Eureka Talk_23 Part 3
past to present. a culmination
This is the final part of the talk I gave at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts on November 18. For the doctoral defense, one is required to give a 45 minute talk followed by questions from the committee and the audience. And answers from me.
I now have a doctorate in Artistic Research from the Fine Art Department at the Oslo National Academy of Arts (!). I started in late 2021 and feel so fortunate to have had this opportunity and experience. Many of you been following this process over these years and I’ve been inspired & heartened knowing that you are out there, reading along this adventure with me.
In addition to the exhibition and defense talk, the doctorate required what the institution describes as a “written reflection,” which does not have to be a traditional academic dissertation. If you would like to read that part of my project I’m happy to share a link (it’s too long for this format).
I divided the talk into three parts and have been sharing them over the last days of this year. I’m posting it here so it can exist outside the realms of hard drives or the library. At the end of this section there are a whole bunch of thank yous and to that list I hereby add you, dear readers.
EUREKA TALK PART 3
SLIDE: HISTORICAL BALLOON AND LAUNCH (2 images)
How did these balloons come to exist?
Let’s go back and imagine ourselves about 250 years ago, in Paris.
In the late 1700s, wealthy French paper manufacturers began creating large paper balloons, filling them with hot air, and sending them up into the sky. These unmanned flights were scientific experiments and mass entertainment. In 1783, tens of thousands of Parisians of all classes came to see one launch. The colorful balloon drifted away, out of sight.
SLIDE OF GONESSE CRASH
But no one had thought to inform the villages around Paris that a large object might float down in their fields. The arrival of the balloon so terrified people in Gonesse that they used guns, pitchforks, and dogs to attack and destroy the terrifying orb that had descended from the sky.
Not long after these first launches, people started putting animals in baskets and sending them up, followed soon by men who were both daredevils and quasi data collectors.
SLIDE: BALLOON PRESS AND CROWDS AND CRASHES
These gravity-defying men were rockstars of their time. These daring aeronauts reported new perspectives on the sun, clouds, atmospheres, winds, storms, and the earth below. Many of these balloon flights ended in disastrous crashes: whatever the case, they all got huge amounts of press. The image of the balloon was reproduced and circulated in the marketplace as hats, dresses, fans, wallpaper, and any other kind of merch you can think of.
But the “balloonomania” in Europe soon ended. Despite a lot of effort, the balloon’s flight could not be harnessed or controlled. As a flying machine, the balloon was neither practical nor useful.
SLIDE: FIRST PAGES OF BLANCHARD’S BOOK
But the first balloon flight in the United States in 1793 had a different kind of resonance.
As an artist, I know how important it is to speak from where I stand. The responsibility I take in making creative work means I have to contend with my subjectivity and the context where I come from.
In researching the stratosphere, I approached a space I needed to hold in relation with another space once designated as “inaccessible.” The landscape of North America.
SLIDE: A Landing (show still no words)
The burden of the United States is heavy. It is the country to which my relatives immigrated from Europe at the turn of the 20th century, and in which I was born and raised. I grew up in a part of the United States that was settled in the late 1700s, when the newly formed U.S. government took the land from Indigenous people and gave it to Whites to move in and claim as their own.
This happened as balloon technology was flourishing in Europe and when the first flights in the United States were beginning. An aerial view of American landscapes offered yet another perspective to support the idea of vast, unfolding lands to be conquered, farmed, and settled. While not a direct cause, an increase in politically motivated and vigilante violence, and brutal displacement of Indigenous people followed the arrival of balloons in the United States.
Eureka is not only an academic project but a personal one. The rural Midwestern town where I was raised and innocently launched my escapist childhood balloons was founded because of the decimation of an Indigenous people. It is not only intellectual investment that fuels the work I do, but a sense of responsibility to critically examine the place I come from.
SLIDE: A Landing: show still of launch drone footage
The film “A Landing” appears to tell the story of a “heroic” journey by the famous French aeronaut Jean-Pierre Blanchard. Blanchard’s balloon flight, in 1793, was the first in the new United States. His launch from Philadelphia was attended by tens of thousands, including President George Washington and all the founders of the nation.
SLIDE A Landing: show short excerpt from middle or selected stills (1:20)
Blanchard flies 14 miles and crash-lands in New Jersey. He doesn’t speak English. The foreigner, his foreign object, and local inhabitant misapprehend each another. The letter he carries from the President is useless until a reader is found. Blanchard returns to Philadelphia, a hero.
SLIDE: A Landing: SHOW MALL SHOT FROM DRONE
The landscape Blanchard saw from his balloon had already been occupied before he began his short journey. Now it is further occupied by the massive box store Walmart, which nearly backs up onto an ancient tree called The Clement Oak, where Blanchard landed. This tree, damaged from climate change, is a living witness to the past 500 years of history in this place.
In my film, I use drone video to approximate Blanchard’s flight. The video lifts off from a government-protected historical landmark in Philadelphia and surveils the city and what little is left of a winding river between suburban sprawl, a highway, and a mall. But the film doesn’t stop there. The beginning and end of A Landing are shot in 16mm film.
SLIDE: A Landing SHOW TREE WITH CAPTION
Encounter is a term I use often in my writing, and it plays a significant, affective role in my work. In A Landing, I encounter the Clement Oak. I project onto it my sadness and grief at its broken limbs and my admiration at its resilience. I bring to it my desire for connection; the tree sits impassively.
SLIDE: SHOW BALLOON ON FENCE
The story of Blanchard ends. I remain, standing with my flawed instrument, the Bolex 16mm film camera. Even as I try to bring the Clement Oak closer by using a nostalgic medium, the tree pushes me out of poetic identification. This is a productive friction. At the end of A Landing, my camera and body stand in relation to this contradiction, this discomfort, between a half-alive tree and a big-box store filled with the endless global flow of cheap goods encroaching on a landmarked space protected as “natural.”
SLIDE: SHOW 16mm NO CAPTION END
Following geographer Doreen Massey, I might say that Walmart designates this land as flat space, a globalized space-in-time. The tree stands as a marker of place, situated in history and in the present. In A Landing, I misapprehend the tree, and despite my insistent efforts I cannot absorb its poetry and majesty nor can I project myself into its experience. I also can’t ignore the mall looming behind me. Here, misapprehension can offer a productive, political potential.
Here there is an opportunity to, as Massey writes, “forge a different relation...a way of understanding which, in the end, [does] not try to seal a place up into one neat and tidy ‘envelope of space-time’ but which [recognizes] that what has come together, in this place, is a conjunction of many histories and many spaces.”
The space of Walmart and the place of the tree with me in between them are held in relation. This is where I locate my research, with A Landing as one instance of this “way of understanding.”
SLIDE: SHOW LIGHT LEAK END IMAGE
Here in this joined space and place, I imagine, and I make images. A Landing ends with an image from my reluctant departure, my camera-eye casting a glance backwards one last time before the film roll runs out. These last light leak frames offer imaginative openings.
SLIDE: IMAGE OF STUDIO OR OF DESK
I spent the third year of the research bringing the work together. Transforming photographs into films, finishing animations, connecting images and sounds.
And I spent a lot of time considering form. Should I combine my material into a single-channel film for projection, or let the works live spatially? In the end, I decided a spatial installation was the right form.
I didn’t want to reduce the films to a single-channel narrative and didn’t think that a unitary start and end would be the most productive way to express the complex relationships among the works.
SLIDE OF TWO INSTALL SHOTS SPATIAL TWO WORKS IN EACH
Instead, I wanted to offer a physical field in which a viewer might move, reflect and return. Where they could see things at the same time and acknowledge their partial status. I wanted to use the exhibition to further support my method of holding in relation.
In my research, criticality emerges in different places. It lives in the background of the visual artworks and refracts through the written reflection. These visual and written elements coexist. My works are not meant to complete each other. Instead, I ask you, as reader and viewer, to reflect with me on their entanglements. Doing this work together enables the fullness of the research results to emerge.
SLIDE: BEYOND PLACE OPENING LOGS
Before starting the PhD I had already begun publishing my writing on an online platform called Substack. When I started the program I thought this would be a useful place to reflect—in real time--on the research process. So far, I’ve published about 125 texts. These are public and they’re distributed via email to subscribers. It’s free to subscribe.
SLIDE: BEYOND PLACE TOC
For my results, I chose 32 and organized them into five categories. Within each category, the texts are presented chronologically, so while you read them, time jumps around: one aspect of the project returns, changed; in another, methods and materials loop and reveal new facets of the research.
SLIDE: BEYOND PLACE LOGGING PAGE, MARITIME LOG and COVER OF POE LOG
I describe these writings as logs, not essays, for a few reasons. First, because logging footage is an important part of making films. Logging is when you review all the footage you shot and take notes on it, to get to know the material before you start editing.
The second reason is because a log is a record of experience, a measurement tool that sailors used to mark the passage of a ship through the water. Early logs were made of small pieces of wood attached to rope. Logs looked objective, but were constructed, handled and interpreted by the people who used them.
The third reason I call these logs is because of a book that has been important in my research, The Poe Log. This giant book gathers documents, letters, legal records, and newspaper reports by and about Edgar Allan Poe. It both enriches and obscures understanding of an author whose writing affected generations of readers. Though it looks definitive, The Poe Log doesn’t put the puzzle pieces together. It is a record of scraps around a brief life that can never be fully understood.
SLIDE: BEYOND PLACE LOGS
My logs elaborate, unfold, refer to, and expand my research. They are records of experience, thought and materials, imaginative projection and embodied knowledge; ways of unpacking and sharing the complexity of the artistic research process.
SLIDE: BEYOND PLACE LOG OF TOMAS MIS INTERVIEW
One example offers a story of an interview I did with a young scientist at the Esrange Space Center, Dr. Tomas Mis.
Tomas was uncomfortable being on camera but happy to do an audio interview. I edited our conversation from 90 minutes down to a 12-minute piece that I showed in my midterm. I didn’t show this in the final exhibition.
In the logs, I present a transcript with images, captions and context. This elaborates my research and retains it as an active element of the work. Things that might be stored in a hard drive or hidden in a notebook become artistic results in their own right.
Tomas, like many others, described the stratosphere as a dark, cold void. This space was full of potential data to be used or examined. While scientists described the stratosphere as having a certain kind of agency, in the form of self-repair and movement, much of their work was about accessing it for information.
Whether that information was used for progressive, environmental causes or nefarious military or surveillance ones was never discussed. The scientists claimed to be working in a pure zone of data-gathering. In the logs, I could contextualize and question these positions by including my commentary, reflection, and images.
SLIDE: LOGS OF ARTISTS, ANDREW JACKSON
Other logs describe in detail many artists and writers who have inspired me throughout my research process. Filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky, Agnès Varda or Trinh T. Minh-ha, visual artists like Rembrandt, Roni Horn and Lygia Clark, writers like the poet Susan Howe or essayist Lydia Davis, are held in relation together with discussions about materials, notes from interviews with chemists, books about 16th century scientific arguments, historical research about the violent regime of President Andrew Jackson, and absurd phone calls with businessmen selling solar reflective material.
SLIDE: RONI HORN AND AGNES VARDA
I do not prioritize one kind of text over another in Eureka. These textual connections offer an equitable approach. The logs work together to open a field in which I engage artistic research.
One might consider the artist as aeronaut, flying freely over fields and cities. In the logs, I write a lot about wanting to be up in the sky, soaring above it all, following currents and looking out and around. It sure would be nice to get off this planet for a while. As a non-expert, an artist might enjoy the privilege of traveling in and out of expert spaces of science, literature, history, even materials. She might be standing in her floaty basket, gathering data or escaping into the sublime. In truth, there were many times in the research process when I did dream about being aloft. But ultimately, the aeronaut, to me, is a character, a figure, a prop.
SLIDE: ESRANGE BALLOON
A more compelling consideration, in my view, is the artist as author who is standing right here on the ground in the same space as you. It is a literary position, in a way, a position that presses against constraint by using imagination. In this terrestrial spot, I imagine myself up as a balloon, popping from the force of physics, or as a complicated experiment beaming broken signals down.
I imagine being a person in a crowded square standing on tiptoes to see the balloon take off, or being the pigeon tossed out of the basket to see if it could manage, or a scientific gondola landing in a swamp, or a cloud forming, or just a handmade box, tied to a string and sent up to see what might happen.
In the research, I do not imagine myself as the stratosphere. As best I can, I try and sit with that space as autonomous, affected by earth but not beholden to it, a powerful space operating on its own terms. The stratosphere resists correspondence. It does not send a letter back.
SLIDE: LAST IMAGES OF LETTER
I imagine the artist as earthbound, projecting, longing to reach an inaccessible and autonomous field. In this position, I have to acknowledge misapprehension and to recognize my desire for answers; to impose clarity, categories, and closure. My film Letter, set in spatial relation to the other works in the show, articulates that vulnerability and recognition. It’s no coincidence that Letter is the most personal work in the project.
SLIDES: LAST IMAGES: ONE AT A TIME
These are the final images from each of the pieces I presented in my exhibition:
Letter: “letter arrived.” (above)
Airopaidia end “The End” or color field that moves past language.
The Wonder end “sky”
Landing “tree”
Lumière
Bexus: “rock” and “landscape” and leave that one up there.
SLIDE: EXPERIMENTS DUAL SCREEN IMAGE
and Experiments.
The last image of each visual work is of something that resists closure. A rock and a distant landscape, a blurry sky, a watery color field, a half-destroyed tree, a letter that says it’s arrived but doesn’t, an image with squiggly lines made by a plastic box. These endings arrive after the films take you on a journey involving encounters, expectations, misapprehension, and imagination.
These endings ask you to sit with what otherwise might be considered inconclusive, and to consider what boxes; what narratives you may have brought to the encounter. And what stories you might want to return to or tell in a different way as a result of the experience.
SLIDE: VIDEO OF OTHER BALLOON (BIG ONE WHITE) TAKING OFF in this time of reading
In 1924, American poet William Carlos Williams published a book of essays called “In the American Grain.” In it, he offers a complex and pointed way of understanding histories of the discovery and development of “The Americas.” Williams uses prose, vivid description, close readings, and imaginative projection to create a uniquely poetic and political work. Writing about his intent and process, he says:
“In these studies I have sought to re-name the things seen, now lost in chaos of borrowed titles ... under which the true character lies hid. In letters, in journals, reports of happenings I have recognized new contours suggested by old words... it has been my wish to draw from every source one thing, the strange phosphorous of the life, nameless under an old misappellation.”
In investigating historical and contemporary narratives about the space of the upper atmospheres, I fling my imagination outward yet remain on earth. I activate the experiential encounters, experiments, and scraps I gather. I construct narratives that strive to hold pieces in relation. The resolution resists flattening. It appears in the relationships among the artistic results.
My approach aspires to knit together considerations among the arts, humanities, and sciences. I believe this commitment can provide ways of working in an interdisciplinary mode while respecting the integrity and materiality of artistic research.
SLIDE: SHOW IMAGE OF DESK WITH THANK YOU FROM AN
Before I close, I want to offer a few more words of thanks. First, thank you to my family, whose support made this whole endeavor conceivable and whose love sustained me all the way. To my dear friends and colleagues whose care has been incalculable. To my supervisors and research leader, Saskia Holmkvist, Alejandro Cesarco, Maryam Jafri, and Jan Verwoert, whose guidance energized my path. To the committee, for their patience and close attention to my project. To Rom for kunst og arkitektur and Atelier Nord for space to exhibit my work for the midterm and the final. And to the Kunstakademiet and everyone at KHiO for giving me the opportunity to do my doctorate in a place that has been absolutely the right fit. There are many others to thank, of course, and I thank you all.
This program allowed me space, time, challenge, and support to inquire deeply into realms of creative and intellectual production. The richness and complexity of Eureka could not have come into being without this institution.
My future research will continue looking closely at what I am now calling “resistant atmospheres.” I look forward to sharing results with the community that has been so valuable in my development as an artist-researcher.
SLIDE: CORRESPONDENCE LOG
I have often thought of the many balloons with notes attached that I let fly during my childhood in a small town in the southwest corner of Ohio. Only once did I open the mailbox and find a letter back. It was from an elderly couple, farmers who lived almost 350 kilometers away. They found my shredded balloon and its taped-up letter in their cornfield. We corresponded for a long time.
Here at KHiO, I have been grateful to connect with colleagues, friends, support, inspiration, and research opportunities. I’m so happy to have had these years of correspondence with you.
Thank you.
END OF PART 3
Flowers received, snacks devoured, and hugs given & received.
Eventually they’ll send me a diploma.
Wishing you all a happy new year, and thanks, as always, for reading.
P.S. If you want to see some of these works in real life, you can visit my exhibition The Wonder at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue (between 34th and 35th Streets), NYC. The exhibition runs through March 6, 2026.
Upcoming events at the gallery as part of the exhibition:
Feb 3, time TBD. Launch of Issue 16 of The Hoosac Institute Journal.
Feb 11, 4pm. Screening of 16mm print of the film Happy are the Happy, directed by Sarah Jane Lapp and Jenny Perlin, (b/w, sound, 18:00, 1999). Q&A with co-directors.
Feb 24, 6:30pm. Screening of BUNKER. (HD, color, sound, 92 minutes, 2022). Q&A with director Jenny Perlin.
Wow! The eclectic experiences are inspiring. Thank you for sharing.