Talk
Artistic Research Lecture: Jenny Perlin / Eureka
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.
Eureka relates literary, scientific, and historical narratives from the 19th century to contemporary issues about stratospheric space, specifically, the use and development of stratospheric balloons. My research utilizes moving image media, drawing, photography, and writing to explore the rise of stratospheric balloons in scientific research, military surveillance, and tourism.
My prior projects explored connections between subterranean landscapes, analog materials, and literary and political histories of the United States. In the current project I further develop research on how narratives of the stratosphere seem to parallel the ways subterranean spaces have been described, approached, and mined. Much like the commercial rockets being used to bring billionaires to space for momentary thrills, stratospheric balloon tourism is a new way for wealthy people to partake in unique experiences. Stratospheric balloons are also used for domestic and international espionage and for deeply engaged scientific studies about climate change and the weather. In this talk I will present and contextualize my recent film-, video-, and writings-in-progress related to the research of the past year.
Bio: 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’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and film festivals, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Rotterdam Film Festival, and others.
Since January 2022, she is a Phd Fellow in Fine Art at KHiO, Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
This lecture is a part of the Academy of Fine Arts public program, the full program can be seen here.