Psychotel
Psychotel, an essay film, uses the metaphor of the hotel to explore the psyche. The film investigates the uncanny as a state of being relating to the split nature of the self by combining fictional stories, dreams, philosophical commentary, and complex voice-over that complicates the authorial voice. The architecture of the psyche is presented in a richly textured audio-visual landscape, explored through tales of strange happenings in hotel rooms; the returning dead, the spirit guide turned bad, the folding of the city.
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Psychotel : watch full video (60 mins)
Psychotel 2: Wollaton Street Studios Research Residency
Psychotel 2 is a cinematic installation project exploring the uncanny. The exhibition employs elements from cinema’s supernatural horror genres; bizarre interpretations of psychoanalysis; and philosophical investigations into the structure of identity. Visitors are subjected to slow nuanced arrangements of objects, kaleidoscopic sequences of images, filmic topologies of thought, and lightly veiled filth; in order to release the uncanny’s power to make us question what we think we know.
About the Residency: Wollaton Street Studios’ research residencies are an opportunity for artists to experiment with the creation of new exhibitions. Susannah Gent will incorporate her sixty-minute experimental film, Psychotel, into an installation, using multiple projectors and sculptural forms. During the residency three iterations of the installation will be constructed. Each of these will form a new exhibition, open to the public. A mid-residency talk, by the artist, will discuss the process and background to the work.
About the Artwork: The film, Psychotel, takes the hotel as a metaphor for the multi-dimensional psyche of the film’s main protagonist; with a clean front of house and a chaotic hidden service region. First-person and third-person narrations, and the voice of the hotel complicate the usual viewer alignment with the onscreen character. The uncanny (German unheimlich “unhomely”) arises when the familiar becomes strange, the known becomes questionable and the body – the first home of the self – becomes corrupt. Uncanny figures hover ambiguously between the living and the dead: the ghost and the undead, as well as the spirit guide turned bad. The uncanny appears during states of uncertainty, when we hold conflicting views, and once more believe in primitive notions that ought to have been surpassed. In society the uncanny haunts from the margins where the overspill of that-which-does-not-fit coagulates.
What we lack is a lexicon of thought. Psychoanalysis has brought us fascinating internal landscapes, while simultaneously boxing up the psyche as a dirty little secret. Ideas from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and Jacques Derrida dovetail with intuitively produced image sequences, which explore how film can be used as a research tool that produces alternative forms of knowledge.
In this project, the film Psychotel will become part of an installation, Psychotel 2. The installation starts from the understanding that the cinema spectator anticipates familiarity, while the installation audience awaits novelty. Originally produced to be presented as an immersive black box experience, the residency explores the impact on a film, already filled with rooms, being placed within a room, where it competes with objects, and reflections; and which can be viewed at any point during its projection.
About the Artist: Susannah Gent is an experimental filmmaker and educator at Sheffield Hallam University. Psychotel was produced in the context of her practice-led Ph.D: “The neuroscientific uncanny: a filmic investigation of twenty-first century hauntology.”
Gent’s films of the past thirty years explore approaches to representing interiority and unorthodox narrative structure. Her commissions from the British Film Institute, Channel Four, and the BBC have won awards at international film festivals. Her recent retrospective at the Short Film Festival of Oberhausen, the longest running experimental festival in Europe, was accompanied by film broadcast and documentary screening on Arté. Although a specialist in film, Gent has undertaken installations which incorporate fine art taxidermy.
Her current research expands the study of the uncanny towards a deeper understanding of neurodivergency through filmmaking and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Website: tracegallery.uk
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @tracegalleryuk
Wollaton Street Studios, 179 Wollaton Street, Nottingham, NG1 5GE
About the Residency: Wollaton Street Studios’ research residencies are an opportunity for artists to experiment with the creation of new exhibitions. Susannah Gent will incorporate her sixty-minute experimental film, Psychotel, into an installation, using multiple projectors and sculptural forms. During the residency three iterations of the installation will be constructed. Each of these will form a new exhibition, open to the public. A mid-residency talk, by the artist, will discuss the process and background to the work.
About the Artwork: The film, Psychotel, takes the hotel as a metaphor for the multi-dimensional psyche of the film’s main protagonist; with a clean front of house and a chaotic hidden service region. First-person and third-person narrations, and the voice of the hotel complicate the usual viewer alignment with the onscreen character. The uncanny (German unheimlich “unhomely”) arises when the familiar becomes strange, the known becomes questionable and the body – the first home of the self – becomes corrupt. Uncanny figures hover ambiguously between the living and the dead: the ghost and the undead, as well as the spirit guide turned bad. The uncanny appears during states of uncertainty, when we hold conflicting views, and once more believe in primitive notions that ought to have been surpassed. In society the uncanny haunts from the margins where the overspill of that-which-does-not-fit coagulates.
What we lack is a lexicon of thought. Psychoanalysis has brought us fascinating internal landscapes, while simultaneously boxing up the psyche as a dirty little secret. Ideas from the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and Jacques Derrida dovetail with intuitively produced image sequences, which explore how film can be used as a research tool that produces alternative forms of knowledge.
In this project, the film Psychotel will become part of an installation, Psychotel 2. The installation starts from the understanding that the cinema spectator anticipates familiarity, while the installation audience awaits novelty. Originally produced to be presented as an immersive black box experience, the residency explores the impact on a film, already filled with rooms, being placed within a room, where it competes with objects, and reflections; and which can be viewed at any point during its projection.
About the Artist: Susannah Gent is an experimental filmmaker and educator at Sheffield Hallam University. Psychotel was produced in the context of her practice-led Ph.D: “The neuroscientific uncanny: a filmic investigation of twenty-first century hauntology.”
Gent’s films of the past thirty years explore approaches to representing interiority and unorthodox narrative structure. Her commissions from the British Film Institute, Channel Four, and the BBC have won awards at international film festivals. Her recent retrospective at the Short Film Festival of Oberhausen, the longest running experimental festival in Europe, was accompanied by film broadcast and documentary screening on Arté. Although a specialist in film, Gent has undertaken installations which incorporate fine art taxidermy.
Her current research expands the study of the uncanny towards a deeper understanding of neurodivergency through filmmaking and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Website: tracegallery.uk
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @tracegalleryuk
Wollaton Street Studios, 179 Wollaton Street, Nottingham, NG1 5GE
Psychotel 2: First iteration
Three projectors, two sets of speakers, a vintage super-8 screen, and a sheet of back projection material with a dressmakers dummy and hat makers head were the equipment and props for the first version of Psychotel 2.
The combination of objects and multiple projectors was very successful. As the film features television screens and windows, illusions were created with the physical and on-screen boxes and shadows. Sandbags made out of tights provided cover for the cables and weighted down the stands.
Psychotel 2: Second Iteration
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The angles of the screens and the slits gave the illusion of looking through spaces into hidden regions and multiple planes of action.
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The second version used shirts and collars that belonged to my bank-manager grandfather. The collars, their stiffness, brought to mind ideas of the wild and the domesticated, how according to Deleuze and Guattari, we seek our own repression. The rows of shirts provided reflective surfaces that, according to Mark Fisher’s description of the eerie, created a space in which the human was both absent and present.
Psychotel 2: Third Iteration
The final version of the installation took a figurative turn and was inspired by the tarot card ‘the hanged man’, a symbol of transformation. The holes cut in the projection screens again provided windows through the viewing area that extended the impression to the full room. As the format of this installation was rotated and contained in a central triangle, the rear of the work was accessible and the back of the screens and the projection through the holes gave the work a 360-degree viewing space.
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