By Joseph Gilson
“Perhaps it is the world that suffers from schizophrenia,” suggests a disembodied voice, ringing out, lonesome, against a cacophony of other voices that are distant and indecipherable, lurking somewhere in the back of my mind.
This, one of so many moments of poignancy in Lindsay Seers’ beautiful audio-visual exhibition: Every Thought There Ever Was, an examination of human consciousness, artificial reality and the schizophrenic mind. Just after these words are spoken, three circular screens transform into giant blue piercing eyes, staring back at me, gazing into my soul. Two of the screens, attached to robotic arms, begin to approach me, coming closer, then moving back away, like a timid wild animal. They seem to be searching for an answer, inviting me into their world of reflection, inside the Upper Gallery of the Mac in Belfast. I can’t reply to the thought as it rings in my ears, I can only follow these eyes into myself and then back out, and continue the journey.
Seers’ installation is one of dualities: of inside and out, of introspection and projection, of institution and freedom, of past and future, and, most startling, the way she represents the perception of the world through the schizophrenic mind and the schizophrenic mind through the filter of the world. The gallery functions not as a cinema, which she views as being set up in a passive way where we lose our sense of bodily presence, but as a space in which we are completely aware of our own consciousness, and how ours relates to the consciousness of the voices and the mechanics of her moving performance.
We are summoned to lose ourselves in the construction of animation, drawing, visual effects and sound design, the imaginative and hallucinatory world of the virtual. But this world is perforated by moments of severe clarity, where the voices fall silent, the screens become motionless, and you are back in the gallery again, sitting in a space, occupying real life. In several instances a spotlight is cast upon me, making me painfully aware of myself within the world, a world now unsettled by what I had just experienced. Seers uses these moments of clarity to create a discourse on why we see mental health conditions such as schizophrenia as some kind of lunacy, rather than extraordinary. Worlds occupied by the schizophrenic mind – worlds which we are privy to because of Seers’ constructions – through the eyes of the sufferer are not seen as hallucinatory but another reality, frightfully alive. “A new hyppereality,” murmurs the disembodied voice.
After a while the crescendo of voices and string-led musical drones reaches a chaotic peak, the robotic arms perform their unnervingly human balletic dance, the lonesome voice describes holding her head in both hands to keep it from exploding whilst the others yell “You little piece of shit!” somewhere in the back. It builds and builds, destined to overwhelm the inhabitants of this world. And then it calms again, and I find myself in the gallery once more. The spotlight is cast down on me, but I do not feel relief that I am back in my own body. It is more that I feel the need to plunge back in again, deeper, to reach the bottom of this sensory experience, and then to look back up and out at the world beyond those giant blue eyes. From behind them this time, rather than in front. “Perhaps it is the world that suffers from schizophrenia,” echoes the disembodied voice, breaking the calm. The line carries more weight now.
The voice, in conversation with itself and us, I learn, is of Victorian surgeon James Miranda Barry, an enigmatic figure said to have fooled the British Army to become the first female doctor in the UK, by posing as a man. Seers’ imagines Barry’s consciousness transported into the future, and implanted into a virtual avatar, looking back at some of the historically barbaric attitudes towards mental health. She bases the journey around a process called Avatar Therapy, in which schizophrenia sufferers can speak to their persecutors, the voices in their head, in a virtual world. This, a technique that was first introduced by psychiatrist Julian Leff. He would give the sufferer’s persecutor a face, so that they no longer felt helpless to the invisible voices causing them so much pain. In his treatment, Leff speaks though the avatars, at first echoing the words that the sufferer hears constantly (You little piece of shit), but then reduces these voices so that the sufferer begins to feel less threatened.
Barry as digital avatar transcends time and speaks to the sufferer from the past and from the future. Looking forward, she speaks of the symptoms undiagnosed in her time and only understood through imagery: “The voices inside your head like a moth, fluttering in your brain.” Looking back, she seemingly has the ability to cure, helping the sufferer though a claustrophobic episode of “malfunction”, with the benefit of hindsight. Because, in the future, she holds in her own head, every thought there ever was. It’s a beautiful but tormented thread of communication, between persecutor, sufferer, and Barry. From relative calm in the past, to a torturous present, and then to the Barry, calling reassuringly back from the future.
Towards the end, the screens turn white and begin counting up from one to ten as symptoms of schizophrenia are listed in a cold voice, removed from the sympathetic interaction of the robot eyes and the human frailty of the voices. From the distance, through the wilderness, comes that disembodied, lonesome voice again. “No, no, no, it’s not like that,” she says. The sufferer. It’s a harrowing moment. The sufferer disagreeing with established signs of schizophrenia, but unable to explain what the truth is to us. We are left with this, the sense of incompletion, and how the understanding of schizophrenia and mental health can be mapped and explored but is ultimately subjective. But through Seers’ sublimely sympathetic giant blue eyes of perception we may just get a little closer to that truth.
The installation begins again and we go on the journey of the mind once more. I’m sitting in the gallery. And then I’m gazing out onto the world again. The projection boots up, code is entered onto a blue screen, and the robots begin their ballet of Barry.
Every Thought There Ever Was runs in the Upper Gallery of The Mac, Belfast until 29th July.
10am – 6pm, 7 days a week.
FREE.
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