Public defence: Jenny Perlin

In my artistic research project Eureka, I explore strategies, tools, and narratives often used to describe “inaccessible” or “empty” space. My particular focus in the research is the stratosphere, a layer of air that lies just above Earth's habitable atmosphere. As an artist, I ask questions about what lighter-than-air travel might have meant in the past, how the stratosphere is characterized today, what kinds of claims are made on this space, and I speculate on what, if anything, the stratosphere might be telling us here below.

In Eureka, I look at representations of balloon flight in late 18th and early 19th century Europe and the United States. I also interview contemporary scientists, engineers, and technologists about their scientific research into the stratosphere and about the balloons they use to launch their experiments into this near space region. My project draws connections between historical and literary depictions and contemporary scientific description and reflects on their effects.

Throughout Eureka, I work with storytelling, imagination, conversation, and correspondence, and use media such as 16mm film, video, animation, photography, and nonfiction writing in my research results. I engage these tools as needed, finding a balance in strategies based on movement within the project. My research results included five films and one long-exposure solargraph created in the stratosphere, together with a series of nonfiction writings entitled The Beyond Place Logs.

I am compelled by the idea of misapprehension, finding ways to explore how materials cannot hold the excess of their experience; how words and images fill to bursting and explode, letting shards and fragments fall. My creative work collects these, not with an eye to restoring, renewing, or comparing but holding in relation, in all their incomplete, imaginative pieces.

Eureka approaches the so-called “empty” space of the stratosphere to open questions about scientific meaning-making, literary and historical description, and artistic research, proposing discursive and ethical potential based in curiosity and imagination. The research points towards ways of receiving “partial” data and considers where creative processes, scientific activities, historical investigations, and unexpected results might meet.