psi
and performance:
a paper presented at SPR Conference September 2004
psi: mid space:
on contemporary performance and psychic phenomena
an arts science crossover
Sue Palmer
notes from a paper presented at the Society for Psychical Research Conference - Winchester September 2004.
I am a performance artist specializing in devised theatre - essentially theatre made from a zero point: an idea, a subject, a desire. I am also a Lecturer in Theatre at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, a University College internationally renowned for it’s contemporary practices.
I’m going to talk about the performance project: psi mid space:a contemporary performance piece that uses sound and video work to explore psychic phenomena in relation to time and space. Made in collaboration with Vic Llewellyn, Lisa Griffiths and Stephen Clarke, all artists, performers and video makers based in the South West of England, the performance has been researched and devised over the past year.
the work:
The term “mid space” originates from the Irish psychic Eileen Garrett, who used the phrase to describe the state which she entered prior to her mediumistic work – ‘mid space’ became something we attempted to frame and to capture in the performance: the space between knowing and not knowing, the threshold of the possible and the impossible, the gap opened by the inexplicable. Mid space also became a performance mode, a way of being in the work.
The piece consisted of a performance which lasted roughly the length of a Ganzfeld experiment (45 minutes), running between three and five cycles at each venue over a day or evening, with 45 minutes between each performance for conversation with audience and showing of video documentation of our making process and the Ganzfeld experiment.
The work was funded by The Arts Council of England and toured to six venues: a mix of arts and non arts venues. The two venues that stood out were Cheltenham Festival of Science and Quest Natural Health Show. “psi: mid space” reached a hugely mixed audience, some familiar with this sort of work, and some definitely not. The project also has a well developed and well visited website.
Conversation was a key part of the project; for such a complex and diverse subject, we wanted to promote conversation and exchange around and about our work and the subject – conversation that would continually expand and open out the project, interconnect ideas, create new theories for the shape of the universe. And those conversations with swarm experts, aerodynamic engineers, mediums, clairvoyants, performance makers, scientists, philosophers, psychologists, students and kids were diverse and extraordinary.
why psi?
As an artist I’ve always been interested in the gaps between things, sometimes they’ve been political, sometimes social, right now, they are about the gaps in our minds, in our thinking, in our ways of explaining the world.
Within the arts, it is rarely dealt with as a subject in itself. The artist Susan Hiller is one of the few to reference the subject area consistently, her latest work being an extraordinary piece called “Clinic” inspired by accounts of out-of-body experiences, commissioned by the Baltic. Her unique and sensitive approach to the paranormal creates very particular ‘spaces’ which allow audiences to connect to the work.
the SPR conference:
Dr Serena Roney Dougal - a good friend - encouraged me to come to last year’s SPR conference as part of my research. It was a huge source of inspiration to me and the place where I was first struck by the Ganzfeld experiment. Here I am a year later giving a presentation on work that directly evolved from being here.
the ganzfeld:
I asked Serena if she would be our experimenter, to do a Ganzfeld with us. She agreed thankfully. We filmed it with three cameras and edit together as a split screen document - 3 cameras following the three different processes, one part of the screen is for the image that was trying to be transmitted. We wanted to see all synchronicities, all the action that had been separated by the experiment brought together onto one screen.
We didn't’t get hits, which was devastating - we so wanted to get results - we had put so much energy into setting it all up and doing it. But we found interesting moments, we found synchronicities, lots of references to the type of image being transmitted - like the one here, where Vic, the receiver, who has been going along on his own for a while, at the moment the picture comes up on the sender’s screen, he cut himself off and immediately talks about a sunrise.
But we found ourselves frustrated of course at the gap between what was articulated in the Ganzfeld and the image that was chosen at the end of the experiment. What was it about that result that we chased so badly?
And this notion became fundamental to our process, we didn’t realize at the time quite how fundamental, because we came to understand that the world of psi is full of these places where the ghost is just out of the camera, the experiment never quite satisfactory, the theory just out of reach, the constant attempt to track, document, to evidence the thing disappearing round the corner.
What were we doing with this invisible notion, this ephemeral and constantly escaping subject?
The Ganzfeld experiment became a powerful fascination: the protocol, the conditions, the red light, the ping pong balls, the static target pool, the time structure of the experiment, and most importantly the hypnagogic state invited, that deep day dream, creative, alpha state, access to the subterranean sub conscious, so often searched for in artistic process.
We became interested in the idea that not only moments of psi are captured in this illusive and curious state of hypnagogia, but that we would use that ‘space’ at the heart of our process to generate performance material.
Quite unexpectedly the Ganzfeld became something we couldn’t get away from, perhaps because of its theatricality, its tenacity to itself, because it was the one collective experience we all shared together.
The day after the experiment we felt terrible, we were various shades of cross, angry and depressed. We dwelt on what had happened.
We decided to “danz the ganz”...we danced the Ganzfeld out of and into our system by using the texts from the experiment to inspire actions and movements. A way of transforming, and owning our experience, and the experiment itself, and here it started to become the source for the performance.
We decided to unpack the Ganzfeld, to look at it from our perspective as artists, to see what ideas and connections it contained. And so we started our devising process, developing the piece over six months on and off.
The Ganzfeld became the base line of the performance and spliced into that were these other areas of psi. The piece is non-narrative, a collection, a non linear sequence of actions and ideas perhaps that might invite an audience into a suspended state of active meditation... a space where things can happen at the corner of your eye, slightly out of reach, a flicker past the door.
As an artist you look for a core starting point from which everything else spills outwards, a generative source that connects, that travels out, a structure and space to unravel, to unpack. We let the tools of the experiment multiply, and bridge out and link up with other ideas.
We
used the roles and timings of the
Ganzfeld
to inform
our work.
Each of us would
take on the sender,
the
receiver, the experimenter
and improvise with
a
variety
of ideas and
materials. We would
use the timings
of the experiment
too, using a
kitchen timer to
indicate specific
start and
end
points for
the various sender
and receiver states.
We used it as a structure for making performance work.
We also had other sources of material for the project: I interviewed around 20 people who had had some sort of experience varying from someone who had had just a couple of experiences to people who worked as clairvoyants. What they all shared was an absolute sense of knowing, this recurring phrase “I knew and there was no way I could have known”. Extracts from these interviews were ‘re-spoken’ in the performance.
We researched quantum physics and string theory and that strange place where esoteric philosophy meets contemporary science, where it all seems to be about vibrations. This translated into performance as a lecturer/scientist who is constantly attempting to explain how the universe works and continually finds himself in a state between profound articulation and desperate confusion.
The
medium
Eileen Garret
also featured
in the
piece -
her book was
very influential
to
us.
We also
had an
unexpectedly
extraordinary
collaboration
with Carolyn
Findlay,
a visual
artist
and clairvoyant
who worked
drawing
while
we devised
and performed
- another
layer,
another
way of
mapping
what was
happening.
the ping pong ball:
But
the Ganzfeld
remained
at
the heart
of
it.
And the
ping
pong
ball.
Cutting the ping pong ball for our eyes, we talked about the air inside being from a different time and space, from Taiwan or China where they were made, an extraordinary thing, when you cut the ball you release a whole other time and space into the room.
Halved
ping pong
balls from
the Ganzfeld
bred a
whole ping
pong ball,
With
a whole
ping pong
ball you
play table
tennis of
course. Then
what happens
if they
multiply into
a thousand,
1008 to
be precise
- that
significant number.
A book called “Sizzling Chops and Devilish Spins” all about table tennis came my way, on the back a quote from Henry Miller:
“No other sport can engage in the same way, it allows you to dream, it is like being in a trance state.”
We’re
onto something, we’re ping ponging our way across the
universe, through the world of psi - we’re in the Ganzfeld and
we’re
playing ping
pong.
A
reviewer wrote:
“ - the ping pong table becomes ever more alive with quantum uncertainty, as if the table were playing the game more than us - an uneasy, a-human energy. It feels as peculiar as the physical world probably is.”
The ping pong balls are like atoms, parts of molecular structures, they are individual worlds, with their own time and space inside, miniature subatomic universes with minds of their own. When we throw them they seem to hover in space: audiences mention this fact time after time. Its here that we reach a critical mass, hovering in mid space, taking over for a moment, the meeting place between order and chaos, something invisible becoming visible.
An audience member wrote to us:
“The moment in psi when hundreds of worlds lifted into space brought my own particles into the space...... I had been prepared for the lift-off but not for that moment of stillness as they seemed to rest in mid-air before their chaotic fall and roll. The work had a kind of virus that attached itself to the spectators. We became implicated in the investigation.”
A significant moment in the devising process came with an intensive working period based on Ganzfeld experiment: all night, 12 hours, 8pm to 8am, working or improvising for 45 minutes then resting in the Ganzfeld for 45 minutes. 8 cycles of work. By 3am we were completely in an altered state, we were hypnagogic, and it was a key point in the devising process where much of the material was birthed: chaos / order, on / off, wave / particle, construction / deconstruction.
ART: what is it good for?
So
why do
this? You
may ask.
What’s
the point?
I
ask it
of
myself
all
the
time.
Why
art? What’s
it good for?
Why
take on
psi in
the performance
space?
Why
encroach into
parapsychology, and
plunder around
in there?
Why
spend hours
wondering at
the choice
of Ian
Mckellan in
a flat cap
in the
super kodachrome
Cathy Dalton
Static Target
Pool?
Why
wonder what
would happen
if you
put in
a photo of
a Mark
Rothko painting
into that
set?
Why
make a dance
out of
laboratory form
and protocol?
Why
all this
arts science
crossover?
Maybe it has something to do with something the artist Anthony Gormley articulates:
“Perhaps the way the world sees itself is changing, and the divide between participant and observer, object and intelligence, is diffusing into field activity.”
In the book Nanoscopic Culture, the curator Miria Swain writes about the Art Programme at the National Institute for Medical Research:
“The greatest revolutions in science occur through ‘paradigm shifts’ of thinking, claimed the historian Thomas Kuhn... Kuhn argues that it was through challenging accepted scientific models and creative leaps of imagination, that science was able to progress in new directions. Science is still often perceived to be a cumulative discipline, but Kuhn makes the distinction between this and the process of making science, which is driven by concepts and hypotheses. This is comparable to much contemporary art practice, which is led by ideas and not the observation or representation....”
To paraphrase Swain: here perhaps we have some kind of fusion between two concepts: we know something exists which is outside our empirical frame of reference, and we have the idea of attempting to make that something visible, if not to the eye then to the mind’s eye.
“To give scope to an idea is also to create a potential space for something new to emerge.”
In all it’s folly, psi: mid space was deadly serious. It attempted to provoke, engage, to bring to the surface, to encourage other ways of perceiving, of looking, of the meeting point between things not normally placed in relation to each other - performance inherently allows for these shifts of time and space.
psi: mid space is perhaps more about not knowing than knowing, not understanding, not quite getting there, and valuing and celebrating that. Its more about the mystery of it all, rather than trying to explain, solve, or evidence. Its not about results.
In his book Into the Silent Land, the neuropsychologist Paul Broks says:
“Minds emerge from process and interaction, not substance.
In a sense, we inhabit the space between things. We subsist in emptiness.”
To quote the artist Gillian Wylde:
“and it’s all a game right?
and is it all just a game we take enormously seriously?
.....our fortune cookies contained big questions about the universe,
string theory, and strange beautiful vibrations.”
To quote Broks again:
“Science, from its’ objective, third person perspective, tries to formulate universally applicable, general explanations. The subjective and unique are anathema to science.”
That is, I think, the place where performance inhabits, the subjective, the unique, the experience, the one off, the transient and disappearing, the un-repeatable, the universe as a subjective structure and reality.
In The Conscious Universe Dean Radin talks about interconnectedness:
“Underlying the isolated world of ordinary objects and human experience is another reality, an interconnected world of intermingling relationships and possibilities.”
psi: mid space attempted to find that world of possibility, of other connections, perhaps it is as puzzling a work of art as the psychic world seems to be.
Sue Palmer - September 2004 - SPR Conference.
