Digital Distress: exploring mental health and technology at FACT
As an exhibition exploring the relationship between technology and mental health opens at FACT, artist Katriona Beales talks about her new commission dealing with internet addiction
One in four people in the UK will apparently experience a mental health issue at some time in their lives. Anxiety and depression are the most common disorders, and whereas in the past these issues have commonly been ignored/denied/brushed under the carpet, today they are more in the open than ever. Over the last few years, celebrity figures such as Stephen Fry and Stan Collymore have talked publically about their struggles with depression, and YouTubers such as Zoella talk frankly about their struggles with anxiety and panic attacks (‘Anxiety Q&A’ with Zoella last year got just under 2.5 million views).
In 2010, curator and researcher Vanessa Bartlett started the blog Group Therapy on the a-n Artists Talking website. The blog documented her research into the relationship between art, technology and mental health and, in her first post, she set as her task: “[to extract] the outdated romantic perspective on the insane Byronesque artist and [view] it from a more contemporary perspective, both in terms of the artistic media used (digital and new technologies) and the way in which we understand the issues around mental health.” Fast forward four years and Bartlett is now a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and Group Therapy: Mental Distress in a Digital Age, opening this month at FACT, is the first case study of her research into the links between art, technology, mental wellbeing and how digital art can be used to raise awareness of mental health issues.
The exhibition brings together 14 artists that approach ‘mental distress’ in radically different ways. Superflex open the show with a video work called The Financial Crisis, in which a hypnotist takes the viewer through a set of scenarios relating to job loss, crisis and the breakdown of the economic system. “My choice to position this as the first interaction in the show is part of a larger attempt to frame mental distress as an issue that impacts on all of us who participate in the modern world, and not just a small cohort of people who are ‘ill,’” Bartlett explains. The exhibition includes work from Melanie Manchot, Dora Garcia and George Khut and also objects that refer to the history of how society deals with mental health, such as a 1950s electroshock therapy machine. “[It] intends to highlight our ongoing love of harnessing technology to build better, healthier humans," says Bartlett. "The first use of electricity to treat brain disorder is on record as early as 1785!”
A more local inclusion is a new commission, the installation White Matter, from Katriona Beales. “The work is part of a body of research I've been undertaking over the last few years into internet addiction,” says Beales, “and was developed in conversation with clinical psychiatrist Dr Henrietta Bowden-Jones, an expert in online addictions. It also responds to my research into the historical antecedents of the black mirror of the screen. The Mexica people treasured obsidian, the volcanic black glass-like material, making mirrors and other ceremonial devices as portals to access other realms. In White Matter I draw a parallel between these obsidian mirrors and contemporary mobile telecommunications devices, which also act as portals into vast realms of information.”
The installation centres around a moving image work, back-projected onto the ceiling of a round room. In the centre of the space, a raised surface supports hand-shaped black glass objects: “Of a similar scale to mobile phones and tablets but with curved surfaces, solid and weighty in the hand,” as Beales describes them. The audience is invited to handle these and use them as viewing surfaces, watching as these hand-held surfaces reflect and distort the projection above them.
The title of the piece comes from some research showing that online gaming addicts have changes to the white matter structures (the neural pathways) in their brains similar to cocaine addicts. (“A scientific study in 2012 has shown that Internet addicts 'show an impairment of white matter fibres in the brain connecting regions involved in emotional processing, attention, decision making and cognitive control,'" says Beales.) One of the shorts in the moving image work references the news story of a South Korean couple who played a role-play game called Prius Online for 12-hour stretches every day. In the game they nurtured an online girl called Anima, who grew and developed the more interaction she received. Meanwhile, tragically, their three-month-old baby starved to death. The coroner reported that the pair had fed their premature baby just once a day. "I‘ve digitally manipulated [an] image of Anima’s face and transformed it into a topography and rendered in 3D,” says Beales, “inviting [the viewer] to journey over the contours of this unknown landscape and gaze into some of the dystopian facets of our increasingly mediated lives.”
So what does Beales' interest in internet addiction stem from; does she have her own internet addictions? “My interest in internet addiction came out of personal experiences of insomnia,” she says, “which I ‘managed’ (or not) by chasing hyperlinks across news articles and websites for hours in the middle of the night. Hours and hours disappear and I end up looking at some totally random stuff with no idea or memory of how I got there. It was this dissolution of time and space – and the sense of being sucked into some kind of void – in which both time and space became somehow meaningless.
"Strikingly, there was a kind of disconnect from the body as I browsed online; I forgot myself. I find being online very seductive, in part because of the sensual experience of the physical object (I'm thinking particularly about the glass screen of my mobile) and also because of the aesthetics – vivid, hyper-real, glowing colours and everything happening at once in a plane; pop-up windows, GIFs, banner ads, videos, images, scrolling text panels, etc. I found these experiences of information overload very appealing, addictive, compelling and disturbing all at once, and started to research internet addiction as a result.”
The example of the South Korean couple and their unfortunate child seems to be rather extreme – probably most of us suffer from mild internet addiction (I have checked my email three times just while writing this sentence) – but perhaps necessary in order to highlight the difference between compulsion and addiction. “The incident with the baby dying interested me because it was an extreme illustration of this disconnect from the body, and the parents from the physical needs of the child,” says Beales. “It epitomised the dissolution of the physical, a disembodiment so total that it ultimately resulted in death. Unfortunately, it’s not isolated – in South Korea (which is basically pioneering the field of internet addiction as it has a heady combo of super-fast broadband, high youth unemployment and a popular online gaming culture) there are regularly reported deaths [of] individuals who have not eaten or slept for three or more days and died from cardiac arrest.”
“For me,” she says, “the puzzle is to maintain ‘agency’ in the state of human being within the conditions of the digital, which [German artist] Hito Steyerl describes as ‘an audiovisual politics of intensity.’ I’m interested in a critical engagement with the new human environment of the digital – rather than just what are we becoming, what type of human beings do we want to be? I think it’s the sculptor in me – I can’t fully leave behind a preoccupation with the physical and material world. For me both the physical and virtual are forms of reality that are important – and interdependent. I love the pictures of the Google server farms for this reason. IRL isn’t a separate state.
“If you look at the diagnostic test for Internet Addiction, which was developed by Dr Kimberley Young in 1998 and is still the only diagnostic test available, you can see that a majority of people (myself included) would be classified under its terms as addicts. In reference to your email ‘habit’ (I had shared my particular internet addiction with Beales), the mesh of telecommunications with network culture means that it's increasingly normal to spend the vast majority of our living and working time online, which is why it's a contentious area. But for internet addicts the problem has become a pathological one. During conversations with Dr Bowden-Jones, Henrietta would describe clients who were unable to hold down jobs or relationships, had lost homes, become bankrupt and had totally family breakdown."
However, Beales says, "I don’t agree that this is a societal judgement – as many of these people (eventually) self-refer themselves as they are desperately unhappy.”
‘Desperately unhappy’: it is not a phrase with which I would usually choose to end an article. And actually, this show is full of possibilities and potential navigations and solutions rather than anything else. It explores how we, as stupid, sensitive, fallible humans, navigate the world and our place within it. And maybe everything will be okay. I mean, of course it will. It has to be.
...Right?