Tag: haunts

Content analysis of wall posts on Facebook Memorial Pages

“This study investigates the types of
messages that construct communication with the deceased, and how this content changes over
the course of time. Specifically, this study examines:
RQ1: What do the living discuss in their messages to the deceased when writing in the
semi-public setting of the Facebook profile page?
RQ2: Does the content of messages to the deceased change over time?
RQ3: If so, how does communication to the deceased change over time?”

Source: citeseerx.ist.psu.edu

“’Vespers Pool’ continues Schneemann’s dissolution of imagistic and technological boundaries. Relying on dreams and signs, the work moves between conscious and unconscious worlds, melding realms that are commonly kept apart. This six-channel video installation fractures distinctions between human and animal, reason and the irrational, even between life and death. (Some of this text is from Eleanor Heartney.)

Vesper was suffering from a vascular disease which thinned veins in his neck so that when he sneezed or moved suddenly there were splashes of blood. Vesper always slept close in to my body. One morning I woke up and saw that his blood had splattered my only good nightgown (coincidentally, it belonged to the brand of cotton clothing, Cornell). I took the splotched nightgown to the sink to wash it out and I was suddenly commanded “Stop! Don’t wash this! Wrap this in tissue, in a safe place.” This was my first indication that there might be a work of artifacts tracing Vesper’s illness.

“Vespers Pool” is preceded by a corridor lined with illuminated niches that contain artifacts—a dead dove, a bloody nightgown, a deer tail, splintered wood from a tree struck by lightning—lit within the facade. These artifacts, presented as rare objects, while of no explicit value, point to a set of coincidences, to paranormal events centered on a death.

Schneemann advances her work in reconstituting psychic spaces as part of ordinary phenomena. The installation raises questions of interspecies communication, deepened by the wall of artifactual coincidences, as well as suggesting unexpected cultural taboos.

Entering the darkened gallery, viewers see seven video projections in a stream of images of a cat (Vesper) ardently kissing a woman; these images flow vertically into a projected pool of water. Schneemann spontaneously photographed the continuously kissing faces—human and animal—over an eight-year period. Questions of interspecies communication are deepened by the wall of artifactual coincidences, as well as suggesting unexpected cultural taboos.

“Vespers Pool” (1999 – 2000) includes six LCD projectors, two slide projectors, and motorized mirrors; a blue wall (8 × 15 × 14˝, with illuminated niches enclosing found objects. Four video projectors cast images down the walls, onto the ceiling and onto a circle of sand on the floor. Two other video projectors cantilever enlarged video loops side-by-side, detailing six-second sequences of the life and death of a companion cat. Edited on a Media 100 system, a multiple channel audial track layers ordinary sounds into a disquieting surround.

—Brooklyn Rail

Susan Hiller, From The Freud Museum, box 0003

“In From the Freud Museum, box 003 Panacea/cure (filed, 1991) (fig.5) focuses on the eighteenth-century mystic Joanna Southcott, a farmer’s daughter who acquired a large following thanks to her prophecies and her alleged pregnancy with the new Messiah at the age of sixty-four. In 1919 some of her followers formed the Panacea Society, according to whom Southcott had left a sealed box of writings to be ritually opened by a public convocation of all twenty-four bishops of England and Wales. The box is believed to contain a panacea, a universal cure that would revoke the sin of Eve and whose opening would usher in a new order. The bishops refused to gather together and open the box, despite repeated invocations by the Panacea Society, who took out annual newspaper advertisements urging them to do so up until the 1990s. Hiller’s box includes a copy of one such advertisement on the inside of its lid, alongside a biography of Southcott annotated and ‘extended’ by the artist, who added to it a bunch of dried flowers which she picked at Southcott’s grave in London. Hiller originally ‘collected’ the fragments of Southcott’s story when she was researching paranormal pregnancy for 10 Months 1977–9 (Moderna Museet, Stockholm), a series of ten composite photographs and texts exploring the implications of human reproduction for female subjectivity. Like Southcott’s pregnancy, the promise of her boxed prophecies never came to fruition: according to Hiller, ‘The moment of opening the box, of disclosing its revelation and (perhaps) bringing a new world into being, remains in abeyance, maybe forever.’30 Yet the legend of the farmer’s daughter-prophetess lives on in one of Hiller’s boxes, to be (re)discovered by each viewer.

The unanswered call of Joanna Southcott and her followers, commemorated in and perpetually disseminated through From the Freud Museum, captures something essential in this work and Hiller’s practice in all its manifestations: ‘an extreme tolerance for the unknown’31 and the unknowable; an unflinching commitment to unsettling the known; and a defiantly ‘reciprocal sympathy’ with all those who dare question ‘the obscurantism of educated opinion’.32 From the Freud Museum releases Freud’s contested legacies from the clinic, the museum and the gallery into sites of cultural and social possibility, where the unconscious activates a visionary politics.”

—-An Extreme Tolerance for the Unknown: Art, Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Occult by Alexandra Kokoli

Source: tate.org.uk

vjeranski:

DUANE MICHALS
PERSON TO PERSON

Tom had no idea how long he had been sitting there. It did not matter. She would never call. Yet, deep inside, he still believed in his power over her.
He always had power over her. Tom knew how to make her cry.
Even now, when he thought of her, it was her body that he missed. He wanted to touch her.
By leaving him, her absence gave her a power over him that she had never had when they were together. Tom was filled with an anxiety he could no understand.
He began to think that he saw her everywhere.
His room was filled with a terrible melancholy without her. When he would return, he hoped she would somehow be there. He was always disappointed.
He wondered if she would let a stranger touch her the way he had. He wondered if she had let strangers touch her when they were together.
Leaving a shop one afternoon, he saw her unobserved. Tom was paralyzed and could not move or speak. Later he realized that he was relieved that she had not seen him.
He dreamt one night that she came and kissed him, and with that kiss she entered his body. She looked through his eyes and listened with his ears. In the morning nothing had changed.
Tom found an old night gown of hers in the bottom of his closet. He liked to drape it over his head. It still smelled of her body.
Soon he began to wear a rose in his lapel, because it was her favorite flower. Her favorite things became his favorite things.
He hated himself for sitting there. He hated her for making him want to sit there. Tom began to believe that he could will her call, that his need for her could make her call him.
Suddenly, he knew, at that very moment she was dialing him. It was true. His power had made her call. Now the telephone would ring.
Hello, no Tom isn’t here anymore. I know he’ll be sorry that he missed your call.

Source: vjeranski