ART AS A BEHAVIORAL LABORATORY
Tatiana Gerasimenok: The human psyche is a highly complex yet extremely unstable system.
80–90% of the psyche is the Shadow, where everything unexamined, repressed, instinctive, and suppressed resides. This vast, hidden ocean is barely contained by the thin cortex of consciousness.
When culture and society demand an ideal, sterile facade, the individual is forced to suppress their inner darkness into the subconscious, focusing solely on the social mask. “Positive thinking” merely obscures the issues, turning this mask into an illusion of well-being. It is precisely this total rift between the facade and the hidden, unexamined ocean of the subconscious that creates a critical vulnerability.
If left unintegrated, the Shadow acts like a pressure cooker: mental tension escalates, control fractures, and suppressed energy erupts into uncontrolled aggression and cruelty. Worse still, individuals begin to project their own unconscious vices onto others, perceiving enemies in neighbors, other nations, or social groups. Violence becomes legitimized in their minds, morphing into a “righteous crusade against evil,” which historically culminates in wars, witch-hunts, and mass psychosis.
My tools are conceptual art and cognitive analysis, operating as a three-stage cognitive feedback loop. Empirical data from individual consultations serves as the primary source to uncover hidden triggers and Shadow patterns. I then replicate these dynamics through interdisciplinary performances, subsequently analyzing the public’s psychological and brain responses to treat the artwork as a behavioral laboratory.
Through this process, I investigate the dark side of human nature to uncover mechanisms for Shadow integration. My ultimate goal is the optimization of social processes and risk minimization through the conversion of latent destructive impulses into a conscious and manageable resource that ensures systemic stability for Qualitative Acceleration (q/acc), where chaotic human volatility is smelted into the pure, uninterrupted energy of cognitive evolution.