Because ‘low theory never needs to dispense with high theory, it merely takes up a different relation to it’.
– ‘The Queer Art of Failure’ Jack Halberstam

DIRT TIME: 9.Theorem 7.Debacle is a collage-video work, emerging from a two-week residency undertaken by Gillian Wylde at Videotage. As a ‘copy in motion’ the video embraces the out of focus and the ineffectual. As Hito Steyerl notes in her essay ‘In Defence of the Poor Image’;

‘The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution”.

Throughout the residency Gillian Wylde has explored assemblage and copy culture as an expanded critical and aesthetic tactic. These tactics create a ‘reverse discourse’ or queering that attempt to unhinge ‘normative’ structures, powers of language or immutable historiographies. The video work developed during the residency assimilates mongrel foraging activities of appropriation from a variety of found and selected material including work from the archive; VMAC (Videotage Media Art Collection).

ARTIST TALK & SCREENING: 7 APRIL 2013 (SUN) 3-5pm  (This event will be conducted in English)

In this talk Gillian Wylde will discuss her art practice in detail through recorded documentation and writing. This will include some of the discourse that informs her practice and some of her approaches to making. Together with discussing work developed during her residency at Videotage, there will also be a screening of recent video works.

About the Artist
Gillian Wylde (b. 1966) is an artist and Senior Lecturer at Falmouth University (UK). She works mainly with video, performance and the appropriated to explore simple interconnections of agency within short-lived temporal frameworks. Her work responds to contexts of location, encounter and dialogue(s) and are often made within ‘unconventional’ situations or conditions and involve not so special effects. Central within this process of working are properties of the pathetic or cheapo, instances of featurelessness, nowotony and/or petty conjectures of the queer.

Critical investigations of multivalent performance activities or forms of energy (such as mechanical, electrical, or chemical energy), the body (human or animal) and material thing in relation to the video camera are constants through most of the work like maybe a savage smell or hairy logic.

Recent projects include; ‘Queer, The Space’ which was a project that ran between September 2011 and May 2012. Inspired by the work of such queer theorists as Sara Ahmed (Queer Phenomenology) it brought together artists, academics, activists, performers, and writers to engage with the questions of spatiality and orientation. And The Nabokov Project, an experiment in ‘how to do and – perhaps especially – how to teach literary criticism today’. The project sees invited practitioners from a range of disciplines respond to Nabokov’s unconventional teaching methods at Cornell University in the US. Work has also been made for Transmodern Live Art Action Festival Baltimore, Lounge Gallery London, Alytus Biennial Lithuania, Tau Art Centre Norway and CCA Gallery Glasgow.

ARTIST TALK & SCREENING: 7 APRIL 2013 (SUN) 3-5pm  (This event will be conducted in English)