small changes. What interests me about the use of parapsychology and body-focused interactions is the possibility of facilitating an intelligent and poetic engagement with our structure and its potential – and to do this in a way that can reverberate throughout a person’s wider life engagements.
I have no doubt that there’s a place for actual violent cathathis and trauma in cultural practice (as distinct from vicarious, as in film), but this is not something that can be easilly achieved between strangers, such as is usually the case in a contemporary art space/live art event. ‘BDSM’ and body modification subcultures provide a very vivid example of the use of intense, cathartic and body-focussed interactions in contemporary urban culture, as undertaken within carefully negotiated and consensual rellationships, but such interactions are far from the distanced anonymity of most contemporary arts centre exhibitions and events programs.
This example of sub-cultural practice brings me back to a consideration of context, institutional values and boundaries, and the plasticity of these values and boundaries in radical creative arts practice. In my own practice, I’ve sought to be inclusive as possible with regard to audiences, but I know in reality, that each gallery that I show with has its own overlapping audience constituencies, more or less permeable to various ‘general publics’ depending on the venue. Often I’m happy to work within existing curatorial niches i.e. ‘live-art’, interactive-art, body-art, community-art etc., but I do think that if we are serious about supporting ‘critically engaged practice’ – then the terms and conditions of audience/community engagement in ‘contemporary art’ require some re-negotiation. Must our engagement with contemporary art always be at a distance, casual, fleeting, and anonymous? Or could there be a space for a more intimate, personalized and enduring rellationship between artist, arts organisation and audience/participants, one that unfolds over a period of months or years – one that can encompass the type of enduring, long-term relationship and duty-of-care akin to that provided by a traditional familly doctor (general practitioner) or local medical practice?
If we are going to engage with audiences at the level that some of us are proposing (cathartic, transformative, intimate, psychological etc.) then these issues of endurance and personalised care will certainly need re-negotiating.
