Video project for Artcolony Cered, 2023.
The theme of this year’s symposium is Tabu. Things we shouldn’t share or say out loud, things that might get us into trouble… What is looked down upon in society? One of the first associations was mental illness. You can’t just declare that you have schizophrenia and continue to live a normal life without fear of losing your job, friends or family… Talking about mental illness can be taboo. But how to include it in a graphic project? That’s when I remembered the Rorschach test, a set of symmetrical abstract ink drawings that were shown to patients to study their state of mind, personality traits, and mental illnesses like schizophrenia. Test results should not be discussed with anyone other than a doctor.
With this idea in mind, I created a video with programming algorithms that takes inspiration from the Rorschach test, but instead of static images, it shows dynamic shapes that appear and disappear, move and change. The shapes in the video gradually become more complex and detailed, just like mental illness…
The sounds used in the video are taken from NASA’s Sound Project, Sound Visualization of Black Holes. If an object falls into a black hole, it cannot escape the enormous gravity… In the same way, schizophrenia has no cure, no escape. If the patient is diagnosed, it will remain for life.
“The Rorschach test may help identify emotional functioning, personality traits, and specific mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, anxiety and psychotic mood disorders. The person being tested is shown abstract images and asked to describe them. There are no right or wrong answers, you can see more than one thing.”
What do you see?
“The study reports that out of observations of 76 chronic schizophrenics, 75 described masses of flesh or muscle, more broadly, in modified forms such as animals or human beings with deformities of head, arms, or legs. Masses of flesh proved to be characteristic of schizophrenia, whether chronic or acute. Normal adults did not perceive any flesh mass” © Elsevier Science (USA), 2002.”
