In speaking about Nebulosus Severine’s “Look What You Made Me Do” installation a few weeks ago, we mentioned the possible connection to the UC Davis Schizophrenia build in SL; this week, we spoke on the podcast about Klink Epsilon’s installation floating in mid-air with bleeding eyeballs and eyes in jars, all of which conjured up similar – if not quite exactly the same – emotions. Just prior to taping the BiW podcast, a friend of mine sent me a tp to a build in SL that disturbed me deeply and fits into this conversation, so I’d like to take a bit of a back road to talking about the art on BiW by talking about the build I saw.
So first, let’s just mention a little bit about the UC Davis Schizophrenia simulator. This is one of the more publicized builds in SL (I saw it on TV long before I knew what SL was) and it gives the viewer a glimpse – albeit a fleeting and brief one – into the mind of a schizophrenic.
At the entrance, visitors don badges to get the full experience of the sim, almost like a baptism or a reminder to the viewer that what they are about to experience is only temporary. And it is jarring, even if you have to use your imagination a bit:
Visitors get to maneuver around the space – much like a cross between a visitor’s center and a modern clinic – and get “treated” to the stuff the makes schizophrenics freak out: strange, haunting voices, visual hallucinations, and text that lets you know that if this were real, it would only be worse.
I have to admit that I never really understood the intensity of the schizophrenic experience until I tried this simulator. Schizophrenia is that one blindspot for me in psychology, the one major disorder I couldn’t understand. But this sim really helped. It’s clunky in its way and certainly could be more jarring, but it gets its idea across.
Fast forward to another build – this one an official Linden build – for another take completely:
Apparently, in the world of Governor Linden and his various associates, the mistreatment of the insane is fucking hilarious! and a great place to explore, role-play, and so forth. In this sim, you can have your avatar creep along the halls of a decrepit mental hospital and snigger at the treatment that befell thousands deemed “anti-social,” gay, strange, or otherwise out of the mainstream. Good times!
Oh cool! Here’s a gurny where you can strap your avatar to and pretend to perform a lobotomy on her!
Neat! When you strap her in, she twitches and convulses, just like a real mental patient would. And it’s funny and cool because it’s not like any of this happened to real people in real life… oh wait… there were the thousands of people who had chunks of their brains removed… but you know, other than those people…
This sim – which I still can’t believe is an actual official Linden build, but it is – makes me sicker than anything else I have ever seen in Second Life (and believe me, I’ve seen some things). I mean, if they’re going to mock the legacy of mental health abuses, they may as well make a fake concentration camp we can all role play in, or a vivisection’s lab where we get to laff while poking some bunny’s eyes out. I’m frankly horrified and if I had anything other than a free account, I would cancel it.
The problem with sticking up for the mentally ill – or, for instance, with standing up for Neb or Klink’s more emotionally riveting work – is that you stand to have criticisms leveled at you. Hmmm, why do you care so much about this, eh? Do you have something you’d like to share? And that’s where everyone falls off and doesn’t want to approach the subject. We become scared to make ourselves vulnerable in that sort of way, such is the stigma of difference, anger, and illness.
So I will. Yes, I do have something I’d like to share: I’ve been heartbroken and sick and different and weird and probably a 100 years ago, I would have been in a cruel institution like the ones the Lindens have built. And I would have preferred – sitting there, in my misery – to think that future generations wouldn’t be laughing at my pain, yukking it up on a sweaty Wednesday evening chasing each other around a simulation of my fate. I would expect that, at the very least, if my current situation wouldn’t allow it then at least that future generation might grant me some dignity and respect. And then I see something like what the Lindens have built, and I realize that was just a hopeless dream.
The first-person accounts into harrowing states that Nebulosus and Klink have given us are a million times fuller, richer, and more honest than this bullshit the Lindens are offering us. I don’t think I ever appreciated their work as much as when I was wandering around that Linden-built hospital, being completely appalled.
Hi Amy,
The UC Davis Schizophrenia build was one of the first places I visited in SL and the experience was an unsettling and memorable one. It seemed to be a responsible and informative way to educate people on the condition.
I’ve not been to that Linden build but it seems from what you’ve described to be without any merit and the total opposite of the UC place. I’ve used medical equipment in my own installations but never to ridicule or for humour, it was about personal anxieties and externalising those fears.
I think your reaction was justified. The Linden build does seem to be trivialising mental illness and mocking peoples misery which is shockingly insensitive.
Left by Arahan Claveau on June 12th, 2008