Cartesian Exorcism

performance
1988

Images representing 500 years of Cartesian influence on scientific attitudes about mental illness slowly dissolve into generalized pixels, one after the other, on a video monitor. Sitting behind a Leonardo window (a drafting tool that breaks the visual plane into a grid), I try to draw each image before it dissolves into simple blocks of color. The performance ends when the paper became so absorbed with ink that it, too, began to disintegrate.