✮Van'z Journal✮
KYS/KMS
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An artwork about mental illness, mainly from my experience with Borderline Personality Disorder. the feeling of helplessness and looping begging to be better, however, it is a process that will find a light at the end of the tunnel.
I want to be smaller, I tried to be small enough to disappear.
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flowers bloom but when it rots off you shouldn't be afraid to cut its head so new beautiful ones grow out, cut it before the rot for it no longer serves you but harms you.
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Whether this work gives you hope or gives you more anxiety about yourself or if you don't understand it, I hope it brings a little more light on BPD and how it consumes. it's not an excuse but in this work, I was begging for sympathy from my family, friends, lover, and myself.
Inspiration and development.
Readings
Over her dead body : death, femininity and the aesthetic / Elisabeth Bronfen.
Bronfen, Elisabeth.
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Post internet : notes on the internet and art, 12.29.09> 09.05.10 / Gene McHugh.
McHugh, Gene,
Art in the age of the internet : 1989 to Today / edited by Eva Respini.
Respini, Eva,
Nettitudes : let's talk net art / Josephine Bosma.
Bosma, Josephine.
Meta/data : a digital poetics / Mark Amerika.
Amerika, Mark.
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Kaysen, Susanna, 1948-
1993
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Small Acts of Disappearance
Wright, Fiona
2015
It is important to cultivate detachment. One way to do it is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window, if there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under the wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieve proper distance."
- Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
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When i read this book, I felt very seen. everything about this book was relatable.
To kill self was to detatch myself from the world. i realised i am very afraid of becoming detached to the world, so im desprate to find anyways to attach myself.
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I've always believed in order to keep my attachment (relationships), i needed to become better first. i needed to be the love i crave and seek for, i conditionally unconditionally love my friends and family, so i can teach myself what is love and attachments.
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​Small Acts of Disappearance-Wright, Fiona2015
In Hospital
I had to leave the kitchen on the day we cooked risotto. I sat on the carpet in the next room, squeezing my temples with my knees. I already felt it choking up in my throat, as glutinous as craft glue. This is the crux of it: what cannot be imagined from the outside, the breathless bodily panics, the unbrained terror, how I sweat and shake and bite down on my nails. I know it’s inconceivable, outside, how the very idea of a plate of rice can make my mind seize up and stutter, as if the grains themselves were predatory. But this is how we lose our selves in this disease. We’re instinctual in these moments, animal; and we’re eaten up in each of these small acts of disappearance.
One morning, about a month in, I realised that I’d been witness to the slow display of a quietly unfolding beauty in these women. That each week they grew more lovely. Some of this I’m sure was purely physical – the too-thin amongst us became less angular, our faces fuller, skin and hair alike lost their flakiness and pallor. So too our clothes looked better-tailored on our bodies. But it was more than this. I’d watched them all uncurl their tightened shoulders, unhang their heads, untuck their knees from underneath their chins. One woman, whose every word had seemed, at first, like it was being dragged out from her in her lower spine bladder infections chest began to joke in a beautifully acerbic way, her mouth unpinched and her whole face softened around it; another had grown a laugh that shook the ceiling. This, I thought, is so much like a second adolescence, each time seeing a woman, glorious and gorgeous, emerge from somewhere underneath a brittle and anxious body.
> my inspiration for the texts
> i recommend listening to their songs
> when i was doing this work i started becoming desperate to get better, the rush to be better was getting to me and it started feeling hopeless
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> I realised i was obsessed with dying because i wanted to kill the part of me that i hate, the part that doubts and gets tired.
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> I wanted to rush healin
> Layer and transparency experiment
> Noise + Threshold
> slowed + Polaroized time on after effects
> used TouchDesign to Blob track
> to get the texts "tracked" i added noise so pixles are moving does tracking a "moving object"
> played around with the blob tracking settings, increasing decreasing tresholds to blob track.
"The Death-Self"
During the Eros scenes in Leviathan Wakes, Miller thinks briefly about a poem he once read called "The Death-Self". It's from one of the most sadly beautiful passages in the book:
[Miller] was aware of having two different minds. One was the Miller he was used to, familiar with. The one who was thinking about what was going to happen when he got out[...] The other Miller was different. Quieter. Sad, maybe, but at peace. He’d read a poem many years before called “The Death-Self,” and he hadn’t understood the term until now. A knot at the middle of his psyche was untying. All the energy he’d put into holding things together [...] was coming free. He’d shot and killed more men in the past day than in his whole career as a cop. He’d started — only started — to realize that he’d actually fallen in love with the object of his search after he knew for certain that he’d lost her. He’d seen unequivocally that the chaos he’d dedicated his life to holding at bay was stronger and wider and more powerful than he would ever be. No compromise he could make would be enough. His death-self was unfolding in him, and the dark blooming took no effort. It was a relief, a relaxation, a long, slow exhale after decades of holding it in.
> Theres different flowers to show that new problems will always arise, relapse happens and the feeling of hopeless ness will happen again, but that is not to dread but rather prepare self.
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> "there is no cure" but there is cope and attachments, i try my best to hold on to them deeply.
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>"it gets better" is a sentence i hear often when in a depressive state or having an episode. it gets patronizing during a timing of distress
> but that is the truth, it does get better, slow movements, grieve, embracing, its all part of the rotting, and one day we have to cut it off and grow again.
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> Again, and again, and again, we grow.