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‘Schizophrenia’ is a gallery installation that is visible to the visitor as a TV set that is not tuned to any particular channel so that it just shows white noise on the screen.

The installation is intended to reproduce the experience of schizophrenia as a boundary disorder, where it becomes unclear when or where words are coming from, and whether they are coming from the inside or the outside.

The sounds coming out of the TV set are fed by a computer that is hidden from the visitor. For the visitor, they may hear what they are saying in the room, what they said somewhere else some time before, what other people were or are saying, in or outside of the room, or what other people had said previously, in or outside of the room.

It would be possible for a visitor to this installation to hear, through the TV set, comments that they themselves had made earlier about other work in other rooms.

Conceptual Background

Schizophrenia is essentially a boundary or interface disorder. There are many different variants and associated mental health problems, but most commonly people with schizophrenia can believe that their own thoughts are spoken to them by someone else or are heard as internal voices but which are not recognised as their own thoughts. In addition, schizophrenics can come to believe that other people can hear their thoughts.

This confusion over interiority and exteriority is usually manifest as auditory hallucination, which is why the installation is essentially a sound piece. This absence of a clear sense of boundary is one of the aspects of schizophrenia that appealed to Deleuze. He once suggested that ‘a schizophrenic is someone who has been decoded, deterritorialized’¹.

Schizophrenic delusions often incorporate technology to the extent that auditory hallucinations can encompass the belief that radios or televisions are speaking directly and personally to them and them alone, or that these same devices are broadcasting their thoughts.

¹ Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995, P. 23