Online Art Therapy: Reimagining Body, Place, Object and Relations in the Digital Era

Online art therapy, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, has challenged the existing art therapy paradigm, reshaping all aspects of how art therapists work, including the ways to connect with clients, work with art, and make space for therapy session. This thesis provides a theoretical framework for navigating these challenges, examining the reciprocal process in which technology shapes us as much as we shape it. In the era of rapid digitalisation and AI advancement, I explore the reconceptualisation of the body, place, object, and relationships in art therapy to better understand this emerging way of working. This research adopts a post-humanist lens, viewing the human-technology interaction as a dynamic network, which made this study multidisciplinary in nature. I draw from art therapy and psychodynamics theory, as well as phenomenology, humanistic geography, anthropology, psychology, and visual art theory. Bricoleur approach and digital ethnographic methods were employed for data collection. The 'cyborg' metaphor is used to understand the intra-twining (Barad, 2007) between the coupling of art therapist and technologies at conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious levels. My fieldwork first investigates how art therapists develop ability to ‘think with’ the technology, then explore how this 'cyborg body' moves, such as viewing an artwork online, which subsequently unveils a new mode of bodily-based verbal and non-verbal communication specific to a digitally mediated environment. I name this process 'digital muscles'. Moreover, findings from this study led to an expansion of the triangular relationship between the client, the art therapist, and the artwork (Schaverien, 2000), I have incorporated four new elements into the formulation, including: 1) digital object; 2) phenomenological existence; 3) corporeal existence; and 4) spatial element. This has created a three-dimensional, octahedron-shaped diagram representing the 'digital skeleton'—a theoretical scaffold for art therapists navigating the complex layers of working online. The 'digital musculoskeletal system' proposed in this thesis serves as a framework to aid art therapists in exploring the nuances of how digital technology impacts the therapeutic relationship. This study concludes with future implications of the theory, and suggestions for developing art therapists’ digital literacy. As the line between human and digital objects is increasingly blurred, what are we becoming? And where are we going? This research is an exploration to make sense of, and find grounding in, this rapidly evolving digital era

Editorial

What stands out in the articles in this issue, for us, is the depth of thinking.  Thinking is sorely needed at a time when neo-liberalist agendas push the art therapy profession further and further into a realm which favours simplistic methods and narrow goals, where the subversive, anarchic aspects of art, and the freedom involved in bringing ‘whatever’ into open-ended therapeutic relationships, is seen as a luxury of the past, even perhaps, as transgressive. There is a split between theory and practice involved here and we need to start thinking of theory making itself as a practice and to recognise that all that we say and do is inseparable from it, and is political. This understanding is behind the papers published in this issue

Art Therapy Large Group

We, the conference organisers, hoped the provision of an Art Therapy Large Group (ATLG) for the conference on each of the three days, would give delegates the opportunity to explore, through the use of art, performance and dialogue, their experiences of the conference and the dynamics that arise in a large group. We had run an ATLG at our first art therapy conference (Finding a voice, making your mark: defining art therapy for the 21st century) in 2013, and hoped there might be some continuity between the first and second ATLG, a development of the dialogue of word, performance and image through time