Minutes of the (Third) Meeting

Minutes of the (Third) Meeting

Date: August 13, 2009
Time: 2:25 pm to 3:15 pm

Faculty members present: Kripa, Raghu

• How can you develop an obsession to your advantage?
• How will you limit the accessibility of the final product?
• You could use yourself as an example and tell the others about how you are living with it and how you are also one of them leading a normal life. This will be like a reassurance for them and it will also make them feel like they are not the only ones. It could be just a matter of fact saying that this is how you live. But it will have to be expressive and empathising; and not textual and sympathising.
• What do obsessed people do to calm themselves down (some kind of surface or material that makes them relax)? What makes them feel good?
• Don’t suggest a medicine or cure.
• Look for a pattern from your interviews and meeting with obsessed people. Do the obsessions come up because of the upbringing of the person (gets cultivated through childhood like the way compassion is according to Nigel Spivey) or is it hereditary? Does it come through genes?
• You could also collect reactions of normal people on the experiments you conduct for obsessed people.
• Define the target audience. People like you who have the same degree of obsession or lesser, who are obsessed but know that they can control it and people who are obsessed but do not want to accept it.
• Which form will be most suitable for such people?
• Reference: Triumph of the Will (Movie) by Leni Riefenstahl – obsession with order and geometry in the army.

Note: The experiences of the patient I met haven’t affected me. Instead they have made me understand how important it is for me to do this project because only when one has been through it and come out of it can he/she tell the others that it is not so bad. This is why I am doing this project. Because obsessed people can trust in me and I can build up an individual relationship with them as a human being and reach out to a thousand others like me as a visual artist.

To do:

• You must keep meeting obsessed people: different age groups and different degrees. Get more case studies.
• Work on the form along with the research. Think of what is most suitable in communicating what needs to be said.
• Think of more experiments and how they can add to the final form.

I feel good

It was a happy day
I met doctor Anita (name changed)
an eye specialist at a well known hospital
welcoming, cheerful and forever smiling
she spoke of her obsessions in detail to me
she hates crowd, being in it or out
she fears it a lot
as a child
when she went to a crowded place
with her father
she would always end up fainting
she could never decipher the reason
till four years ago
when she met up with Doctor Thomas
because of her constant hunger for air
she has claustrophobia
more than 10 people is crowd for her
she has to sit at the entrance or exit
of any room
because the mind knows
that it will be the easiest way to escape
in case of lack of oxygen
she could not cross the road
because of the fear of cars touching her
she was never able to sit in the aircraft earlier
because of the fear of lack of oxygen
and of the plane crashing
she would prefer to stand at the end of a queue
because of the belief that
most amount of oxygen will be available there
she would never be able to go a restaurant
because most of them have a closed space
and her mind would immediately calculate
the amount of oxygen available to each person
she would start panicking and feel suffocated
if two cars came on each side of her car
she could not walk through a narrow corridor
because the walls would appear to be falling on her
she was scared of travelling in the lift
because of the fear of not being able to breathe properly
when feels the fear
she starts sweating
her heart starts pounding
extreme amount of restlessness.

but for the past four years
she has been under the medication of Doctor Thomas
and she is really thankful to him for having given her a new life
the medicines have calmed her down a lot
and made her live life as a normal human being
she completely believes in medicine
having helped her come back
to her family and friends.

Understanding becomes better

It is a complex space
the one I am trying to enter
or rather the one I am
already in
the space where I write this from
it is called
the mind of an obsessed
highly complicated
I met up with psychiatrist
Doctor MJ Thomas yesterday evening
a very humble manextremely eager to help
we sat in his clinic
and he answered all my questions
patiently
with a smile
I attentively heard
every bit of it
We started talking
about the project
I asked him to define OCD
referring to my name
he asked me if I had seen people
chanting mantras
and I nodded
he said that it was a compulsive act
the thought that
something bad might happen
being the reason
so what leads to an obsession is
a fear in the form of a thought
which leads to
the development of
a certain amount of anxiety
in the person
to act
most of the times
in an irrational way
and this is what makes
an obsessed mind different
from other people
an obsessed mind gets stuck
to an idea or a thought
while a normal mind
let’s go
a normal mind
doesn’t care
an obsessed mind exaggerates
I keep questioning again and again
the definition of ‘normal’
but I guess it is something
that gets commonly accepted
within the society.

he was really interested
in knowing what I will be doing
with all the research
a piece of advice:
do not make the form abstract
because something strong and
important needs to be communicated
the simpler, the better.

I asked him if I could
meet some of his patients
but he told me that
they might not talk to me
about their obsessions
because the trust factor
is missing since they don’t know me.

He also said that
medication is important
as external factors stabilize
the chemical imbalance
in the brain
and therefore
some extreme cases
have to depend on medicine for life.

A Summary of the Second Review Meeting

There are many decisions Prarthana has to make. She has done extensive reading up and research in the past two weeks.
But in this subculture of the obsessives - which type are you going to work with - those with diagnose OCD or "ordinary" folk who have their obsessions but have not become OCD?
Prarthana said she wants to work with the latter.
Define: obsession
Define: degrees of obsession
In which case, how do you identify them? Do they come out of the closet for you to identify them?
What are their obsessions - how do you categorise them in terms of variety and degree of intensity of obsessions?
How do they survive without therapy - coping mechanisms?
Are there support groups for them?
The key question is if you have done all this research, does it answer these questions?
Prarthana had listed out all her own obsessions - fear of white squares in the hall way, computer recycle bin must always be empty, bathing with dettol water, cleaning loo with dettol, checking all four doors of the car, keep computer desktop clean, fold clothes in certain width etc.
She must look at notions of purity and contamination - fear and anxiety
Obsession and addiction - if you cannot fulfil your obsession, you turn to addiction in some form.
Don't lose the focus of your project which is "It's fine to be obsessed with something - leverge it!
You have chosen a part of you which is seen by the world/medicine as defective and are looking at it as to be fine. But what will you do with it? Take Salvador Dali, he turned his kinkiness into a methodology for art - the paranoiac critical method. What do you propose?

THINK/TO DO
1. What can you do to take research to expression?
2. Meet psychiatrists, get case studies, meet your obsessed people - gather stories.
3. You may need audio, video, sketches of them, sketches by them
4. Design a set of experiments like the alignment experiment you mentioned.
5. Test them in public spaces - what are the obsessions that people are compelled to perform in public spaces?
6. Find out to what extent visual patterns (literal) and metaphoric (in the head/emotions) are linked to obsessions. Discover them, collect them.
7. What incidents might have led people to adopt obsessions?
8. What obsessions do certain kinds of upbringing bring?
9. Think about the form of your work - it might be a book, a campaign, an art installation, a space. Can you try to make something (an artefact) that makes a normal person behave in an obsessed manner?
Next meeting: August 3, 1.30 pm

clearly

"When your mind becomes obsessed with something, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere."

- from the movie 'Pi' by Darren Aronofsky

Research Questions

Name
Age
Sex
Occupation
Hobbies

• Do you get fixated on certain thoughts/notions/ideas/objects/actions? How easily? Please specify the fixation.
• Do you know about obsessions or Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)?
• Do you think that you are obsessed?
• How would you define obsessions/obsessive compulsive behaviour?
• What is the extent of your obsession? Please specify using an example of an incident/event.
• How has OCD affected your life?
• What are the symptoms you experience?
• What is the history of the obsession? How did it start? When did you find out? What is the reason (a superstition/something that you learnt as a child/an accident or event)?
• What are the strategies you use to cope up with your compulsive needs?
• What is the worst that would happen if you make a mistake?
• What happens in the process of recurring thoughts and getting anxious?
• What happens when you are unable to perform the compulsive actions?
• What are the things that calm you down?
• Do you take any medication? What kind?
• Are you undergoing any treatment?
• Do you know of any other cure?
• Do you know when your compulsive behaviour starts becoming irrational and irritating for those around you? What actions do you take then?
• How does it affect your family and people around you?
• What do you think about your OCD?
• Do you laugh at your OCD?
• Do you mind talking about your obsessions to people or do you find it embarrassing?
• Are there any special needs that you have as an OCD survivor?
• How do you think your experiences with OCD can help other who have the same or the people around them?
• Do you get involved into the lives of other people who have OCD?
• Do you get influenced by other people’s obsessions?

recently

i am feeling
restless.
my heart beats fast.
my mind talks more than ever.
i feel low.
extremely.
i am trying to calm myself down
by taking deep breaths.
i saw a huge rat
on the kitchen platform today.
its tail was about 10 inches long
or more.
i feel depressed.
i feel like crying.
my heart sinks
and my eyes tear.
i scrubbed the entire platform with soap.
i washed all the utensils.
i made sure nothing was left
unattended.

i look around
i see thing unorganised.
i see some dead fly.
i don’t want to sit there anymore.
i want to cuddle up
into my darkness
and go off to sleep.
i need to distract myself.
the thought of the rat is killing me.
that image
is strong and overpowering.
it keeps coming back to my head.
that rat has been roaming around
in the kitchen for the past 17 days now.
that one
and a hundred others.
at least ten more.
i don’t believe this.
i have been eating
from the same plate
the rats might have licked.
i saw a lot of rat shit
in the kitchen in the morning.
it was disgusting.
it gave me goose bumps.
i feel restless
and helpless.
i don’t know how to clean it.
i don’t know how to get rid of the thought.
my head falls into my palms.
it feels heavy.
i cannot focus on anything else
right now.
i need to get out of here.

i need to talk to someone.

someone who would get the way i feel
who would hold me tight and tell me
that it is not such a big deal.