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Psychosis comprises a screen, a video camera, a computer and a sound system. Using the camera, the computer views what is happening in the gallery and processes the video stream in real time in the manner of a ‘psychotic machine’. The resulting image is projected. The projection therefore displays a psychotic perception of what is taking place at that moment in the installation environment. The projection shows a video feed of the gallery space overlaid with military equipment that the computer has mistakenly ‘seen’ as a result of its psychosis.

The thesis that accompanies this work can be read here

The rules governing the way that the computer will process the image are to recognise basic shapes in the installation environment (such as the outlines of the people visiting) and misinterpret them as military technology (planes, missiles, guns, knives, tanks etc.). These rules relate to two key diagnostic characteristics of psychosis:

1. The psychotic subject holds an unshakeable belief about the world that cannot be contradicted through conversation, reason or evidence. For the psychotic, all such experiences are interpreted to fit or reinforce the underlying psychotic belief.

2. The psychotic subject does not merely misinterpret experiences and perceptions, but in some cases can hallucinate manifestations of their psychotic belief. Occasionally the belief itself might not in itself be a cause of concern, but the hallucinations that result from it can be psychotic. For example, reasonable people might or might not agree that the world is a dangerous place or even that we are at risk from military technology, but to repeatedly manifest these beliefs by seeing weapons that aren’t there can be a symptom of psychosis.

When sufficient objects have been recognised, the machine will play a mix of sound files which show confusion between recollection of everyday events and recollections of military ones. The mix is produced interactively based on what is happening in the gallery and it makes use of pairs of recordings that, for example, might be the everyday sound of people going to work in an office or the sound of troops marching.

Psychotics typically pick up on current events cultural cues and incorporate them into their belief systems. This is why psychotics frequently incorporate concerns such as surveillance, radio, computers, and aliens (when aliens were popular on TV and film). The installation also helps to demonstrate that it is not the eye/camera that perceives, but rather the brain/computer.

The choice of military technology in the installation functions both as something that is often true for psychotics but also as a critique of those aspects of media theory that trace the genealogies of media technologies to their military base. For me, the existence of a military is simply another issue that relates to boundaries and identities, only this time at the national level.

The Psychotic Machine – series overview

Each work is a technological representation of a psychiatric disorder. Function, form and meaning is revealed as the works interact with visitors and their surroundings. The Psychotic Machine series is an extended critical engagement with subjectivity and interiority. It explores the cultural associations and opposition between the virtuality of mind and software, and the materiality of brain, body and hardware.

The Psychotic Machine is therefore an exploration of subjectification, through the deliberate examination of disordered, marginal, or exceptional states, interrogating a set of technologies, cultural constructs and conventions (dispositifs) that relate bodies to machines, computers to brains, and software to intelligence. It is also an examination on the role that cinema plays in sustaining these constructs and cinema’s own status an analogy for the imagination and the imaginary.

In this series of works I am also seeking to explore the hardware/software divide. One difference between psychoanalysis and psychiatry is that psychiatry is generally more willing to make physical interventions in the ‘hardware’ of the brain (drugs, electroconvulsive therapy, surgery) that in psychoanalysis.

An average psychiatrist will investigate the possibility that a damaging blow to the head in childhood might have damaged the brain and affected behaviour in adult life; only a very experienced and competent psychoanalyst will think to check the possible ‘materiality’ of a disorder in this way. For me, there is an obvious but complex parallel to be drawn between the discourses about software/hardware and the discourses about mind/brain.