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INSIDE THE TRANCE OBJECT: ACCESS, AFFECT, AND ESCAPE

FRANCES SCOTT

MA Fine Art
Wimbledon College of Art

Critical Practice Research Paper - 2010


CONTENTS

PRE-VOICE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1

THAT PERSON/S (MULTIPLY, TO THE POWER OF...) 4-13


INCIDENT 1
INCIDENT 2 (AND 3, AND...)

NODES (LOCALISED SWELLING) 14-21


BODY/IES AND SELF-
(UN)CONSCIOUS, CONSCIOUS, NONCONSCIOUS
TO REPRESENT, OR NOT

THE HAND IS A NEEDLE 22-27


BODY-MACHINE
BODYMACHINE

REWARDS 28-33

THE BLIND SPOT 35-37

ENDNOTES 38-40

ILLUSTRATIONS 41-53

BIBLIOGRAPHY 55-64
PRE-VOICE

Can you hear me?

Two voices in tandem are played against each other. They


create funnels; one, left, that mediates, one, right, that
questions its mediation through its relations. They are
represented, but only for a moment, as fonts. They are
inextricable and frictioned, not monochromatic but gradients
and pixels. They propose a disintegrating third voice, the
beginnings of a stereoscope.

Come again?

Things in the mirror are closer than they appear.

The double spread is a double entendre. Forget the


erotic suggestion for now, but consider the seduction of the
diptych dual images duelling, the impact of the way two
images, or words and images, act upon and transform one
another. The double spread is ground zero for the sequential,
narrative, or time-based possibilities of the book-space. One
image speaks for itself, another criticises it. One image can
be powerful, another can disarm it, stoke it up, change its
meaning entirely, begin a new sequence, say more.1

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Joel Fisher, Rosalind Horne, Oliver Evans, and


Lesley Sharpe for invaluable conversations; Joyce Cronin for
proof-reading the text; Steven Ball at the British Artists'
Film & Video Study Collection, Central St Martins College of
Art & Design, and Adam Jones at the LUX Collection, London,
for assisting with access to works by Jane and Louise Wilson
(in particular both versions of Hypnotic Suggestion 505) and
Susan Hiller (Belshazzar's Feast); and finally, thanks to
Graham Thomas for hypnotising me.

Front cover image:


Jane and Louise Wilson, Stasi City (1997), video still (detail)
Available at: Kunstverein, Stasi City: Jane and Louise Wilson, Kunstverein,
Hannover 1997. p.42.

1 Lippard, Lucy R. 'Double Spread', Fusco, M., & Hunt, I. (eds.) Put About: A
Critical Anthology on Independent Publishing, Bookworks, London 2004. p.83.
THAT PERSONS/S (MULTIPLY, TO THE POWER OF...)

Where are we?

INCIDENT 1

It is as though one were watching one's own life from someone else's perspective,
like an autobiography written and read by someone else. 1

In January 2007, in the turbine hall at Tate Modern, a seated audience witness the

artist Matt Mullican perform within a state of hypnosis. 2 Over ninety minutes he

carries out a series of repeated actions; working in ink on large paper banners at the

back of the space - text, images writ large - marking out bands on the floor with

masking tape, and talking (to himself). As the performance unfolds, Mullican

appears agitated, and at some point lies down on the floor, shouting obscenities.

Finally, there is some communication between Mullican and hypnotist. It seems he

asks the hypnotist to 'stop now'. He is guided from the hall and the performance

ends.

Fast forward to January 2010, to the lecture theatre at the ICA, London. To a seated

audience again, Mullican presents a performance-lecture, cycling through live

drawings on a white-board, slides, and video documentation of previous works,

including a live transcription of his last public performance under hypnosis,

presented at the Whitney Biennial in 2008. Actions in the recorded performance are

similar to those from the Tate, this time with dialogue between a falsetto 'start the

day, start the day!' and from a much lower register, 'I can't wait to start my day'.
Talking through this particular section, Mullican faces the video documentation on

screen, not his audience. He seems weirdly energised by the play of escalating voices,

contributing to their exchange.

In both instances it could be said that we experience a difficulty in reconciling the

'different' Mullicans played out. Recall the Tate: Watching again the documentation,

there is some discrepancy between the composure of the artist shown in interview

pre-performance, to the activated figure then witnessed in the live event. Recall now

the lecture at the ICA earlier this year: The strangeness here comes with Mullican's

transcription of the footage of himself; 'oh, yeah, he often does this'. It would appear

that the 'he' in question is a familiar, if eccentric, friend, known to embarrass himself

in company. This disparity of persona/s is acknowledged by Mullican outside of the

performance context, referring always to himself in the trance as 'that person'. 3 In

this alternative space of being, it would appear that he articulates a set of

characteristics different to those he might normally enact.

This state, for Mullican, is closely aligned with a certain kind of virtual reality, an

example within his practice being his stick figure 'Glen'. 'Glen' lives on the page, in a

room that denotes Mullican's studio and workspace - another plane for being and

experiencing. 'Glen' can do anything, his first action to pinch himself, he works on

stuff, he gets bored, sometimes he hurts himself, he dies in an eternal mortal-coil

shuffle. 4 'That' person is also a kind of stick figure:

In a way he is like Glen, but I don't want to call him Glen. He's beyond

Glen. He's something else. 5

'Glen' allows a breaking up or splitting, an abstracting, of the individual body across

time and environments; a before/after, and during, person - different versions of the

same (still whole) 'self'. In some respects, what Mullican does here is to initiate a

ventriloquial exchange. David Godblatt posits that: 'Ventriloquism is the occasion


6
for letting strange voices speak', and so, Mullican ventriloquises himself. As with

the ventriloquist and their dummy, he proposes to the audience a tension between
two discrete entities - one docile, inert, the other agent and active, whose voice

source is apparently undetermined. Mullican also suggests his need to keep this

self(ves) separate to the collective, the audience body. He speaks of a palpable 'heat'

brought by the audience on their arrival to the space, and the demarcation of the

performance 'zone', creating masking tape boundaries between where he and they

reside. 7 In doing so, and in his description of this affect (on his body), he conjures

up images of the ritual. His desire to access the 'other' in some way, implies an

activity that draws on the vocabulary of mystic practice, aligned with a tendency

towards transcendence, movements from lower to higher registers of being. In this

operation, he appears to suggest that he is able to control the individual and

collective identity, through certain performative gestures. Or more simply, he must

keep the 'other' (whatever that 'other' turns out to be) at a distance.
Come again?

INCIDENT 2 (AND 3, AND...)

This time, an audience of one, watching a video on a monitor

played in a dark (and hot) archive room at Central Saint

Martins College of Art & Design.8 A voice, 'And take another

good, deep breath'... and 'This may remind you of other

experiences'... But, it doesn't, not yet at least. This is

Jane and Louise Wilson's Hypnotic Suggestion 505 (1993), a 15

minute video piece originally commissioned for the exhibition

'Walter Benjamin's Briefcase', curated by Andrew Renton in

Porto, Portugal. Two figures - Jane and Louise Wilson - both

dressed in black, are seated next to each other in padded

vinyl chairs, reminiscent of office furniture. There is a blue

curtain back-drop. This is not a theatre per se, although the

curtain could certainly propose it. Instead, it feels like a

conference space, or the end of the boardroom table where

ideas are pitched. Just in-shot is a partial profile of a man

(the Hypnotist). His voice, the only one, is often barely

discernible, where the instructions feature more as a

metronome that sets a pace.

Action.

As the hypnosis script unfolds, the artists are instructed to

close their eyes, raising hands to faces (the signal to 'go

deeper still'). 'Now just imagine you are walking down a long

corridor. And with every step you take you drift deeper,
deeper into trance. Relaxing deeper, deeper, and deeper.'

Yes, I have been here. Or at least some place nearby.9

Different voice, same voice, registers register. After a few

minutes, the camera slips very slowly through the gap between

them, as if obeying the same instruction to move down a

corridor. It finds its focus amongst the starchy folds of the

curtain behind, and it stays there for what feels like a long

time. Now, silence.

Some time later, the camera pans back to present the scene

again, minus the Hypnotist in view, and almost immediately the

Wilsons are 'awoken' with the instruction '505'.

Mais profundo e mais profundo...

So far, so simple. Except it seems there are two versions (one

in English, the other in Portuguese). The second version shows

what appears to be the same set-up, although with a different

Hypnotist. The figures have swapped places, their arms no

longer raised forwards but at a 90 degree angle from their

side, somehow uncomfortably. The figure seated to the right

drops a coin held in her fist. Around their necks, a lead to

small earpieces, we assume relaying the translated hypnosis

script. The text, for the non-Portuguese speaker becomes

abstracted texture. Again the camera moving between them,

again, the curtain.

The reading of certain formal decisions - the black 'uniform',

the twins located as Rorschach mirror-image and the virtual

'sync' of their actions - might quickly lead to conclusions of


the double, bodies at once separate and the same. Instead, the

surface is slippery here; no suggestion of becoming other/s,

or that one figure demonstrates the Freudian unconscious /

conscious of the other.

Instead the body-abstraction is transferred to the viewer, our

sensing space is accessed through our movement with the

camera, drawing us into the folds of the curtain. This is the

threshold of virtual / actual space. This material density

(the curtain no more than a grid, a series of bands that

recall the test-signal) absorbs us and it seems too the voice,

which on the return leg is not allocated a body-source but

comes from elsewhere (off-stage right). On the journey back,

whilst the configuration of hypnotised figures remains the

same, they are also somehow, unrecognisable. There is an

imperceptible change (as in Lars von Trier's Dogville), 'what

would best have been described as a tiny change of light'.10 A

kind of forgetting has taken place in the gap where the

figures were removed and the test-signal brought forward.

Their re-introduction has engendered a shift so that they feel

to be surplus matter, extraneous to the event. Important to

mention too, that the audience for the work in Porto would

have encountered the projected film having entered first via a

virtually identical space - empty other than a blue curtain.

It turns out later that this first room was the one in which

the hypnosis was filmed. This physical recursion created

through the installation, adds another layer of movement to

the slipping through and beyond the figures proposed in the

film. The recursion is not contingent on human figures, but on

a physical oscillation between space, time, and objects.


NODES (LOCALISED SWELLING)

Enter the orphaned unconscious.

Through the lens of the trance-state (in this context, induced

through hypnotic suggestion), and with particular reference to

the practices of Matt Mullican, and Jane and Louise Wilson,

certain sites and terms begin to flicker in and out of frame.

These sites are nodes, or localised swellings, that propose

meanings and references that intersect.

BODY/IES AND SELF-

The body considered in one funnel here, is the intact, organised organism, The

human-being as rooted, central reader of world and universe, channels everything

but is not channelled. It can act as a terrain onto which another voice - external or

internal - might speak, but even so will continue to preserve itself. Its identity is

formed by itself and through the systems in which it operates. It carries (I carry) all

meaning, self-articulating, self-defining and enclosed subject. Bleed is minimal.


The second funnel charges the body as something expressing the

potential for dissolution of a 'unified' or intact self-. This

self- is not necessarily sited as 'one' located within a

single mind or body, but towards a textured plane, contingent

and porous, it overflows into the world and the world into it.

The hyphen, swift on the heels of 'self-' is introduced by

Brian Massumi, whereby the body/self- is a sort of relay

between corporeal and incorporeal dimensions, existing as

dynamic event. This relay points to a state of emergence, not

a crystallised end-point: 'The hyphen is retained as a

reminder that “self” is not substantive but a relation.'11

Furthermore, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari's 'Body Without

Organs' is an example of this incorporeal body, it is:

...not the proof of an original nothingness, nor is it


what remains of a lost totality. Above all, it is not a
projection; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the body
itself, or with an image of the body. It is the body without
an image.12

The body is therefore one part of many parts. Like the

machine, it generates and accepts 'flows' of energy, matter,

from other machines existing within an infinite chain.

This notion of the body as incorporeal and relational, does

not ask that we ignore our 'real' body, but opens up

possibilities for thinking about its potentials.


UN(CONSCIOUS), SELF-CONSCIOUS, NONCONSCIOUS

Funnel one: Within the psychoanalytic trend, the unconscious is theorised as an

interior or 'deeper' layer that seeps constantly through into the flesh of the

conscious. Repressed and submerged by the individual, it acts upon the psyche,

welling up into the conscious to either be articulated and given formal expression, or

returned. The 'self' remains intact throughout this process of being acted upon.
Funnel two: The incorporeal body introduces a trouble for the

notion of the conscious as aligned with a known 'I' or assumed

self-hood. Instead, the unconscious exists but not as the

repressed version worked through in Freudian programmes. It is

operational and expansive, with abilities to surpass those

regulating forces without being distorted. It is not interior

local to the individual, but forms another component of the

body/machine/s.

The unconscious is not figurative, since its figural is


abstract, the figure-schiz. It is not structural, nor is it
symbolic, for its reality is that of the Real in its very
production, in its very inorganisation. It is not
representative, but solely machinic, and productive.13

In situating the unconscious within a productive and producing

chain, the implication is that the unconscious is additive and

affirmative, generating and generated. Despite Deleuze and

Guattari's wrestling of the unconscious away from terrains of

psychoanalysis, the term itself struggles to shake particular

connotations. For purposes here, in clarifying the two

funnels, can we conjure another word? 'Trance'? Or

'nonconscious'? Massumi makes distinction between the

unconscious and nonconscious, the latter proposing a kind of

sensing, body-intuition, that is not curtailed by personal

fantasy. Its definition might better be found within terms of

affect, speed, and movement;

Perhaps they are distinguished modally, by their ways of


carrying variation: by their different dopplering of potential
(different “speeds”) 14
TO REPRESENT, OR NOT

The hypnotic trance state, articulated within the practices of

Mullican and the Wilsons, emerges in quite different ways. In

some instances, the experience is brought into form, in

others, it is displaced or transformed as anti-matter.

In early spiritualist practice, the medium or filtering body materialises the

'unknown' (the dead). It emerges - and is appropriately documented - from an orifice

as ectoplasm; distortions in wax, light, or a cloud of wool portraying the face of a

dead relative. Here, the un-representable is represented.


Conversely, I would like to consider the potency of a non-

representation, and how practice might employ this as working

method. Especially, how this 'other' place or experience might

be more appropriately indicated or pointed to, but not

formulated - in line with Lyotard's discussion of the

unpresentable, the sublime: 'When one represents the non-

demonstrable, representation itself is martyred.'15 In fact a

formulation can only propose a distraction, the decoy then is

the medium or product. I understand my inquiry in terms of

Walter Benjamin's observation, to find formal expression might

effectively dissolve the essential core of that experience:

The narration of dreams brings calamity, because a


person still half in league with the dream world betrays it by
his words and must incur its revenge. Expressed in more modern
terms: he betrays himself. He has outgrown the protection of
dreaming naivete, and in laying clumsy hands on his dream
visions he surrenders himself. 16

One way to consider a non-representational approach to

practice, is how it might not require spectators but operates

with and through participants, who change through their

engagement with that work. A series of unexpected affects in

and on the body are brought to bear; we experience a dizzying

sensation, a body-hypnosis, within Jane and Louise Wilson's

Gamma (1999) or Stasi City (1997), when the camera pans down

endless corridors, following the vertical trajectories of a

paternoster lift through a deserted building. There is a

prising open of the cause/effect cycle, in which we are

permitted to inhabit the in-between, time and space collapse.

Within my research, the trance operates as one of these

prising tools, it permits a change of tempo, access beyond an

everyday modus-operandi, allowing for the self- to embrace its

relations with other things, the world, and draw them close.
What does this introduce for work whose approach is one leaning towards models of

representation, re-presentation? In the context of Mullican's work there is a

distinction articulated early on between artist and viewer, or spectator. In order for

the work to be fulfilled, we are needed to recognise and validate, to make real, the

person/s enacted in trance before us. Recall: in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, the

private eye - Blue - is hired by a client - White - to investigate and follow a man -

Black. It soon appears that Black is in fact White (no Black and White then, but Grey.

Gradients and pixels). His 'being watched' validates his existence;

I've needed you from the beginning...To remind me of what I was supposed
to be doing. Every time I looked up, you were there, watching me, following me,
always in sight, boring into me with your eyes. You were the whole world to me,
Blue, and I turned you into my death.17

This validation can only happen if the state is presented to the viewer, if 'that' person

is called into play. Without an audience, it remains as a (single) person being

inducted into hypnosis. Thought and body are posited as autonomous images, and

affect is controlled and accounted for. It does not spill further than the 'Mullican'

perimeter.

The unconscious can therefore present only what is supplied to it by the conscious. 18

Representation assumes a certain position vis a vis the world, in that the human

throws light onto something in darkness, and brings it to the fore with their scanning

torch, making it recognisable.


This is not to say that the scale between (generalised)

representational and non-representational work is at all

monochromatic, and also not to say that artistic practice

finds no 'form'. Instead, it becomes how ideas are worked

through and absorbed into the fibres of production. Robin

Mackay in his recent talk, Denaturalising the Ear-Brain

(psychoacoustics and 'engineering-as hallucination'), 19

proposes that the artist transforms their subject - if the

work illustrates or pictures, it is no more than scientific

model, but, in the process of 'dramatising' it,20 the artist is

able to set in motion a change. That thing is allowed to

b e c o m e something else, and enters a dynamic context of

understanding. It is brought into sensory, sensing experience.

This reveals the potential of practice to tunnel through

material in order to change it, to create channels that lead

away from origins, from crystallised, immobile forms. It

agrees with Harman's perception of movement and 'weird

realism', where;

We do not transcend the world, but only descend or


burrow towards its numberless underground cavities - each a
sort of kaleidoscope where sensual objects spread their
colours and their wings. There is neither finitude nor
negativity in the heart of objects.21

The non-representation is a sort of archaeological dig, where

digging goes right through and out of the other side to show

something as it is.
THE HAND IS A NEEDLE

Fade in.

BODY-MACHINE

If the body is a mediating body, a medium through which other voices may speak

(including those voices present already within that body) - filtering and framing -

there is relationship between the trance state and technology, hinged on

representation. Thinking about Mullican's drawings produced under hypnosis, and

pulling in Henri Michaux's mescaline-induced ink works as example, the hand is a

needle that behaves as seismograph or monitor. It registers a disruption. The body is

prosthetic of technology, a physical lens that projects an abstraction of an already

ambiguous stimulus. The outcome, as with Mullican, is hardcopy evidence,

documentation of the trance state. It exists outside of the event as discrete and

autonomous. This notion of the body as machine and its 'print-outs' is corroborated

through Michaux's description of his experience, whereby:

...thoughts and feelings proceed like projectiles, where inner images, as


much accentuated as accelerated, bore and drill with violent, unbearable
insistence, objects of an inner vision from which it is no longer possible to detach
oneself, luminous like burning magnesium, agitated by a to-and-fro movement like
the slide of a machine tool, infinitesimal.. .22

Mullican also describes the act of channelling and (re)projecting noise. Under

hypnosis he becomes:

...a radio, an AM radio, and I'm moving it around the room. I'm receiving
different kinds of information...If I have an AM radio and I'm on the dial going
from one channel to the next, it's chaos, there's no information. 23

No information. It is not so much 'what's out there' and more the action of
receiving, translating. The thing that emerges might be white noise and nothing

more. In the context of spiritualist practice and history of the seance, Marina Warner

also describes Tony Oursler's The Influence Machine and its animated bodies in this

way, as: 'technological transmitters / receivers / channellers.'24 These references

suggest that the mechanical is aligned with the unconscious, in which there is an

interesting tension between what is seen as inert or docile 'reception', and a more

active process of 'transmission' or 'projection'. Whether inert or active, the machine

in this vein can be understood to represent the unconscious, as expressing

something automatic and submerged.


BODYMACHINE

A familiar counter argument to technology, and its

relationship to the biological and social body, comes through

the role it is perceived to play in the dissolution of 'real'

experience, in its mediation in and deprivation of human

interaction and potential. There is some sense of horror that

it will even submerge the human, swallow it up entirely, thus

becoming total replacement for the otherwise preserved and

preserving organism! Georgio Agamben, in his essay 'What is an

Apparatus' places technology in opposition to the human body,

proposing the divide: 'on the one hand, living beings (or

substances), and on the other apparatuses in which living

beings are incessantly captured.'25 This reading is limited to

creating polarities between organic and non-organic materials

and systems, generally couched in terms of human versus

machine.

Within my research, I attempt to shift this notion of

technology as 'othered', alien thing - to subtract the

'versus' - to something closer to Mark Hansen's reading as it

being affirmative extension of our capabilities. Importantly,

technology's potential to expand and unpick the margins of the

individual and collective bodies, that is:

...submitted and constituted by an unavoidable and


empowering technical deterritorisation - a body whose
embodiment is realised, and can only be realised, in
conjunction with technics. 26

The body is 'affective'27 and indispensable. It holds potential

to mimic, or be understood as machine as corporeal entity.

This is not to say that it replaces the machine (or visa


versa), but emerges through its connections to other material

things, supplements. As with the 'Body Without Organs', it

operates as a relation, transforming and producing energy

(that can be transformed somewhere else, and elsewhere again).

It is a process of accumulation;

Doubtless each organ-machine interprets the entire world


from the perspective of its own flux, from the point of view
of the energy that flows from it: the eye interprets
everything - speaking, understanding, shitting, fucking - in
terms of seeing. But a connection is always established, along
a transverse path, so that one machine interrupts the current
of the other or “sees” its own current interrupted. 28

The machine/body/object might then allow then for discussion

of affects without the interruption of the self-conscious

subject. In sharing a space of operation, there is no self-

consciousness. All states, all phenomena are therefore

objects. Harman's bubbling objects in 'On the Horror of

Phenomenology...' also express this chain;

Intentional objects are everywhere and nowhere; they


'bubble and blaspheme mindlessly' at every point in the
cosmos. Although vividly present as soon as we acknowledge
them, intentional objects express their reality, only by
drawing neighbouring objects into their orbit, and there
things in turn are only present by enslaving still others. 29

A de-centering of self- is something that happens in relation.


REWARDS

Where's the rest of me?

Rewind.

The notion of the mediating body or active, mechanical filter, suggests a certain

element of will, a conscious decision to open up various channels of reception. It also

implies an agency or capacity to close or redirect those channels as desired. If we

consider this strand first and submit to the role of medium, what reward or access to

(a version of) a truth is permitted? To make the leap to the site(sight) of Disneyland,

this 'reward' is described by Umberto Eco as operating for the tourist:

An allegory of the consumer society a place of absolute iconism,


Disneyland is also a place of total passivity. Its visitors must agree to behave like
its robots... If the visitor pays this price, he can have not only 'the real thing' but the
abundance of the reconstructed truth. 30

What Eco seems to be saying is that there is a complicity or form of contract; our

submission and acquiescence permits us to believe in the construction of this 'place'.

Robot body equals trance?! We are duly rewarded with the infinite, with unlimited

knowledge. In her essay, 'Truth's Shadows', Jean Fisher proposes that this surrender

brings forth a dilemma for the individual dreamer, who becomes unable to claim for

themselves their own altered state/s, and plays out instead 'someone else's

phantasy'.31 She suggests that the domain of the (repressed) unconscious, the dream,

the imagination, is colonised and conditioned by society, systems (of our own

making) to the extent where it no longer belongs to the individual. In both instances,

the notion of a surrender or giving-in, assumes still that the body mediates and is

conscious in its selection to behave this way. It is implicated, and, as Deleuze and

Guattari have argued, might even desire its own repression.32


Flip this around. If indeed there is no self-consciousness,

then how can the unconscious be repressed? The body and these

channels are open for business 24/7 as part of an ongoing

network of other bodies.

If will is indeed removed from the equation, what is left to

escape? The narrator Walbrook, in Sharon Kivland's essay 'A

Viennese Waltz...' enacts this void:

He could see everything, whereas you were condemned to


see nothing save through his eyes and his words. He knew all
this and was going to teach you all about your desire and
knowledge, as nothing more (well, I declare) as agent of the
Other. His sight and voice would have to do for you. 33

Walbrook represents the desire for knowledge (of everything).

He can even see in the round! Through this lens, it appears

that the territories of the 'unknown' are appropriated into

systems of capital, folded into it, and mirror perfectly this

quest to know, to achieve, to acquire the infinite. This quest

to become so many more things than 'One', finds its anecdote

in Ronald Reagen's early outings as an actor. Massumi maps a

particular incident - in which Reagen as actor enacts an

event, or intensity (a terrible discovery of a loss of limbs)

- onto his later activities within conservative politics.

Politics promises, rewards him with, the potential to

infinitely self-divide. He is to thus able to:

...enter innumerable bodies of other “fellows”. These


bodies in their eagerness (or at least willingness to play
their social roles, will have worked themselves into a state
of heightened receptivity, a kind of panicked passivity marked
by autonomic repetition of assigned lines and a susceptibility
to becoming - other, on cue. 34

His reward, the world. Though, where Reagen locates or opens

up a gap in which he is able to 'lose' sight of himself in

order to ever-expand the numbers of contexts that he can


inhabit, Mullican's becoming 'other' crystallises. The event

is cut short at the point in which he polices himself through

his designation of 'that person', even 'Glen' performs his

dutiful role as inhibitor. The process of becoming is

recognised and named before it gathers momentum, access and

knowledge therefore being limited to Mullican finding only

himself, over and over; Every time you see yourself, well,

there you are. 35


The autobiography quoted with the first

'incident', is not in fact performed and read by someone else,

but by Mullican. In this light, the hypnotic trance becomes a

coded space in which responsibility can even be publicly

relinquished in order to re-enact certain immanent desires.

Access and escape are held in stasis within the same body. No

bleed.

The movement away from the human figure as metaphor for

complicit 'subject', to other sites of being, intimates that

the lack of self-consciousness need not subtract or undermine

experience. Reward is sensation. In several works by Jane and

Louise Wilson - Gamma (1999), Home/Office (1998), Stasi City

(1997), and Crawl Space (1995) - the trance state is proposed,

not through its image, but embedded within the buildings and

interior spaces through which the camera tunnels. There is a

particular (dis)orientation that is affective on the

experiencing viewer, without any human body presented as

disorientated in itself. This hallucination is created twice,

within the filming process, and then further amplified through

the installation; often, projections intersect at adjacent

corners, the filmed worlds disappearing into or emerging from

the fold between them.


When we stare, barely seeing, into the screen, haven't
we entered a “lost” body-dimension of abstract orientation not
so terribly different from the one we go to when we roll up
our eyes and find ourselves in the fold? 36

In the instance of A Free and Anonymous Monument, a series of

screens at various angles are suspended from the ceiling,

creating a kaleidoscopic 'sky', multiple vantage points that

conflate actual and virtual space. Millar expresses the affect

on his own body through these moments of collapse:

Everything inside me becomes outside. The perspective


itself begins to shift and fails to resolve...I am caught in
an unresolved parallax where difference approximates a
combined vision. Perhaps we have not passed through the
mirror, into another space, but are caught in that space
between mirror and glass, a space which flaunts its three-
dimensionality while deprived of depth. 37

This last sentence recalls, again, the curtain in Hypnotic

Suggestion 505, which acts as the escape and in the same

moment, revealing that the escape itself is held between

places. It is not a transcendence but an immanence in and of

itself.
But wait, the blind spot.

THE BLIND SPOT

Where are we?

Come back around, again, to the narrator Walbrook.

Like the blind man, he saw everything, except what is


lacking, what cannot be seen. He could not see the blind spot
but you, you knew it, for you were in it; you may even have
been it, but you had nothing to say about it. 38

He cannot see the blind spot, but it does exist as an obscured

visual field outside of perception, an insensitive region only

lacking to him. If we return to thinking of the machine body,

it designates an area where (radio) reception is patchy or

inexistent.

Come again, to Reagen's desire to multiply himself, to annex

himself through a losing of self-consciousness. He looks for

no image. The blind spot then i s the body without its image,

in which it moves out of itself and loses its centre,

precisely because the blind spot changes with every axis of

movement. If imaged, the body becomes as series of freeze-

frames or film stills,39 it is a taxidermy where missing

information is filled in but not known. Then again, blind

spots may be produced, and on their shadow or behind their


axis of movement is another. They proliferate, not as

originals, for there is no original, but opening up onto each

other as contagion. The trance as with the blind spot, is

immanent and constant. It happens all the time. Its access

promises escape (with return), but access is osmosis through

thresholds not boundaries, not 'now we are here, now we are

not' but 'now we are here'.


1 Wilmes, U. 'Who do we think?', Mullican, M., Moura de, V. & Wilmes, U. Matt
Mullican: that person's workbook, MER, Gent Belgium & Ridinghouse, London,
2007. p.723.

2 'Hypnosis is a mental state (state theory) or set of attitudes (non-state


theory) usually induced by a procedure known as a hypnotic induction, which
is commonly composed of a series of preliminary instructions and
suggestions...Contrary to a popular misconception - that hypnosis is a form
of unconsciousness resembling sleep - contemporary research suggests that
it is actually a wakeful state of focused attention and heightened
suggestibility, with diminished peripheral awareness.'
Wikipedia, Hypnosis. [Internet]. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnosis>
[Accessed: 18 November 2009]

3 Mullican, M., Moura de, V. & Wilmes, U. Matt Mullican: that person's
workbook, MER, Gent, Belgium & Ridinghouse, London 2007.

4 Mullican, M. Dying Stick Figure (2001), animation dvd on monitor, presented


as part of the group exhibition Shudder, Drawing Room and Animate Projects,
London, 21 January - 14 March 2010.
(artists: Edwina Ashton, Barry Doupé, Ann Course, Avish Khebrehzadeh, Matt
Mullican, Raymond Pettibon, Naoyuki Tsuji and Markus Vater)

5 Mullican, M. performance lecture to accompany exhibition For the blind man in


the dark room looking for the black cat that isn't there, ICA, London, 12
January 2010.

6 Goldblatt, D. Art and Ventriloquism, Routledge, London and New York 2006.
p.42.

7 Tate Modern, Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis, video documentation of


performance, UBS Openings: Saturday Live, Tate Modern, London, January 2007.
[Internet]. Available from:
<http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/26406462001> [Accessed: 5 December 2009]

8 Wilson, J. & Wilson, L. Hypnotic Suggestion 505 (1993); Normapaths (1995);


Crawl Space (1995); Home/Office (1998); Insert (1997); Stasi City (1997),
viewing of film and video works and access to application 'Strategies of
Psychical Rationalisation' (1997) made to Arts Council of England, held at
British Artist's Film and Video Study Collection, Central St Martins College
of Art & Design, London, 2 July 2010.
[The work viewed has been installed in different projection configurations for
presentations in the UK and internationally. Jane and Louise Wilson are
currently represented by 303 Gallery, New York.]

9 Thomas, G. Hypnosis session/s with the author, London, 16 November 2009 - 20


January 2010. [Graham Thomas is a hypnotherapist, registered with the United
Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy and is a member of the British Association
for Counselling and Psychotherapy. He also worked with artist Seb Patane
towards the artist exhibition So this song kills fascists, 'Art Now' at Tate
Britain, 3 November 2007 - 13 January 2008]

10 Dogville, directed by Lars von Trier, Icon Home Entertainment, UK, 2004.
[DVD]

Grace, a fugitive in the small, American mountain town of Dogville, is


permitted refuge by the townspeople, contingent on her provision of manual
labour (and increasingly, other 'favours') to each member of the community.
As the narrative unfolds, Grace - through the voice of an unseen narrator -
senses a series of changes, what would best have been described as a
tiny change of light over Dogville. These phenomenal shifts signal
developments in her knowledge and changing perception of the town and its
inhabitants.

11 Massumi, B. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke


University Press, Durham and London, 2002. p.14.

12 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans.


Hurley, R., Lane, Helen R., & Seem, M., preface Foucault, M.), Viking Press,
USA 1994. p.311.
13 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans.
Hurley, R., Lane, Helen R., & Seem, M., preface Foucault, M.), Viking Press,
USA 1994. p.8.

14 Massumi, B. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke


University Press, Durham and London, 2002. p. 210.

15 Lyotard, Jean F. 'Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime', Morley, S.


(ed.) The Sublime, Whitechapel Gallery, London and MIT Press, Cambridge
Massachusetts 2010. p.134.

16 Benjamin, W. 'One Way Street', One Way Street and other writings (trans.
Jephcott, E. & Shorter, K.), Verso, London 1997. p.45.

17 Auster, P. New York Trilogy, Penguin, London and New York, 2006. p190.

18 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans.


Hurley, R., Lane, Helen R., & Seem, M., preface Foucault, M.), Viking Press,
USA 1994. p.338.

19 Mackay, R. Denaturalising the Ear-Brain - illustrated talk to accompany


installation by artist Florien Hecker, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 18 March
2010.

20 Mackay, R. postgraduate research seminar, Chelsea College of Art, University


of the Arts London, 6 July 2010.

21 Harman, G. 'On Vicarious Causation', Mackay, R. (ed.) COLLAPSE: Philosophical


Research and Development, Volume II, Urbanomic, Falmouth March 2007. p. 193.

22 Michaux, H. 'To Draw the Flow of Time' (1957), Morley, S. (ed.) The Sublime,
Whitechapel Gallery, London and MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 2010.
p.24.

23 Wilmes, U. 'Who do we think?', Mullican, M., Moura de, V. & Wilmes, U. Matt
Mullican: that person's workbook, MER, Gent Belgium & Ridinghouse, London,
2007. p.724.

24 Warner, M. 'Ourself Behind Ourself, Concealed...': Ethereal Whispers from the


Dark Side', Tony Oursler: The Influence Machine, Artangel, London & Public
Art Fund, New York, 2002. p.70.

25 Agamben, G. 'What Is an Apparatus?', What is an Apparatus? and other essays


(trans. Kishik, D. & Pedatella, S.), Stanford University Press, California
2010. p.13.

26 Hansen, M. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media, Routledge, New York
and London 2006. p.20.

27 Hansen, M. New Philosophy for New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts
2006. p.6.

28 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans.


Hurley, R., Lane, Helen R., & Seem, M., preface Foucault, M.), Viking Press,
USA 1994. p.6.

29 Harman, G. 'On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl', Mackay,


R. (ed.) COLLAPSE: Philosophical Research and Development, Volume IV,
Urbanomic, Falmouth 2008. p. 362.

30 Eco, U. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality (trans. Weaver, W.), Vintage,


London, 1998. p.48.

31 Fisher, J. 'Truth's Shadows', Hiller, S. (ed.) Dream Machines, Hayward


National Touring Exhibitions, London 2000. p. unnumbered.

32 Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans.


Hurley, R., Lane, Helen R., & Seem, M., preface Foucault, M.), Viking Press,
USA 1994. p.296.

33 Kivland, S. 'A Viennese Waltz and a Murder: An Eye-Witness Account', Beech,


A., Joseph-Lester, J., & Poole, M. (eds). EPISODE: Pleasure and Persuasion in
Lens-based Media, Artwords Press, London, 2008. p.18.

34 Massumi, B. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke


University Press, Durham and London, 2002. p.55.

35 Massumi, B. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke


University Press, Durham and London, 2002. p.48.

36 Massumi, B. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke


University Press, Durham and London, 2002. p.182.

37 Millar, J. 'the story so far', Doherty, C. & Millar, J. (eds.) Jane and
Louise Wilson, Ellipsis, London 2000. p. 40.

38 Kivland, S. 'A Viennese Waltz and a Murder: An Eye-Witness Account', Beech,


A., Joseph-Lester, J., & Poole, M. (eds). EPISODE: Pleasure and Persuasion in
Lens-based Media, Artwords Press, London, 2008. p.18.

39 Massumi, B. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Duke


University Press, Durham and London, 2002. p.48.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Matt Mullican, Performance under hypnosis
Tate Modern, London, January 2007
Images: documentation (this page) and detail (right)
Image available at: Art Review, Issue 42, Summer 2010. p.99.
Jane and Louise Wilson, Hypnotic Suggestion 505
video installation, 15 minute loop
Originally commissioned and presented in the group exhibition
‘Walter Benjamin’s Suitcase’, Porto, Portugal, 1993
Images: video still (this page) and detail (right)
Image available at: Doherty, C. & Millar. J. (eds.) Jane and
Louise Wilson, Ellipsis, London 2000. p.72
Jane and Louise Wilson, A Free and Anonymous Monument
video installation, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, 2004
Images: installation details (this page and right)
Image available at: BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Jane
and Louise Wilson: A Free and Anonymous Monument, Film & Video
Umbrella, London; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art,
Gateshead; and Lisson Gallery, London 2004. p.40.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CITED REFERENCES

Agamben, G. 'What Is an Apparatus?', What is an Apparatus? and


other essays (trans. Kishik, D. & Pedatella, S.), Stanford
University Press, California 2010.

Auster, P. New York Trilogy, Penguin, London and New York,


2006.

Benjamin, W. 'One Way Street', One Way Street and other


writings (trans. Jephcott, E. & Shorter, K.), Verso, London
1997.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and


Schizophrenia, (trans. Hurley, R., Lane, Helen R., & Seem, M.,
preface Foucault, M.), Viking Press, USA 1994.

Dogville, directed by Lars von Trier, Icon Home Entertainment,


UK, 2004. [DVD]

Eco, U. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality (trans.


Weaver, W.), Vintage, London 1998.

Fisher, J. 'Truth's Shadows', Hiller, S. (ed.) Dream Machines,


Hayward National Touring Exhibitions, London 2000.

Goldblatt, D. Art and Ventriloquism, Routledge, London and New


York 2006.

Hansen, M. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media,


Routledge, New York and London 2006.

Hansen, M. New Philosophy for New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge,


Massachusetts 2006.

Harman, G. 'On Vicarious Causation', Mackay, R. (ed.)


COLLAPSE: Philosophical Research and Development, Volume II,
Urbanomic, Falmouth March 2007.

Harman, G. 'On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and


Husserl', Mackay, R. (ed.) COLLAPSE: Philosophical Research
and Development, Volume IV, Urbanomic, Falmouth 2008.

Kivland, S. 'A Viennese Waltz and a Murder: An Eye-Witness


Account', Beech, A., Joseph-Lester, J., & Poole, M. (eds.)
EPISODE: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media, Artwords
Press, London 2008.

Lyotard, Jean F. 'Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime',


Morley, S. (ed.) The Sublime, Whitechapel Gallery, London and
MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 2010.

Mackay, R. Denaturalising the Ear-Brain - illustrated talk to


accompany installation by artist Florien Hecker, Chisenhale
Gallery, London, 18 March 2010.

Mackay, R. postgraduate research seminar, Chelsea College of


Art, University of the Arts London, 6 July 2010.
Massumi, B. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,
Sensation, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002.

Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis, video documentation of


performance, UBS Openings: Saturday Live, Tate Modern, London
January 2007. [Internet]. Available from:
<http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/26406462001> [Accessed: 5
December 2009]

Michaux, H. 'To Draw the Flow of Time' (1957), Morley, S.


(ed.) The Sublime, Whitechapel Gallery, London and MIT Press,
Cambridge Massachusetts 2010.

Millar, J 'the story so far', Doherty, C. & Millar, J. (eds.)


Jane and Louise Wilson, Ellipsis, London 2000.

Mullican, M., Moura de, V. & Wilmes, U. Matt Mullican: that


person's workbook, MER, Gent Belgium & Ridinghouse, London
2007.

Mullican, M. performance lecture to accompany exhibition For


the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that
isn't there, ICA, London, 12 January 2010.

Thomas, G. Hypnosis session/s with the author, London, 16


November 2009 - 20 January 2010. [Graham Thomas is a
hypnotherapist, registered with the United Kingdom Council for
Psychotherapy and is a member of the British Association for
Counselling and Psychotherapy. He worked with artist Seb
Patane towards the artist exhibition So this song kills
fascists, 'Art Now' at Tate Britain, 3 November 2007 - 13
January 2008].

Warner, M. 'Ourself Behind Ourself, Concealed...': Ethereal


Whispers from the Dark Side', Tony Oursler: The Influence
Machine, Artangel, London & Public Art Fund, New York 2002.

Wikipedia, Hypnosis definition. [Internet].


<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnosis> [Accessed: 18 November
2009]

Wilson, J. & Wilson, L. Hypnotic Suggestion 505 (1993);


Normapaths (1995); Crawl Space (1995); Home/Office (1998);
Insert (1997); Stasi City (1997), viewing of film and video
works and access to application 'Strategies of Psychical
Rationalisation' (1997) made to Arts Council of England, held
at British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection, Central
St Martins College of Art & Design, London, 2 July 2010.
[The work viewed has been installed in different projection
configurations for presentations in the UK and
internationally. Jane and Louise Wilson are currently
represented by 303 Gallery, New York.]
SELECTED RESEARCH RESOURCES

PUBLICATIONS AND JOURNALS

Agamben, G. 'What Is an Apparatus?', What is an Apparatus? and


other essays (trans. Kishik, D. & Pedatella, S.), Stanford
University Press, California 2010.

Allen, J. & O'Reilly, S. (eds.) Magic Show, Hayward Gallery,


London 2009.

Auster, P. New York Trilogy, Penguin, London and New York,


2006.

Badiou, A. Metapolitics (trans. Barker, J.), Verso, London and


New York, 2005.

Ball, D. (ed.) Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology 1927


- 1984, University of California Press, California 1994.

Baudrillard, J. Simulacra and Simulation (trans. Glaser, S.),


The University of Michigan Press, Michigan 1994.

Beasley, M. (ed.) Hey hey glossolalia (after), Creative Time,


New York 2008.

Bruno, G. 'Modernist Ruins. Filmic Archaeologies', Jane and


Louise Wilson: A Free and Anonymous Monument, Film & Video
Umbrella, London; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art,
Gateshead; and Lisson Gallery, London 2004.

Benjamin, W. One Way Street and other writings (trans.


Jephcott, E. & Shorter, K.), Verso, London 1997.

Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture, Issue 14: 'Doubles',


Summer 2004.

Cabinet: A Quarterly of Art and Culture, Issue 26: 'Magic',


Summer 2007.

Cheroux, C. & Fischer, A. (eds.) The Perfect Medium:


Photography and the Occult, Yale University Press, New Haven
and London 2005.

Corrin, L. 'In Stereoscopic Vision: A dialogue between Jane


and Louise Wilson and Lisa Corrin', Jane and Louise Wilson:
Stasi City, Gamma, Parliament, Las Vegas, Serpentine Gallery,
London 1999.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and


Schizophrenia, (trans. Hurley, R., Lane, Helen R., & Seem, M.,
preface Foucault, M.), Viking Press, USA 1994.

Dolar, M. A Voice and Nothing More, Short Circuit series (ed.


Zizek, S.), MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2006.
Eco, U. Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality (trans.
Weaver, W.), Vintage, London 1998.

Eco, U. 'The City of Robots', Docherty, T. (ed.)


Postmodernism: A Reader, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Harlow Essex
1993.

Feeke, S. & Wood, J. (eds.) With Hidden Noise: Sculpture,


Video and Ventriloquism, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds 2004.

Fisher, J. 'Truth's Shadows', Hiller, S. (ed.) Dream Machines,


Hayward National Touring Exhibitions, London 2000.

Goldblatt, D. Art and Ventriloquism, Routledge, London and New


York 2006.

Grayson, R. 'Belshazzar's Feast: The Writing on Your Wall',


Hiller, S. Susan Hiller: Lucid Dreams, Henie Onstad
Kunstenter, Norway 1999.

Hansen, M. New Philosophy for New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge,


Massachusetts 2006.

Hansen, M. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media,


Routledge, New York and London 2006.

Harman, G. 'On Vicarious Causation', Mackay, R. (ed.)


COLLAPSE: Philosophical Research and Development, Volume II,
Urbanomic, Falmouth March 2007.

Harman, G. 'On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and


Husserl', Mackay, R. (ed.) COLLAPSE: Philosophical Research
and Development, Volume IV, Urbanomic, Falmouth 2008.

Hiller, S. Sisters of Menon, Coracle Press for Gimpel Fils,


London 1983.

Home, S. 'Say What You See: Psychic', Fusco, M. (ed.) The


Happy Hypocrite: for and about experimental art writing -
Linguistic Hardcore, Issue 1, Bookworks, London Spring 2008.

Jameson, F. 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late


Capitalism', Docherty, T. (ed.) Postmodernism: A Reader,
Harvester Wheatsheaf, Harlow Essex 1993.

Kivland, S. Conversion of pleasure into sickness, Kettles


Yard, Cambridge 1987.

Kivland, S. & Soukes, C. Reading in the dark, Sharon Kivland,


Sandrock Road, London 1993.

Kivland, S. A Case of Hysteria, Bookworks, London 1999

Kivland, S. 'A Viennese Waltz and a Murder: An Eye-Witness


Account', Beech, A., Joseph-Lester, J., & Poole, M. (eds.)
EPISODE: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media, Artwords
Press, London 2008.

Kunstverein, Stasi City: Jane and Louise Wilson, Kunstverein,


Hannover 1997.

Lippard, Lucy R. 'Double Spread', Fusco, M., & Hunt, I. (eds.)


Put About: A Critical Anthology on Independent Publishing,
Bookworks, London 2004.

Lyotard, Jean F. 'Answering the Question: what is


postmodernism?', The Postmodern Condition: a report on
knowledge (trans. Bennington, G. & Massumi, B.), Manchester
University Press, Manchester 1984.

Lyotard, Jean F. 'Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime',


Morley, S. (ed.) The Sublime, Whitechapel Gallery, London and
MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 2010.

Lyotard, Jean F. 'The Sublime and the Avant Garde', Docherty,


T. (ed.) Postmodernism: A Reader, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Harlow
Essex 1993.

Mannoni, L., Nekes, W., & Warner, M. (eds.) Eyes, Lies and
Illusions, Hayward Gallery, London 2004.

Massumi, B. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect,


Sensation, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2002.

McCarthy, T. Remainder, Alma Books, Richmond, Surrey 2007.

Michaux, H. 'To Draw the Flow of Time' (1957), Morley, S.


(ed.) The Sublime, Whitechapel Gallery, London and MIT Press,
Cambridge Massachusetts 2010.

Millar, J 'the story so far', Doherty, C. & Millar, J. (eds.)


Jane and Louise Wilson, Ellipsis, London 2000.

Mullican, M., Moura de, V. & Wilmes, U. Matt Mullican: that


person's workbook, MER, Gent Belgium & Ridinghouse, London
2007.

Punt, M. 'Shaping Consciousness: New Media, Spirituality and


Identity', Pepperell, R. & Punt, M. (eds.) Screen
Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World, Rodopi, Amsterdam and
New York 2006.

Quasha, G. & Stein, C., 'HanD HearD/Liminal Objects', Morley,


S. (ed.) The Sublime, Whitechapel Gallery, London and MIT
Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 2010.

Sacks, O. Awakenings, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1976.

Sacks, O. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Picador,
London 1986.

Stuart, S. 'Extended Body, Extended Mind: The Self as


Prosthesis', Pepperell, R. & Punt, M. (eds.) Screen
Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World, Rodopi, Amsterdam and
New York 2006.

Toscano, A. 'Cinema and Werner Herzog', Parr, A. (ed.) The


Deleuze Dictionary, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh
2008.

Warner, M. 'Ourself Behind Ourself, Concealed...': Ethereal


Whispers from the Dark Side', Tony Oursler: The Influence
Machine, Artangel, London & Public Art Fund, New York, 2002.

Warner, M. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and


Media into the Twenty-first Century, Oxford University Press,
Oxford 2008.

Wellcome Collection, Sleeping and Dreaming, Black Dog


Publishing, London 2007.

FILMS

Celine and Julie Go Boating, directed by Jacques Rivette,


Films du Losange, France 1974/2006 [DVD]

Day is Done: Extracurricular Activity, Projective


Reconstructions #2-#32 directed by Mike Kelley, Microcinema
International, USA 2005/2006. [DVD]

Dogville, directed by Lars von Trier, Icon Home Entertainment,


UK, 2004. [DVD]

Heart of Glass, directed by Werner Herzog, Anchor Bay


Entertainment, USA 1976/2002. [DVD]

Fata Morgana, directed by Werner Herzog, Anchor Bay


Entertainment, USA 1969/2002. [DVD]

Inland Empire, directed by David Lynch, Optimum Releasing, USA


2006. [DVD]

Lost Highway, directed by David Lynch, October Films, USA


1997. [DVD]

Magic, directed by Richard Attenborough, Dark Sky Films, USA


1978/2007. [DVD]

Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, Artificial Eye, London


1979/2002. [DVD]

The Passenger, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, Sony,


London 1975/2006. [DVD]

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, directed by Sophie Fiennes


(presented by Slavov Zizek), Microcinema International, USA
2006. [DVD]

ONLINE RESOURCES

Beyond Belief, Jane and Louise Wilson exhibition at Lisson


Gallery, 11 April - 25 May 1994. [Internet].
<http://www.lissongallery.com/#/exhibitions/1994-04-11_beyond-
belief/> [Accessed 26 February 2010]

British Society of Clinical Hypnosis [Internet].


<http://www.bsch.org.uk/> [Accessed 15 March 2010]

Dream Machine, [Internet].


<http://www.interpc.fr/mapage/westernlands/dreamachine.html>
[Accessed 18 November 2009]

Hiller, S. Susan Hiller, [Internet].


<http://www.susanhiller.org/> [Accessed 18 November 2009]

Leith, W. Jane and Louise Wilson: WE ARE A CAMERA, interview


with William Leith, The Independent, 29 August 1999.
[Internet]. <http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-
entertainment/interview-jane-and-louise-wilson--we-are-a-
camera-1118042.html> [Accessed 26 February 2010]

Matt Mullican Lecture, video documentation of performance-


lecture, ICA, London, 12 January 2010. [Internet]. Available
from <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJby8isYSTA> [Accessed 15
March 2010]

Matt Mullican Under Hypnosis, video documentation of


performance, UBS Openings: Saturday Live, Tate Modern, London,
January 2007. [Internet]. Available from:
<http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/26406462001> [Accessed:
December 2009]

McCarthy M. Surplus Matter. [Internet].


<http://surplusmatter.com/writings/only
the-reel-is-real/> [Accessed 5 February 2010]

Wilson, J., & Wilson, L. Unfolding the Ayran Papers, video


interview, Animate Projects. [Internet].
<http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2010/jane_and_l
uise_wilson_interiew> [Accessed: 4 July 2010]

Wikipedia, Peter Tripp. [Internet].


<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Tripp> [Accessed 20
October 2009]

EVENTS AND EXHIBITIONS

Gilligan, M. Popular Unrest, exhibition, Chisenhale Gallery,


London, 7 May - 20 June 2010.

Grayson, G. exhibition, De la Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-sea,


16 January - 14 March 2010.

Magid, J. Authority to Remove, exhibition, Tate Modern,


London, 10 September 2009 - 3 January 2010.

Mackay, R. Denaturalising the Ear-Brain, illustrated talk to


accompany installation by artist Florien Hecker, Chisenhale
Gallery, London, 18 March 2010.
Mackay, R. postgraduate research seminar, Chelsea College of
Art, University of the Arts London, 6 July 2010.

Mapping the Lost Highway: New Perspectives on David Lynch -


conference, Tate Modern, London in collaboration with London
Consortium, LCACE and the British Association for American
Studies, 31 October 2009.
(speakers: Parveen Adams, Sarah Churchwell, Stuart Comer,
Gregory Crewdson, Simon Critchley, Marko Daniel, Roger
Luckhurst, Daria Martin, Richard Martin, Tom McCarthy, Chris
Rodley, Jamieson Webster, and Louise Wilson)

Mullican, M. performance lecture to accompany exhibition For


the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that
isn't there, ICA, London, 12 January 2010.

Wilson J. & Wilson, L. Proton Launchpad (2000), video


projection, presented as part of group exhibition Crash:
Homage to J G Ballard, Gagosian Gallery, London, 11 February -
1 April 2010.

Mullican, M. Dying Stick Figure (2001), animation dvd on


monitor, presented as part of the group exhibition Shudder,
Drawing Room and Animate Projects, London, 21 January - 14
March 2010.
(artists: Edwina Ashton, Barry Doupé, Ann Course, Avish
Khebrehzadeh, Matt Mullican, Raymond Pettibon, Naoyuki Tsuji
and Markus Vater)

CONVERSATIONS, INTERVIEWS, AND OTHER RESEARCH (ARCHIVES)

Hiller, S. Belshazzar's Feast (1984), viewing of video work,


LUX Collections archive, London, 2 June 2010.
[Susan Hiller's Belshazzar's Feast was originally presented as
a single screen projection installation, and as live-broadcast
on Channel 4, November 1984. The work is now held in the Tate
Collection, London].

Horne, R. Interview with the author, London, 21 October 2009.


[Rosalind Horne initiated and managed the publication project
Matt Mullican: that person's workbook - see earlier reference
- as part of Ridinghouse, London].

Fisher, J. Email Re:Hypnosis, 26 November 2009 - to date.


Personal emails to: F.Scott (franceslscott@gmail.com) from
J.Fisher (joelsmirror@googlemail.com).

Fisher, J. Meeting with the artist, London, 8 March 2010.


[Joel Fisher has used hypnosis and trance in different forms
within his work, and amongst exhibitions and work presented in
the UK and internationally, he was included in the Hayward
touring exhibition Dream Machines, curated by Susan Hiller in
2000].

Thomas, G. Hypnosis session/s with the author, London, 16


November 2009 - 20 January 2010. [Graham Thomas is a
hypnotherapist, registered with the United Kingdom Council for
Psychotherapy and is a member of the British Association for
Counselling and Psychotherapy. He worked with artist Seb
Patane towards the artist exhibition So this song kills
fascists, 'Art Now' at Tate Britain, 3 November 2007 - 13
January 2008].

Wilson, J. & Wilson, L. Hypnotic Suggestion 505 (1993);


Normapaths (1995); Crawl Space (1995); Home/Office (1998);
Insert (1997); Stasi City (1997), viewing of film and video
works and access to application 'Strategies of Psychical
Rationalisation' (1997) made to Arts Council of England, held
at British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection, Central
St Martins College of Art & Design, London, 2 July 2010.
[The work viewed has been installed in different projection
configurations for presentations in the UK and
internationally. Jane and Louise Wilson are currently
represented by 303 Gallery, New York.]

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