My research focuses on failure and its effects. How can detritus, fragments, drift, contingency, and misrecognition be generative of artistic results? While failure is not the subject of the work, I engage with the idea through concept and method. Through my artistic research I explore how failure might function as a productive creative force.
I am a visual artist working primarily in film. However, my research is interdisciplinary and draws on investigations into literature, history, and scientific fields. As methods, I utilize drift, play, imagination, storytelling and projection in the research process.
The project focuses on literary and historical attempts to escape the surface of the earth together with contemporary ways of trying to decode the upper reaches of our atmosphere, an uncontrollable space without clear boundaries or borders. The project’s ideas are bookended by two texts written by the 19th century American author Edgar Allan Poe. The first is a short story imagining the possibility of a balloon flight to the moon and the second is a scientific and literary essay called “Eureka” in which he claimed to have discovered the origins of the universe.
To do this work, I am exploring representations of balloon flight in the late 18th and early 19th century and contemporary scientific understanding of the stratosphere and stratospheric balloons. This research connects not only with issues of escape, mapping, and surveillance but also with climate change and its catastrophic effects. In addition to reading primary sources and conducting interviews with scientists and engineers, I am working with texts from the history of science, anthropology, and poetry.
In the project I use 16mm film, hand-drawn animation and analog photographic techniques in parallel with documentary video and non-fiction writing. The research and the creative work continually inform and affect one another. The work is being created in several locations outside the studio, including the site of the first balloon flight in the United States and the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden. The result of the research will be a moving image installation, photographs, and a series of essays.
Jenny Perlin makes 16mm films, videos, and animations. Her films work with and against the documentary tradition, incorporating innovative stylistic techniques to emphasize issues of truth, misunderstanding, and personal history. Her projects look closely at ways in which social machinations are reflected in the fragments of daily life. Perlin is a PhD candidate at the National Academy of Art in Oslo. In addition to her work as an artist and educator, Perlin is director of The Hoosac Institute, a platform for text and image focusing on pieces that don’t fit conventional disciplinary narratives.
Everything went wrong. It all felt kind of jammed together. Like trying to hammer a piece of porcelain to a wooden board. Slow cracking, then it falls into shards and dust.
Then I remembered where I had launched from and allowed myself to drift along the atmospheric river. Looking up and out.
Eureka is an artistic research project exploring failure and its effects. I want to know how failure might be a productive force that holds potential as a generative source of creative results. The artistic work has two interrelated components, one historical, the other, contemporary. The first is about literary and historical attempts to escape the surface of the earth in a balloon. The second is an investigation into contemporary ways of trying to decode, comprehend, and engage with the stratosphere, an uncontrollable space without clear boundaries or borders.
In my first year I took time to contend with and assess the problematic ground on which I was standing. I looked at historical representations of ballooning and the ways a new technology was represented in relation to power, visuality, and fantasy.
My second year of the PhD has seen a turn to learning and investigating the stratosphere itself. I wanted to explore creatively how the stratosphere might be communicating, and how one cannot ever fully discern what this space might tell. A register of absences, of missed signals, of fragmentary information. Over the course of the year I interviewed numerous scientists, shot 16mm film and made pinhole photograms, conducted interviews and filmed balloon launches at the Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden. And I launched my own experiments to the stratosphere.
I’m letting the fragments, misapprehensions, disorientations and incomplete pieces become part of the work. I’m embracing aspects of failure as a methodology and practice. Other methods I use are play, drift, conversation and storytelling. I move between analog and digital forms with reasons both known and felt. It is my hope that the gaps allow the viewer to enter in.
I’m learning how to gather up the broken bits, to sit with the glitched data. No need for repair or completeness, only holding in relation. Learning to accept what’s come back.