BARKER: If you have a genetic screening, and you’re told that there’s a 50% chance of Huntington or Parkinson’s disease, the medical world says maybe you should really consider aborting. That’s not really a choice, that’s a “You will.” The healthcare system, particularly here in the States is less and less going to support those kinds of lifetime decisions.
It’s just made to appear that this knowledge equals a choice; whereas I really disagree that it’s doing that.
BR: It’s not a choice. It’s giving you information, but you don’t necessarily choose.
BARKER: Precisely.
BR: Did you grow up with people who had some sort of disability—for example, within your circle of family and friends?
BARKER: I grew up within a nice healthy functional family.
BR: Ok, so now let’s cut to the year that you came to New York. You came a visit with Anna Munster, the Australian artist and new media theorist to see New York.
BARKER: I’d been to New York before. We decided to come over for the millennium with our two closest friends because we wanted to spend New Years Eve ’99 in New York. I was doing research on some data gloves for Praæternatural in its final installation form. I’d never wanted the work to be a piece that was just on a computer terminal; I wanted it to be projected, and I wanted the viewer to use a data glove so you would be able to control and interact with the work. We’d arrived in New York about three days before New Years Eve and we were having a great time. Then just after New Years, maybe about two days into 2000, I started not to feel so good. I mean, in hindsight, I hadn’t been feeling right leading up to that. I’d been a bit sick on and off, but I’d been working crazy hours and I was tired. I was tripping over a lot and I was breaking things. Stuff would just jump out of my hand, or I’d twist my ankle. I got pneumonia about two months before I left. I just assumed it was because I was working crazy hours. I’d had some artist residencies and I was just thinking, like anyone else who’s thirty--you can do anything. It’s like you’re invincible. We got to the States and about two or three days after, around New Year’s, I started to notice that the left side of my face was feeling a bit numb. It was really cold, and ignored it. I noticed that my fingers were feeling a little bit numb and tingly, just on my left side. Then progressively, over the next day or two, I started to limp a little bit. I didn’t say anything to anyone; I just thought: Oh, maybe I pinched a nerve. I went and saw a chiropractor in New York, and he said, “Your circulation’s not great,” or something like that, which is the understatement of the century now, and then he said, “You should be fine in a few days.” But, I got progressively worse. I remember one day walking in Central Park and I could hardly walk. I was dragging my foot along. Then we flew to Las Vegas on the 7th or 8th of January. We stayed in that really weird hotel, the Luxor, the one that’s shaped like a pyramid. I realized that I could hardly walk from one end of the foyer to the other. I mean, it was just indicative of how big it is, but also how bad things were getting.
BR: At this time, did you tell your friends?
BARKER: They knew there was something wrong, we just didn’t know what. I think we were all a bit naïve to it. They got the resident pseudo-doctor down to have a look at me, and he said, “You should go to a medical center in the morning.” So, I get to this medical center and the first thing this doctor said was, “We’re gonna get her into the hospital.” By that stage, I was completely paralyzed on my left side. Interestingly enough the doctor said, “It seems like MS to me, but we need to get you to the hospital.” So they got me to a hospital, and it took hours to get me through emergency.
BR: In the United States, you have to really be bloody for them to take you in the emergency room quickly. Otherwise you just get in line with everyone. When that doctor had said that maybe it’s MS, multiple sclerosis, did you know what that was?
BARKER: No. At that stage I was too sick and out of it to concentrate on anything. At the hospital, they put me on intravenous steroids and they did some CT scans. By that night, the neurologist came around and he said, “Oh, look, you’ve had a stroke. You’ve had a major stroke but you’re gonna be ok.”
BR: Here you are, thirty years old, in a strange hospital in Las Vegas with no medical records and the diagnosis it that you have had a stroke.
BARKER: They wouldn’t let me fly because around that time, there was the fear of deep vein thrombosis and also, airlines won’t take you if you’d just had a stroke, so I couldn’t go home. So I was stuck in this hospital in Vegas. It was like a nightmare. I started a little bit of rehab there. And then finally, they let me go.
BR: How many days later was that?
BARKER: It was about five or six days. But they wouldn’t let me fly, so the agreement was that I could leave with my friends. We went to Palm Springs which was great. I got to go to Joshua Tree, even though I couldn’t really walk anywhere. It was all a bit strange. I got back to Australia and I saw a neurologist, and then I went into rehab to learn how to walk again, which is a really weird thing, when someone tells you, “Lift your leg.”
BR: And you can’t do it. There’s no connection.
BARKER: No, there’s no connection. You know in your head what lifting your leg means, but you can’t do it. How do you tell something that just doesn’t respond to respond? It took a few months of going to hydrotherapy and physiotherapy to learn how to walk again.
BR: Were you getting around in a wheelchair, or with a cane?
BARKER: I’d gone from a wheelchair to a frame to a walking stick. I started to regain some movement quickly, but not proper walking movement; that was quite difficult. It was really strange. Something that neurologists generally believe never happens, but I could swear when I’d finally get movement back in something—particularly a peripheral area, like the most extreme part would be the toes on my left foot, because they’re the furthest from my brain—that I could almost feel this electric current going across the synapse. The doctor would say, “No. You couldn’t have felt anything.” I know what I felt and it would just send this wave through me.
BR: The research now really is, in terms of brains science is that people are constantly forming new synapses.
BARKER: They say that, but they don’t say that you can physically feel them. Trust me, I could feel something. I was also feeling really lucky. It was like, yeah, yeah, I’ve had a massive stroke, and I’ve survived. Then it was about March and I decided to go back and teach one class, because I thought it would be really good for me. I got a little bit agoraphobic during all this. Obviously, I didn’t want people to see me in the state I was in. But I was finally feeling good, and it was my first day back, and I could feel all the same symptoms coming back again. I thought: Oh, my God and I rang my doctor and she said, “Get to the hospital now.” So I rushed back into the hospital with another suspected stroke. I thought: No way. What’s going on? I was going numb again and they did all these tests, and my neurologist came around, and he ordered a whole lot more extensive tests than the ones that were done in Vegas.
BR: At this point, you had left Las Vegas, and the prognosis was: This is a young woman who had a stroke. Even though the very first doctor who saw you said, “This could be MS,” it wasn’t pursued.
BARKER: Apparently there was a big argument between the radiologist and the neurologist in Las Vegas. The radiologist said, “I’m sorry, she fits all the criteria for MS, and not for a stroke.” I am an Anglo-Saxon-slash Celtic background; twenty-eight to thirty-two; female. It was all there. There was one massive lesion on my brain which is why they thought it was a stroke, rather than MS. Back in Australia, they did some more extensive tests, which it turns out they could’ve done in the States, to actually identify the difference between a stroke and MS. My neurologist did it, and by that stage, when he got the results back, instead of one lesion repairing itself, there were five new ones. At the time, it felt like the beginning of the end. Instead of having just recovered from something and thinking I have to move on with my life, it was being diagnosed with something and thinking what the hell does this mean?
BR: Plus, you had lost approximately four months, where you could have been treated.
BARKER: If they hadn’t taken me off steroids when I got to the hospital in Las Vegas--it stops the brain swelling—I wouldn’t have actually become so paralyzed. But of course, the one thing they do make you sign in the emergency room is a waiver saying that they’re not responsible for any misdiagnosis. Even though I’m left-handed and I couldn’t actually sign it, it’s just probably this scribble, they still made me do it. The weird thing is, in terms of medications, you have to have two attacks before you’re allowed to go on any MS medications. But at least I would have had steroids, and I wouldn’t have been paralyzed.
BR: So during the second time, that’s when the diagnosis came down.
BARKER: Everything just crashed down around me. I’ll never forget that day.
BR: So here you are, a new media artist who has been working with issues of the body. As you said, you were in some way thinking you’re a healthy academic who had a healthy distance from the content issues of the body, when in actuality it was circling around you during the whole entire time.
BARKER: Well, that’s exactly it. I mean, there’s a good chance that it was actually there the whole time. You can have attacks and they don’t show up, because they don’t affect some major active part of the brain.
BR: Right. Like in the example of my girlfriend who has MS--she was being treated for Lyme disease for a couple of years. She had an intravenous pump in her arm and she was trying to go about her life. Even though, she knew that she really didn’t feel well for four years. She was thinking, “Oh, yeah, it’s Lyme disease. But wait, I don’t see any deer tick spots. I mean, I always check myself.” It was an absolute misdiagnosis.
BARKER: A lot of doctors just put it down to anxiety.
BR: Female anxiety?
BARKER: Which is why, with the piece “Struck” I started to look back at the history of hysteria. People I do know who’ve been finally diagnosed have often heard the familiar phrase, “You’re overreacting.” The symptoms can be so varied. It doesn’t have to be the extreme paralysis that I had; it can just be tingling in the fingers or really quick flashes of blindness, or even longer ones, or feeling tired. There are some really small effects. Often doctors just put it down to, “Oh you’re just under the weather,” kind of thing.
BR: What I’m really struck with—and of course, that word struck is so powerful—is what you say in your piece, which is, “How do we gain an understanding of disease through the visual interpretation of data?” If we take that question and split it into two, I think it’s almost like two questions at once. I’m really fascinated with the first part of the question, which is how do we gain an understanding of a disease? I think it’s so interesting how you talk about the connections between female anxiety, female hysteria and what was once thought of as hysteria which may be thought of today as psychosis or anxiety, or bipolar. Perhaps, it’s some type of mood disorder. How does a disease come to be in the world? How does it become diagnosed? How is it studied? How are patients told about it? How is a medical discourse established? There’s so many things in your piece that really strike
you as a viewer. It’s personal on one level, but it really takes into account the whole idea of a medical disorder. It’s also a neurological disorder, which is maybe the twenty-first century’s biggest drain, in terms of so many different neurological disorders that affect people. At this point, let’s talk about the medical aspect of your piece. Let’s focus on the imaging of your brain and how in your artwork that came to be.
BARKER: Firstly, just in terms of the name Struck, it’s kind of weird; the name actually came about the night I was taken into the hospital in Las Vegas. I was sitting on my bed, and Anna Munster said, “We’re going to have to do an artwork about this. And we’ve got to call it Struck.”
BR: Yeah, always the art historian.
BARKER: Yeah, get all these new media theorists in there and they’ll always come up with a good name. Anna just said it. I mean, that’s the kind of thing she just does. She was scared as all hell but she just kept it together. There was this other part of her that knew that some kind of experiential thing like this, she knew that ultimately, I would want to do a work about it. When I got back to Australia with all my reports from Las Vegas, I couldn’t really look at the scans for a long time, because they were really invasive, and it was really scary to see that this was my brain. We’ve all seen x-rays of a broken arm or whatever, but this was my brain and there was something in there. I felt detached and scared by it at the same time. That’s when I started to realize that it’s a really strange relationship between what a neurologist does when they just pull out this x-ray and then look at it. From seeing my neurologist every few months since that time, and having MRIs every six months since 2000—so that’s quite a few MRIs now I’ve had—I realized that there’s this huge difference between that process of medical imaging that I go through and how I actually feel personally. Not just emotionally how I feel, but how I feel physically isn’t always going to show up on an MRI, you know? So there’s this kind of weird divide between the two things. I suppose one of my things was that more and more, science and medicine is looking at these hugely expensive imaging technologies to engage with illness, particularly neurological illness. But I don’t necessarily think that on their own, they can do anything. When you go back to thinking about when I was in Las Vegas in the hospital, and it was actually the radiologist, the girl who is the absolute expert on reading something like an MRI, who turns around and says, “I’m sorry, I don’t care if there’s just one lesion there, this person fits the criteria for MS rather than a stroke.” It’s so interesting that they would actually go against their own reading of an image to say, “No, this is all wrong. You know, this doesn’t fit a stroke victim with no history of stroke.”
BR: Do you think that part of that is that people are afraid to hear a diagnosis? People only want to hear good things when you go to the doctor, so it’s really hard to say to a parent or anyone, “This is really the diagnosis.” In fact I’ve heard stories from the other end where for instance parents will say, “The neurologist gave me the diagnosis of PDD-NOS, pervasive development disorder, because they don’t want me to hear the word autism. They knew that I couldn’t take that word autism.” When in actuality, it’s really the same thing. I’ve even heard that PDD-NOS is a new made up word, because, the harder diagnosis of autism is so difficult for someone to take. The question really is: how do you give out information and who makes that decision?
BARKER: Well, that’s the thing. At the end of the day, in a hospital, it’s the neurologist who makes the ultimate decision. I mean, a radiologist can read a report or read the image but it’s up to the neurologist to make a final decision. Whether you’re diagnosed with a stroke or MS, both of them fit into that pretty high spectrum of shock value. I think that a stroke was an easier diagnosis to make, based on what they saw. There were two neurologists, I remember, and they both conferred and said that the radiologist was wrong. It’s an interesting thing if you look at the history of a disease. Ultimately the radiologist was right and she picked up on the right things. I think that that’s where just reading an image, a medical image is really problematic.
BR: Although it’s problematic, it’s also powerful.
BARKER: I think sometimes it’s taken as the basis of someone’s experience. I can’t tell you what’s going on in my brain; but more and more, I’ve learnt that I can feel things. I’m more in tune with my body.
Funnily enough, my doctor always comes to my shows, which is really nice. I think he’ll actually really appreciate it, because I’m quite fortunate in that I have a really good neurologist, who does look at my MRIs, but he also says, “How do you feel?” The piece itself is about wanting to say, “Well, look, there’s some really bizarre things that these neurologists have said.” I mean, you can read the text in the work and at one point it says, something about having an Australia accent. It’s like, great; well, that really helps with the fact that I’m paralyzed here.
BR: When I look at the piece, I think: Oh! Doctors think they’re such experts. Who is really the expert here? Is the patient the expert?
Or is it the doctor, who’s spent a certain amount of time in medical school and, yes, may have seen a certain number of things. If you’re in an emergency room, maybe you’re going to see a younger person, an intern, perhaps. Whom do you trust?
BARKER: With more and more imaging technologies available to them, they tend not to trust the notion…
BR: Not to trust the patient. But what you’re saying is that the radiologist knew all along.
BARKER: Well yeah, the radiologist did seem to know.
BR: The radiologist is the person who can read the visual—in other words, the person who read the visual knew. But the other people—the neurologist, the doctor, whatever—were arguing over the diagnosis, because they didn’t trust the visual.
BARKER: Well, it was more that they trusted the visual to say one thing. When you just have one massive lesion, or kind of a lesion—in terms of that image, it’s like this big white spot. When there’s just one there, and it’s big, and it’s had the result that it’s had, they say, “That is a stroke.” Perhaps, the radiologist knew the ambiguity of the image.
BR: It’s so interesting, because they could’ve said to you, “You had a stroke, but you might have MS and we suggest that you go back to Australia and check that out.” Was that never discussed?
BARKER: In the piece, I do have a few comments about their recommendations. I think they put it in there to maybe appease or acknowledge the radiologist in some way.
BR: It’s so creepy when you read it in the text in the piece with the music. It’s kind of this mystery. It’s a creepy, eerie, monstrosity in a way.
BARKER: I guess that’s what I wanted, because that’s how it unfolded for me. It literally did unfold. It unraveled itself. There isn’t a conclusion, because I finish with the final recommendation from Las Vegas, which are, “Overall, I think this is a fortunate young lady.”
BR: But your audience--they’ll walk away from it thinking…what?
BARKER: Well, that’s the thing. Maybe they’ll think what I think, which is that I don’t really know; maybe I am fortunate. The fact that I’m walking five years later, when my neurologist thought I’d be permanently in a wheelchair within seven years, which would’ve been in the next two years…the fact that I’m not, and the fact that he’s revised that, maybe I am a fortunate young lady. But I suppose I’m leaving that part open-ended because there is no end. That’s what I’ve realized with this. There is no remission, there is no, you either have it or you don’t. You have it. What it does to you is always going to be completely different. I wanted to leave the piece on this strange point where you might think: Oh, she’s lucky. Or is she lucky? Is that what’s she’s saying?
BR: In terms of neurology and science and the twenty-first century and imaging--all these different imaging techniques that happen when you go to the doctor now, what’s your take on all of this?
BARKER: I suppose this comes back to that time, that pre-millennium period of my life, where I never went to doctors. I wouldn’t even take an aspirin if I got sick. In my post-millennium state, I have to take a lot of drugs and I have to see a lot of doctors. Neurology is strange. I’m so lucky that I have an exceptional neurologist, who is the first one to admit that the brain is not understood. I did get a lot of different opinions. Particularly because I seemed to have developed this cluster of lesions just in one area, which is very rare for MS. They’re normally all over. I’ve only ever had them on my right side. So it’s only really affected my left side. I was thinking: God, I’ve got a brain tumor or something. Which was the other thing that they thought I might’ve had. I realized through my neurologist that he’s never going to lie to me. But, he’ll always give it the worst take, because that’s what specialists tend to do. They’re not going to try and say something that’s encouraging—particularly in neurology—when they don’t know. Initially, he did say, “You’re going to probably be in a wheelchair in seven years, because you’ve got a severe case.”
BR: Can we back-track a little bit about the research that you did at the Hospital Salpêtrière and Charcot and how Charcot discovered MS? But in actuality, what he’s predominantly known for is being the precursor to Freud, in terms of hysteria.
BARKER: Yeah. He actually worked with Freud at Salpêtrière. I went to Salpêtrière, after I’d had my residency at Eyebeam, to just follow up on him a little bit. It’s a bit difficult to get access to a lot of his stuff, unless you speak perfect French. But it was interesting and the guy sounded like a real jerk in terms of the Salpêtrière and the whole history of how women were diagnosed as hysterics and women were not technically diagnosed with neurological disorders. They were paraded in his famous Tuesday lecture series where he’d just bring out some hysteric and she’d be up there on the stage with him while he’d be giving a lecture. What I found interesting was the fact that Charcot discovered multiple sclerosis, which actually means many scars.
BR: How did he discover it?
BARKER: He discovered it through autopsy. He cut up the brain. Fortunately, we don’t need to do that now to discover it.
BR: The women who were hysterical had all different sorts of symptoms, right? And then ultimately, when he saw their brain, it was a lesion filled brain.
BARKER: Exactly. So, a lot of physical mannerisms that they were exhibiting—which I’m familiar with because I actually exhibited some of them during my MS episodes—these strange fetal positions which is before your muscles are strong enough. I know it sounds strange, but to actually hold your hand limp, you’re actually using more muscles than you are to have it curled. When I was at the height of my paralysis, my arm would be completely curled up. Doctors do these strange little tests on your toes and stuff, and when they curl, it’s a fetal thing that babies do, and I’d do that. A lot of those things that Charcot defined are present in MS . Also through portraiture, Charcot was looking at a lot at facial expressions. I found that really interesting, because I then saw that MRIs are this strange form of portraiture. It’s my face, it’s my head still, but it’s in a very different way. It’s being read the same way that Charcot was having all these portraits of people taken, and trying to define illness through that. While the technology may have changed immensely how far have we really come? Maybe it’s a tendency that I do of harking back to another period with my work.
BR: To make it historical? Or, to comment upon the history?
BARKER: Well, I think because so much of what is contemporary has a history. It’s like things like genetics with Praæternatural and the monstrous, it just doesn’t start one day in the twentieth or twenty-first century. It has a history. Rather, it was the nineteenth century, definitely, that had it. That’s why I started to construct a visual from that.
BR: Do you think it’s possible that many of the women that Charcot was looking at were actually suffering from MS?
BARKER: I think there were a lot who were under that kind of category that he and Freud defined as hysterical. It would’ve been things like anything from bipolar to a nervous breakdown. But yes, I think that it’s hard to get statistics, but I’d say quite a few.
BR: Kind of all mixed in together?
BARKER: Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, he had to rely more on how a patient was acting. But the huge plethora of photographs that he was able to take at the time is quite telling, in that when you look at some of those women, just in their facial expressions, part of the side of their face might be drooping. Now, mine was doing that, because the muscles had all gone in my face. One of the things that the neurologist in Las Vegas said in my report was that, “She had good facial symmetry,” which is such a loaded thing. Oddly enough, it actually wasn’t true. I mean, if they’re calling it good facial symmetry, where half my face had collapsed I’d hate to see what bad facial symmetry is all about.
BR: From your piece, it really makes you, as a viewer, really question medicine, even medical technology.
BARKER: It’s weird. I had a discussion with my supervisor about a week before I went on that trip to New York in ’99, 2000 and we were talking about something that I was going to write for my PhD when I got back. We were talking about the what-ifs of being diagnosed with something, and we were talking about genetic engineering, predominantly, at the time. At the time I was still in my Preternatural headspace of otherness. We have to have difference; we have to have mutation.
BR: Why?
BARKER: In terms of evolution, we have to have difference. With my advisor we had this discussion and, again, it was on this theoretical-slash-kind of personal level of, “Man, what would you do if you’re, diagnosed with something?” We both thought-- well, we’d want a cure. At the same time here’s me writing and creating this work about how we have to accept difference. Now what’s really weird for me is not so much genetic engineering, but it’s stem cell research that I would say I look at closely, because if there’s anything that’s going to cure me it’s going to be stem cells. I subscribe to all these neurological journals and I really shouldn’t go there, but I do. I can’t help myself. I know exactly what’s going on and I know what research is being done and yet I certainly don’t want to go into any trials on stem cells, because I think my health is quite good at the moment. But if my health wasn’t good, then there’s this bizarre survival thing, that you deep down think: No, I don’t want to be a sick person. I remember what my life was like before I had an illness. But at the same time—and this is where it becomes really loaded—is that in having an illness, it’s changed me so much, and not all of it’s been for the worse. I have to say that in all honesty it’s given me such a self-awareness that I never would have had. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. But at the same time, there are worse things that could happen in my life.
BR: Do you think that you’ll take the work that you worked with in Struck and use it in other formats or in new works or channel it in other ways?
BARKER: At this stage, I don’t know. This has been really hard for me. It’s been just over five years and funnily enough, I missed the date; it was on the twentieth of March that I actually got diagnosed with MS.
BR: That was on Sunday.
BARKER: Yes, Sunday. I’m glad I forgot about it this year.
Here I’ve made the artwork, and the first time it’s shown is in New York. I think I need to sit back for a while now and really think about is this something I want to explore further? It was a bit of an emotional minefield. I think it was important to do. I’m not saying that art is therapy or anything like that; but more about the fact that it was a logical extension of the research I had been doing. I need to do a little bit of thinking when I get home to Australia.

BR: Because the content is very, very rich. You can go so many different ways with it. Do you think that neurology in general will continue to fascinate you?
BARKER: I think it will. I don’t think there’s any escaping that. I mean, because my life is dictated a lot by the brain. It’s more whether I want to start to divorce my own personal process and move into other areas of interest, or whether it will continue to function as a process for making art. It’s very hard at the moment becauseI spent all day yesterday at the Natural History Museum, photographing dioramas.
BR: The old dioramas? I heard they’re taking those away soon.
BARKER: No way!
BR: I thought they were redoing it--over the next decade or something.
BARKER: I’m so glad I photographed them all yesterday.
BR: They’re redoing those dioramas, because they really are a very nineteenth century way of thinking about man.
BARKER: Oh, absolutely. I find that really intriguing. Without giving too much away, there’s this little germ forming between dioramas and how that can fit in with my interests. I’m not quite sure just at the moment. It could be brains and dioramas.
BR: Do you find that your students are interested in content which is more about health and everyday society? What are your students in Australia working on now?
BARKER: In the last few years, I’ve always had a few who are really interested in medicine, and particularly genetics. I jokingly call neurology the new genetics. There’s a huge amount of artists who do stuff on the new genetics in New York.
BR: I see a ton of artists working with genetics or cybernetics. When you look at those works, they’re so futuristic, in a way, that it’s very hard to have a connection with them. That’s why I think your piece is so strong, in that you get into the viewers’ experience immediately. Could that be the difference where artists have to suffer and you have to feel that, versus looking at it from such a far away point?
BARKER: I think that’s a good point because the piece came from such a personal place. But at the same time, I didn’t want it to be this: this is just me.
BR: It’s anonymously personal.
BARKER: Yeah, that’s what I was trying for. It’s an experience and I guess it’s about a confusion of an experience and the conflict between what something says and what’s really happening to a person.
BR: Also, for a person who has any loved one who is being affected by whatever it may be—Alzheimer’s, autism, Parkinsons, whatever, any type of brain illness—it’s very, very powerful.
BARKER: Yeah. I think it’s a really hard area. Again, it comes back to the fact that we don’t know anything about these illnesses.
BR: There’s no cure to all these illnesses. There’s no magic pill, there’s no crystal ball. We’re just pulling at ways to try to have these people in our lives have fruitful and meaningful lives.
BARKER: Yeah, exactly. I think that’s what it comes down to. It comes down to a quality of life. From the research end there’s attempts. But there has been some really hideous trials, too, with some of those diseases, particularly Parkinson’s. There was a horrible example of putting stem cells back into the brain, and then the patient went into overdrive. Instead of bringing the Parkinson’s into a process of stasis, it actually went the reverse and accelerated the illness. Some of these people actually did a ten year leap in a few weeks. And they couldn’t reverse it at all. Research can be a very dangerous thing sometimes.
BR: It is really like being in a laboratory and throwing tons of unknown vials together. In a way, we’re in the dark age in terms of neurology.
BARKER: I think someone with Parkinson’s thinks: Well, I’m going to die from this; what have I got to lose? I don’t think they were expecting quite what they got. So you know, it’s very hard.
BR: What’s interesting to me is how easily neurological issues work with new technology. Why is that?
BARKER: It’s an interesting point. Maybe you have to look back again as to why it is that new media artists jumped on genetics. If you look at that, there’s a huge amount of new media artists who did stuff on genetics. If you think about a process such as an MRI, you think of it in some bizarre way as a photographic process. But technically, there’s no light involved at all. It’s purely magnetic. It’s whipping neurons all around the place and then throwing them back and seeing what the difference is between these before and after states. That’s how they detect changes. I think that new media and the contemporary process of imaging are interested in science. I don’t really think there’s very many examples of art/science collaborations. I just think that’s just a nice little term that some artists like to use, some scientists like to use; but I don’t really believe that artists and scientists collaborate; that if they do something together, they’re both in it for their own thing, and they’re just humoring the other party. I do believe that artists are—and a lot of new media artists—are incredibly interested in the technologies of science and medicine. It ranges through the whole gamut of things like genetics, microscopy and imaging technologies like CT and MRIs. I
I think they become useful tropes for producing work, and for looking at the body in technology. For a long time, they tried to dismiss the body from this whole process. We went through that hideous phase of believing that we could go back to this sort of mind/body split, and that we could go into the digital, and leave the body behind. That’s just a load of crap; it just doesn’t happen like that. Even in the most sophisticated environments, you can’t abolish the body. For me, I think that’s really important, and that’s what’s made me interested in a lot of these technologies.
BR: Do you think that technology can save neurology?
BARKER: Oh. I don’t know. I think they’re maybe uneasy bedfellows, in that they rely on each other. I mean, because of things like neurology, technology really got developed. Think about how much an MRI machine costs, let alone to run it. So scientists will argue for more research and development that will get higher technology; and then neurology will rely on that technology more to read something. But at the same time, it then means that to actually get someone who can really understand what’s going on in the person in all of this is going to become harder. I mean, a lot of people think: Oh, great, well at least they’re putting a lot of money into new imaging techniques. This is where I think the body gets lost in all of this--The person. Every six months I get completely anxious when I go for an MRI. I think, “what if it’s going to show something?”
BR: It’s kind of back to that thing of trust. Do you trust your own body? Do you trust your doctor? Do you trust what the visual representation says? Who do you trust?
BARKER: That’s exactly it.
BR: Which is fact, which is fiction?
BARKER: Exactly. It’s hard. There’s a tension there. I still get worked up every six months about this process.
BR: Will Struck travel? Will you show the piece in other places?
BARKER: I’m talking at the moment, because as they say, it was literally hot off the press by the time I came over to New York. I’ll be talking to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which is our major gallery in Australia. They’re interested. I’ll probably make a single channel version as well, for festivals, because three channel pieces are very hard to show. But, it has to be a projected piece. I’m quite adamant about this. It is meant to be a slightly overwhelming experience, which you don’t get on a small screen. I guess my feet kind of haven’t hit the ground properly on this one yet.
BR: In terms of coming to Eyebeam how do you think that fit into your work? Do you think the piece would’ve been different or the same? Did it help it, or did it help just being in New York?
BARKER: Being here the first three months, doing the residency was really hard. I’ve lost a lot of memories from that period here. I did ask myself: What the hell am I doing here doing this work? Why am I here doing it? Why couldn’t I have stayed at home? I’ve got the equipment.
BR: I remember we had talked about that, and you even said that.
BARKER: I suppose maybe what it was is that it gave me that rare space and time. Sure, I’ve got the equipment, but I don’t get seven days a week to do it. Maybe it forced me to deal with some of the things that were going on that I’d suppressed for a long time. I think coming to Eyebeam was a really good thing. Also because of the people I met and experiences that I had, it was invaluable to the work.
BR: The work changed a lot from when you showed it last year at Eyebeam’s Open Studio evening.
BARKER: I think that was maybe how I was feeling about it at the time, which was a bit manic. I look back on that four-minute rough that I did, and it was incredibly manic and too much one sided.
BR: In that first version, it was the narrator that was the text.
BARKER: Yes.
BR: There was a lot of text.
BARKER: Yeah, exactly. I realized it was just following too much of a straight literal narrative, whereas I hope the final piece messes that up a lot. It has its moments of manic-ness. I suppose it tries to cover the full range of emotions, in a way. Then I didn’t actually touch the work for quite a long time when I got home. I think I needed to just let it play around in my head. So I’d get these images, and I wouldn’t even write anything down, I’d just think about them and then it was actually only about two months ago that I sat down again and started. I didn’t know how it was able to fit together, but I knew exactly what I had to shoot and what I needed to work with. It started to just evolve that way.
BR: Are there other artists that you’re looking at now? You had mentioned Jim Campbell, but are there other artists that you’re fascinated with, either their technology, their format or their content? Who’s your favorite now?
BARKER: I find this the hardest question that I can ever answer. I think because it changes so much.
BR: Or how about are you reading something? Or have you seen some film or a doco or anything that has really stayed with you?
BARKER: Well, the stuff that I read is all over the place. It’s the end parts of my PhD, anything from like Chris Staver and her reading of Rabelais and his world, about laughter, to something on cybernetics to something on neurology. It’s just all over the place. I do go through a hiatus on not seeing art. Particularly when I’m making a work, I won’t go and look at work, because I think it’s almost a dangerous space to be in. I always think that when you open yourself up to your art practice, you’re always a little bit of a sponge, sometimes. You may not even realize it. I see students do it all the time. I realize it often doesn’t matter how good you are; if something clicks with you, suddenly you’ll go back, and you won’t even know that you’re doing it. I’m not saying it’s plagiarism, but I think it’s easy to be influenced sometimes by other people’s work when you are in that quite vulnerable open stage of production. So because I’ve just had two shows in a row and I’m finishing off the really boring parts of the PhD I haven’t been involved in much else, really.
BR: So when you say “finish up the boring part of the PhD,” that means?
BARKER: Oh, you know, things called footnotes. In the next four weeks I’ll probably be finished.
BR: Does that affect your teaching, your position at the university in terms of tenure?
BARKER: I’m on tenure already. I’ll look at promotion and good grants and stuff like that.
BR: Right. And continue to make art?
BARKER: Oh, absolutely.
BR: Do you think you’ll come back to New York?
BARKER: Yeah, I will. I might give it a little break for a while. I’ve been here a few times now. I’ll always continue to travel. For the first time in so long, I just don’t know what the next project is going to be—which is kind of nice, actually. It’s nice to have a little bit of breathing space, I think.
BR: From the viewer’s point of view, I feel like I want to say, “Make more neurological work!” because it’s such an important topic, and everyone needs to be bombarded with it in the newspaper, in the journals, in the magazine, and in the art gallery.
BARKER: Yeah. Ok, well, Beth, just for you. I’ll make something else. You heard it here first. I guess the main thing is that I wanted to create something that was vulnerable, in a way, that was not completely understood. Everyone’s going to take away something very different.
BR: When I looked at that shadow-like figure it reminded me of Hanna Wilke’s, work Carving, where she basically tries to shrink her body through dieting/starvation over a period of a month. She changes a teeny little bit in every single photograph. That’s what that figure made me think of. It is up to the viewer, but in some way it evoked the monstrosity image for you, but for me, it also evoked this sort of medical thing.
BARKER: The fact is that the body is open to this sort of probing, and nothing is sacred anymore. It was vulnerable, but at the same time, it wasn’t completely identifiable or recognizable. It slipped in between states constantly. That was very new for me to work with a model, to work with a figure. It’s not normally how I produce work.
BR: Did you ever wanted to use yourself for that image?
BARKER: No, no. It wasn’t what I was interested in. I think there’s enough of me in the work as it is, without having me in the work, you know.
BR: Well, it’s you, it’s everyone. It’s anyone.
BARKER: That’s exactly it.