Digital Art Therapy

Material, Methods, and Applications

Rick Garner

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784501600
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Considering the latest advances and developments in the arena of digital media, this book explores current materials, methods and applications of digital technology in art therapy.

It looks thoroughly at the many potential uses and benefits of digital technology in art therapy practice, including the use of stop motion animation and therapeutic light painting photography. A worked example of how digital art therapy can be used in the treatment of traumatic brain injury is also included. The book explores innovative therapeutic uses of digital technologies such as gaming and virtual worlds. Contributions from experienced art therapists address professional and ethical issues, from the sensory qualities of digital media and their effects in practice, to identifying and using developmentally appropriate technologies. As art therapy programs increasingly recognize the importance of using digital media, this cutting-edge guide provides all the necessary knowledge to incorporate this emerging field into practice.

Part 1

Considerations for
Digital Technologies
in Art Therapy

Chapter 1

Grid + Pattern

The Sensory Qualities of Digital Media

Natalie Rae Carlton1

It was thrilling when I got my first cassette deck with recording level dials and backlit arrow buttons that indicated the movement of the tape forward, backwards, or stopped. On blank Maxell cassettes I recorded my best Kermit the Frog voice as I pretend-interviewed my sister, friends, and cats. Elaborate music mixes, voice dialogues, and on-the-scene news accounts of “Humpty Dumpty Takes his Big Fall” were some imaginal spaces enacted into form by the humble tape machine and child operator. I deeply loved the sounds of life playing back through speakers or in my headphones and the technology engaged me as much as my beloved three-speed bike. The recordings were moments of time captured and voices and sounds mixed through multiple “takes” recorded over one another for an excellent amorphous cacophony of overdub bleeds. Fast-forward from the analogue technology play of my childhood afternoons in 1976 to 2015 and I am still accessing a machine to materialize creativity, contemplate, and synthesize narratives in the world around me, and engage my spectrum of chaotic to ordered sensory drives. Rather than the battery-operated tape technology of before, I am employing a 13-inch MacBook Pro and its digital conduits and modern detachable electrical cord to charge my reflective and creative act of writing this essay. “Form shapes thought” (McNiff 2014, p.92) but machines and media do not create the work themselves without active participants (Austin 2009). Essentially I drive my creativity through whatever choices of materials I employ.

The media of our work and play do transmit meaning in their physical manifestations because the aesthetic features of things inform the messages we mean to convey (McLuhan 1966). The visual, aural, and tactile qualities of technological artifacts from yesteryear and the digitized, computer-mediated machines of our modern era all share great appeal. Their ‘inner workings’ drive operations, channel and capture energies, and form their own distinctive outputs or dissemination while their ‘outer skin’ elements invite manipulations of seeing, listening, and touching sensory states. Moreover, we are not simply remediating previous tools for newer ones when we upgrade from tape cassettes to laptop computers but, in fact, we are taking apart and putting back together the very foundations of social culture, visual and aural languages, and communication dissemination networks. There has always been an ongoing future with technology unseen and unfolding and it seems important to assume curiosity, responsibility, and awareness for our greater immersions with it.

Some characterizations of computer communications and related device “overuse” depict media effects as de-evolving humankind into overly rational, socially inept, and “Asperger-like” states of being. Mass media have popularly shown computers, and the people who run them, to revere reason and eschew emotion. However, it was only through the tenacity, reasoning, and “otherworldly” intelligence of such characters as Dr. Spock from Star Trek, or the wise and careful being who is not home with earthlings or his Vulcan race, that our human existence was protected to prosper in fiction. In literature and film, technology has been imagined as saving humankind from its own excesses, shortsightedness, and idiocracies whereas other versions predict a bleak future of mechanized, apocalyptic worlds inhabited by cyborgs or machine-fused humans. “Some of the greatest fears and highest hopes are aroused by visions of a thoroughly computerized future” (Binkley 1997, p.116) because many of us are experiencing growing symbiosis with evolving technologies through more daily ubiquity with computers in our work, leisure, and relational lives. Our stories about technology are both fact and fiction and they illustrate and predict vital spectrums between the qualities of “deadness” to opportunity within the complexities of digitally mediated spaces and tools.

Our computer-reorganized communication and interactive spaces have inherently changed us due to interactions with and incorporations of the new media. One overall effect for the newly initiated, casual to savvy, or over-saturated user is that digital media technologies have shifted value to the representational over real objects of reference and experience (Lapenta 2011, p.15). This transfer of physical realism for perceptual approximations is often defined as virtual reality. To complicate this discussion, digital media were not the first mediums to excite, manipulate, or approximate real objects in virtual perceptual fields. Art historians have cited overlaid cave drawings animated with firelight, early film and photography, and drawing machines used by 18th-century artists as some origins of virtual experience (Garcia 2014). Garcia discussed how “virtuality” has a long history in human experience and remains inherent to our abilities to depict a variety of 3D, real-world forms and experiences through techniques of representational imagery and form originated and dynamically crafted on 2D surfaces. Modernizing digital media have similarly isolated and separated physical and visual inputs through our interactions with flat-screen surface technologies approximating our greater physical and 3D worlds. For the casual observer of constant “upgrades” in materials and perceptual to organizational shifts, it may be a challenge to comprehend how computer media are fusing and impacting physical world sensory experiences with digital ones.

Sensory qualities of digital media

My interest for digital media use in art therapy has grown from lived experiences with computer technology and my dissertation research, or, its current uses with art therapists and clients (Carlton 2015). Creative experiences with computer-mediated materials have included my imaginative explorations and sensual employment of their dynamic and varied tools and processes (see Color plate 1). Moreover, I have witnessed how computer technologies and related software development have invigorated new languages, tools, networks, and meanings into things that respond in novel ways to the circumstances around and between us (Lòpez 2012). Within this chapter, I will ask questions that have emerged when material to digital boundaries are crossed or integrated. Namely, are we actively or passively shaping our physical to virtual, or tangible to ‘realish’, experiences? What happens to our benefit or detriment when we reach across virtual to material and material back to virtual new ecologies? How will we track, describe, and adapt within the sensory qualities digital media afford us?

There has been increasing openness and curiosity amongst art therapists to note and ask how future generations and evolutions of change with technology will impact society at large (Alders and Allen 2010; Alders et al. 2011; Austin 2009; Cohen, Johnson, and Orr 2015; Moon 2010; Mosinski et al. 2012; Orr 2010b, 2012). Art therapy authors have discussed how digital savvy youth and adults are evidencing group cultural upheavals within new forms of identity, creativity, and communication through computer platforms while simultaneously developing future life skills in their applied learning and adaptive interactions with it (Austin 2010; Choe 2014; Ehinger 2009, 2015; Mosinski 2010; Tilberg 2014). Details regarding digital media, as the medium or conduit of information and imagery in our modern day Internet, and how it makes use of invisible forces to shape our thoughts, behaviors, and emotions have also been noted and queried (Carlton 2014; Kapitan 2009; Orr 2010b). Art therapists have also asked how the intimate elements of our creativity, work, and social identities shared on the Internet can be shaped consciously alongside identity privacy and the complexities of relational boundaries in cyberspace (Belkofer and McNutt 2011; Miller et al. 2015). As a field, we have contemplated the constant flux of evolving professional ethics, determined ongoing best practices for therapists using digital media, and witnessed gaps in generational perspectives of computer and Internet users struggling to shape and determine an unfathomable future with technology (Miller et al. 2015). In recent years, ethics, privacy, and informed consent have created vital dialogue and research topics in art therapy related to the safe and confidential use of digital media on Internet platforms and in virtual communities (Alders and Allen 2010; Alders et al. 2011; Choe 2014; Belkofer and McNutt 2011; Miller et al. 2015; Mosinski et al. 2012; Orr 2010a). A critical layer that has received attention but little written discussion or research is questions as to whether digital media sensory qualities exist at all. While several art therapists cited above have discerned differing attributes to its positive materiality for clients, some clinicians have deemed the media choices of computers, iPads, cell phones, and related software as lacking important therapeutic qualities of touch. I would like to counter these conclusions with a few questions. Is not the base nature of touch an experience of sensory, interactive, or spatial feedback? Do not these digital media materials provide both haptic immediacy to more abstract biochemical and behavioral response experiences within and around their screens, software, and hardware? Are some persons transgressing nuanced boundaries to reach in, touch, and be affected by computer matrixes and pixels while others are not?

As an artist researcher rather than a technological expert or programmer, I have viewed the materials of computer technology in sampled contexts to bring them “closer to my eye,” juxtapose incongruent comparisons, and distill their critical and sensual components into a disparate whole. I am experimenting and collaboratively witnessing these materials with interested colleagues and students because those of us using these media have become key advocates for their interactivity and malleability in art therapy palettes (Carlton et al. 2016). Dustin Yu (2016), an alumnus of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) art therapy graduate program, described the following from his thesis research on digital video editing:

Via our hands, we are able to feel the keys through our fingertips, which are one of our most sensitive areas according to the concept of the cortical homunculus. As we type, we create a symphony of sounds and rhythm in our synchronized and coordinated tapping. As we type, we feel the “bump” of the F and J key ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 Considerations for Digital Technologies in Art Therapy
• Part 2 Current Applications of Digital Technologies in Art Therapy
• Part 3 Emerging Digital Technologies as Therapeutic Interventions
• Contributors
• Plates
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright
• Of Related Interest
• Endorsements