Methods of Treatment Peculiar to Women
(work-in-progress), 2026 (VR/360° experience)
Hysteria has a unique visual history with a key moment taking place in 19th century Paris, during neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s tenure at La Salpetrière Hospital. Known as the “Napoleon of Neuroses,” Charcot researched hysteria using theatrical and ethically questionable methods, experimenting on women patients with hypnosis and a range of technologies including electricity and acoustical stimulation. He, along with artists of the time, documented his “research” through art: photographs, drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Charcot inspired the work of Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet, shaping modern psychiatry today. Methods of Treatment Peculiar to Women (working title) is a hybrid live action/animated VR 360° experience that explores 19th century understandings and representations of hysteria, specifically the line of inquiry pursued by Charcot and his pupils through an intersectional feminist lens.
A composite of present-day virtual reality, proto-VR technologies, i.e., Victorian-era pre-cinematic immersive entertainments such as panoramas, stereographs, and shadowgraphs, reclaimed historical images from Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière and other 19th century medical texts (now part of the public domain), and live-action material generated in the present day, the piece explores and re-imagines the hysterical woman in the history of art and medicine. By removing images of the hysterical woman from their individual frames and placing them together inside a new frame that is large enough to contain the spectator but stripped of the visual and historical hierarchies that remind the spectator of where they stand, Methods of Treatment Peculiar to Women disrupts the conventional relationship between viewer and frame, artist and subject, doctor and patient, and forces an encounter with the limits of the body, vision, and agency.
Please view in Firefox or on a VR headset
Hysteria has a unique visual history with a key moment taking place in 19th century Paris, during neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s tenure at La Salpetrière Hospital. Known as the “Napoleon of Neuroses,” Charcot researched hysteria using theatrical and ethically questionable methods, experimenting on women patients with hypnosis and a range of technologies including electricity and acoustical stimulation. He, along with artists of the time, documented his “research” through art: photographs, drawings, paintings, and sculptures. Charcot inspired the work of Sigmund Freud and Pierre Janet, shaping modern psychiatry today. Methods of Treatment Peculiar to Women (working title) is a hybrid live action/animated VR 360° experience that explores 19th century understandings and representations of hysteria, specifically the line of inquiry pursued by Charcot and his pupils through an intersectional feminist lens.
A composite of present-day virtual reality, proto-VR technologies, i.e., Victorian-era pre-cinematic immersive entertainments such as panoramas, stereographs, and shadowgraphs, reclaimed historical images from Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière and other 19th century medical texts (now part of the public domain), and live-action material generated in the present day, the piece explores and re-imagines the hysterical woman in the history of art and medicine. By removing images of the hysterical woman from their individual frames and placing them together inside a new frame that is large enough to contain the spectator but stripped of the visual and historical hierarchies that remind the spectator of where they stand, Methods of Treatment Peculiar to Women disrupts the conventional relationship between viewer and frame, artist and subject, doctor and patient, and forces an encounter with the limits of the body, vision, and agency.
Please view in Firefox or on a VR headset