Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, TLE, has affected many creative individuals and is thought to be the source of much artistic inspiration. Artists like Vincent Van Gogh and Fydor Dostoevsky are just two such significant creative people. The electrical storms associated with this condition are considered to cause a kind of cross-pollination of ideas between different functional areas of the brain, giving the artists extraordinarily insightful visions, which feed into their creative practice. Much of the work and research that exists is visual leading to a goldmine of information for an artist like myself interested in the visual and the underlying neurological condition.

Seized, is a time-based work using three pairs of projectors which explores the subject of TLE. Each pair of projectors projects images onto three semitransparent screens set between the projectors. In each pair images rise from one projector and then dissolve into images from the second projector. Each set of projectors works through its slide sequence independently from the other pairs showing primarily the same sequence of images with some variations. The same images will be seen at one time or another on all the screen sets but rarely at the same time.

The sequences within the time-based work ‘Seized Out of this World’, deal with particular elements of Temporal Lobe Epilepsy as described in Geschwind Syndrome which is a personality syndrome consisting of symptoms such as circumstantiality, excessive verbal output, hypergraphia, writing or drawing a lot, altered sexuality, often hyposexuality, but it can be hypersexuality, an intensified mental life, deepened cognitive and emotional responses, hyper-religiosity and or hyper-morality.