Diagnostic Chaos
Virtual exhibition : Emmy Thelander & Romina Meriç
Game design : Nicholas Steindorf
Sound design : Min Yu
Published online @Virtual Dream Center / Lumierrante
Welcome to our clinic: a space for analysis, reflection, confusion, dissociation and more!
This virtual experience evolved from our collaboration Compartmentalization Therapy: a set of drawings and paintings devised to systematically map, sort and graph our fluctuating internal states—a selection of which decorate the walls of our virtual waiting room. You will find a personality questionnaire on the clipboard in the form of a flow chart, which also infests the walls. Answer the questions for yourself, following the branch that best matches your response, until you arrive at your shadow type or a vicious cycle OR — a dead end. Please feel free to lose yourself in your efforts of diagnosing your situation.
The second room contains results: a medley of animated shadow archetypes, the supposed diagnostics of humanity’s self-contradicting psyches. This is the area of analysis, the dim subconscious library, a walkthrough of long lost clarity.
Lost in endeavors of over intellectualization, our methods of emotional processing adapt to the information era by mimicking the ways data is organized. We construct phrases and keywords that define and locate feelings. We make Google Sheets that contain and give order to perceptions. We use our efficiency-crazed task-tackling to resolve our abstract doubts and internal conflicts. Responding to unpredictable contemporary conditions, we are simultaneously victims and perpetrators of western adulthood’s idolization of speed, efficiency, and labels. Our obsessive, mechanical attempts at self-analysis in the mode of data processing are genuine, anxious, cathartic, and also absurd. We’re tired - yet somehow enthusiastic.
