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Week 5

The link between surrealist and hysterical told by this blog has deepened my understanding of hysterical being essentially pessimistic and tragic.

The Phenomenon of Ecstasy (1933) is a photo collage depicting the faces of “hysterical” women in the grip of what looks more like erotic pleasure than pain. His paintings and drawings—such as Invisible Lion, Horse, Sleeping Woman (1930)—also repeatedly present women arching their bodies in a way that resembles the arc de cercle demonstrated by Charcot’s hysterics. In one drawing, Poems Secrets Nude with Snail (1967), a female subject with her face partially hidden arches her back to catch the milk from her lactating breasts in her mouth. With mutilated bodies, exaggerated sexual features, and closed eyes, Dalí’s women are vulnerable to the viewer’s gaze, disempowered by their apparent enslavement to their uncontrollable gendered characteristics.

The Surrealists saw hysteria as a state in which poetic expression could run free, at the expense of women who were not given a voice, but instead objectified. Decades later, in 1980, hysteria was finally removed from the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But for a significant period of time, this now-supposedly-defunct disease of the mind was explained away as a fundamental condition of being female, and exploited by scientists and artists alike.

Bibliography:

Breton, A., Chénieux-Gendron, J., & Wagner, O. Nadja.

Souter, A. (2021). The Dark Side of Surrealism That Exploited Women’s “Hysteria”. 

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Week 4

“Five senses design” is a concept brought by Lee. In this diagram, the X-axis represents the 5 sense, the Y the intensity of a particular experience on each sense.

He recorded some activities and rated the sensory experiences in the graph and shows that the more sensory engaged, the better (more emotionally engaged) the participant will feel. 

This video has led me to thinking of this course-- heightened multisensory experience. While VR and other emerging technologies have make experiences both more sensorily and emotionally intense, I am finding a way of making videos and sound elements be smelt, touched or tasted.

Video games, for example, are primarily intense in sight and sound aspect, and then comes touch, but rarely can one smell or taste the games. 

Following this thread, came to think that when I was in elementary, I used to watch cartoons, and sometimes when I see characters eating or drinking, my mouth would water. This can also be a successful example of using sound and images to open up a third sensory experience.

This study shows that people mouth waters more when they see a video of one eating lemon even though we know that we are only using ears to hear, eyes to see only. This is a very interesting angle for me to start delve deeper into what color, frequency for sound would invite a third sense other than sight and sound.

Bibliography

O'Gara, M. (2021). How Engaging the Senses Creates Meaningful Design | Human Spaces. Retrieved 27 September 2019, from https://blog.interface.com/how-engaging-the-senses-creates-meaningful-design/

Wang, Q. J., Knoeferle, K., & Spence, C. (2017). Music to make your mouth water? Assessing the potential influence of sour music on salivation. Frontiers in Psychology, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00638 

Fanatical Futurist. (2020). Japanese researchers reveal a new gadget that lets people taste virtual food. Retrieved from https://www.fanaticalfuturist.com/2020/06/japanese-researchers-reveal-a-new-gadget-that-lets-people-taste-virtual-food/

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Week 3

This week I have discovered further in the origin of hysteria psychologically. I have learned that hysteria, being the noun form of hysterical, is an emotional burst, followed by physical symptoms like headaches, tremors and convulsions.

As I have chosen my direction in discovering mainly the negative side of hysterical, the clinic reports of hysteria is in line with my direction of study. 

Surprisingly, as I was researching the historical treatments and descriptions of hysteria, they are mostly sounding “hysterical.” The Egyptians attributed the behavioral disturbances to a wandering uterus—thus later dubbing the condition hysteria. To treat hysteria Egyptian doctors prescribed various medications. For example, doctors put strong smelling substances on the patients’ vulvas to encourage the uterus to return to its proper position. Another tactic was to smell or swallow unsavory herbs to encourage the uterus to flee back to the lower part of the female’s abdomen.

After knowing this, I was inspired by my emotions after reading the history of hysteria. I felt absurdly funny first, then confused and finally came to the idea that absurdity, if well handled, can also cause people to feel hysterical, feel extreme.

Following this thread, I found a genre in book called “hysterical realism.” Hysterical realism is a term coined in 2000 by English critic James Wood to describe what he sees as a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other.

This is a very surprising finding and will do a lot of help in my further building of work.

Bibliography

Mota Gomes M, Engelhardt E (December 2014). "A neurological bias in the history of hysteria: from the womb to the nervous system and Charcot". Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria. 72 (12): 972–5. doi:10.1590/0004-282X20140149. PMID 25517645.

Micale MS (January 15, 2019). Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-60561-6.

Yates, Elliot J. (May 2014). The Other Side of Realism: David Foster Wallace & The Hysteric's Discourse (PDF) (B.A. thesis). University of Melbourne.

Smith, Zadie (2001-10-13). "This is how it feels to me". The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-03-21. and archived.

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This piece of work by Christina Quarles is discussing human body not trapped by time or space. Her expression of free form of body and flamboyant colors altogether work as a response to her idea. Idea that she usually calls her work as representatives of over excessive and chaotic state. Through elongated and thin extremities, we can find her expressing ideas in a hysterical way. 

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Metal bands like Metallica choose a rather hysterical way to express their thoughts both musically and visually. Sonically, the blood-pumping drum-kicks, aggressive electro-guitar, and screaming vocals altogether builds up the emotional intense level. This is why some will find the beauty inside the extreme and the hysteria.

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As Chiharu Shiota keeps discussing life, death and human relationships, she uses languages from different dimensions to discover the existence of humanity. The terrifying and messy strings seem moving even though it is a still picture. The overwhelmingly heavy pressure by the strings fits into the hysterical feeling category.

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An installation art by French artist Baptiste Debomgbourg. 

The church, representing the solemnity and everlasting, is departing by an invisible and diabolic flood. This exerts tremendous visual and emotional shock to viewers. Which tightly links to hysteria.

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A series of work by Tung is about figures trapped within carved wood. The combinations of figures trapped inside the sealed, suffocating wood would remind us of survival crisis of an individual (or individuals). This discomfort is mainly caused by the instinctive and hysterical struggle for surviving, staying alive.

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E, by Anna Malina, is a collage-style music video remaking a horror movie in 1972 called Nachtschatten. In the video, the tearing of actors’ faces, body part and background is a very hysterical way of emotional expression. We can tell from sometimes the exaggerated holes tear by the artist that they are indeed the great reflections of her hysterical decadency.

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The work called The Mending Project by Beili Liu is an astonishing work that the artist herself sitting at a table needling under thousands of Chinese traditional scissors. The scissors reveals the deep fear hiding in the inside, the immediate crisis, and the worrying uncertainty. The contradiction of the immediate crisis (which is the scissors might seemingly fall on the artist at anytime) and the absolute peace(which is the artist herself needling worry-freely) makes this work impressive. The immediate crisis, resembling an upcoming emotional explosion, is a good mask for the hysteria.

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This is a work “Hope” (2018) by Chrisope Delbeecke. The interactions of the two materials in the picture serves as both shock and confusion to audience. This anti-physic state of the balloon will trigger the discomfort to viewers optical understanding to the world, all because of the idea about the “expected” explosion of ballon never taking place. This kind of cognitive dissonance will eventually lead some viewers to a state that is somewhat similar to hysteria.

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Definition of Hysterical

“Hysteria is a term used to describe emotional excess, but it was also once a common medical diagnosis. In layman's terms, hysteria is often used to describe emotionally charged behavior that seems excessive and out of control.” (Cherry, 2020)

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“The world is crowded by desperado.”

This is the work from a German artist Felix Dolah. His paintings are reflections to his inner world with all its light and darkness. From the picture, we can feel the there’s abundant emotions while the color and composition of this work are monochromatic and simple. Easily can we sense the suffocation and gravity of the negative feelings explosion from this very piece of work.

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“Didn’t You Care About Me? Will You Ever Change?”

The illustration by Jame Zucco starts from the “characters”. Although the color he used is almost monochromatic, we can still feel the excessively overwhelming emotions flowing out from the pictures. We are able to sense the loudness and depression.