WORK IN PROGRESS 2024
Mick O'Kelly 2024
This is work in progress. This work explores ideas of mapping. This approach to mapping is not about longitude and latitude but rather a mapping from ‘within’ that relates to the unconscious, the psyche as a motive force. It is a kind of mapping that is not about locating points and objects, but rather about lines of duration, movement and flow.
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To map the unconscious REM sleep / dream space that confirms and consolidates our desires or help us process the unthinkable, thoughts we rarely give ourselves permission to verbalize.
What tools do we use to represent and bring a visibility to the un-conscious, the unknowable.
For the 3-D model above, I used a PSG2 Sleep Profiler technology, that captured my REM sleep over four nights. Fusion 360 CAD software converted this spectrographic data to a resin 3-D model. This sleep journey resembles more the cinematic mode of cut and paste narrative that rapidly shifts between several modalities simultaneously, more likely generating non-linear narratives. Such mapping will have a different reading that goes beyond the conventional language structure.
This collaboration is supported by Professor Christine Walsh, Neurology at the Memory and Aging Centre (MAC), Clinical Research Coordinator Natalie Pandher and Jenny Tai Engineer at the Makers Lab University of California San Francisco.
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Mick O'Kelly 2024
RHIZOMATIC TIME 2024
How do we contemplate and represent the complexity of time? There are universal conventions of standard time which most of us share to regulate for commerce, legal and social purposes. There is the urgency of one’s body clock. There is institutional time. In hospital we lose a sense of time. One’s body is observed, measured, assessed, managed and regulated to the rhythm of the hospital machine. People living with cognitive impairment i.e. dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s live to a different rhythm who’s time is not universal or standard but unique to how one’s life always proceeds to different rhythms and speeds. Conventional shared understanding of time is arborescent, a linear temporality and horizontal, in a single direction. The clock has twenty-four hours synchronised with the sun and the moon in a wider cosmos of infinite expansion. We make appointments, we wait in the firmament for something to happen. We keep time or does time keeps us? We invent all manner of rituals, diary’s, schedules to regulate the body to manage and build a sense of cohesion for everyday living. We have a sense of time that is shared.
People living with Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease live in a rhizomatic time, a kind of out of time. In the most extreme they live outside language in a wordless grammarless zone. This may feel like living on the limits of what it feels to be human. I am working with Dr Sean O’Dowd consultant Neurologist at Tallaght University Hospital and his patients. Using the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) clock drawing test, we are making a sequence of 13 different graphite etchings 400x400mm with functioning time mechanisms. How do we live among our most vulnerable whose time we do not share. In a most gently and understated way this asks us to pause and be present in perceiving other modalities of living.