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:

1. 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.

A recap of what’s going on here:

This is the second part of the talk I gave for my doctoral defense on November 18. As you can see from the title, it was version 23.

As part of my recent doctoral defense in Artistic Research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, I was to give a public 45 minute talk followed by questions from the committee and the audience. And answers from me.

So this is part 2. I’m posting it so it can be public and not just hidden away on a hard drive and a library archive. I’ll be posting the final part tomorrow, the last day of 2025.

EUREKA TALK PART 2

SLIDE: INSTALL EXHIBITION ENTRANCE

Here are some images of my doctoral exhibition at Atelier Nord. This space used to be a church. There are five films and one photograph in the installation. Here you can see the animation Airopaidia at the entrance, referring to an 18th-century account of a balloon flight. It invites you in with its brightly painted colors and hand-drawn moving text. The Wonder is in the corner. Here, a 21st-century balloon sits on a gravel expanse, launching when you least expect it. Experiments is on the large freestanding wall. You can’t see it when you enter, you just hear its soundtrack filling the gallery, sounds of people laughing, music, hammers, trucks, chatter, applause.

SHOW EXPERIMENTS INSTALL SHOT

When you turn the corner, it’s right there next to you.

SLIDE: INSTALL SHOTS OF A LANDING AND LETTER WITH LUMIERE

Tucked into the gallery’s former church naves are A Landing and Letter, set in more intimate spaces to sit and read the text on screen. On the back wall, where the church altar once was, is the unframed, mysterious, tiny pinhole photograph Lumiere.

So let’s look a couple of things more closely.

I’ll focus on two pieces here, EXPERIMENTS and A LANDING.

SLIDE: LOON BALLOON

During the early phases of research, I interviewed scientists busy with the stratosphere and the balloon technology developed to get there. I talked with engineers, atmospheric chemists, climate scientists, and tech entrepreneurs.

I was fascinated by stories about Google’s failed nine-year attempt to create a balloon that could stay up in the stratosphere without ever bursting and falling back to earth. Google had wanted to fill the whole stratosphere with these balloons, but never managed to make it work. The conditions up there made it impossible for the corporation to take it over. But people keep trying.

SLIDE: UNDETECTABLE EMPTY

In all my conversations and research, the stratosphere was described as dark, freezing, and uninhabitable. It’s a space with its own ecosystem, the scientists told me, and yes, it’s affected by human activity, but it’s also independent, powerful, and unpredictable. But humans need the stratosphere. It holds the ozone layer that protects Earth from solar radiation. Without the stratosphere, we’d be fried.

The scientists I interviewed talked about the stratosphere as something up there, to be used for things like weather prediction, pollution testing, climate management, surveillance, and data gathering.

SLIDE: ANOTHER UNDETECTABLE

I tried to envision this space that had been narrated as devoid of life, yet full of invisible elements and useful data. I made a series of photograms in the darkroom. Those images, called Undetectable, later became material for a film I called Letter.

Photograms are cameraless images made by placing objects on photosensitive paper and processing them in darkroom chemistry. I made these using my hands and everyday household items like salt, sugar, pepper, along with party balloons, glass slides, light bulbs, and string.

SHOW FIRST EMAILS TO AND FROM ARMELLE

At the same time, I had been reading about an EU student scientific balloon program called BEXUS at the Esrange Space Center outside Kiruna, Sweden. I thought, you know, I’m kind of a student too, let me give it a try. So, I sent an email to info@swedish space corporation and explained my project.

A week later I heard back from Armelle Frenea-Schmidt, who at the time led the program. After many conversations, Armelle invited me to travel to Esrange and conduct my research alongside the student scientists. I went first in 2022 to film a non-student launch, and in 2023, I returned to Esrange to film the students at work. I spent about 10 days each time, living on site along with the staff, team, and scientists.

The BEXUS program is competitive and requires at least two years of work before eight teams of students arrive at the space center. Once there, they work day and night to finalize their experiments, put them in boxes, and watch them launch to the stratosphere. Their boxes are sealed, protected from radiation, cold, and moisture, and as they float, they transmit data to the scientists’ computers below.

SHOW EXCERPT FROM EXPERIMENTS (SILENT)

So what are we looking at? These are some excerpts from Experiments. I’ve turned off the sound here and will describe as these excerpts play.

EXPERIMENTS is a 23-minute two-channel video projection with sound. It has a loose structure that follows the days the student teams are working. The teams come from different universities across Europe, from Switzerland to Spain to Poland and more. They design their own stickers, logos, matching sweatshirts. They spend their time finalizing their experiments, or at the space center hotel, game room or cafeteria.

When I arrived at Esrange to film, I was fascinated with the wilderness that spread out around the space center. I filmed it for hours. I was also obsessed with the scientists’ activities, not only their labor, but their groups, down time, rivalries, competitions, seriousness and play.

The video almost never shows the scientists outside. They stay in the workshop, focused on their boxes. The launches are shown on a separate video, The Wonder.

In Experiments, while you never see the launch, you see evidence of its success, through applause, and scientists jumping around happily, and on computer screens. The “star” is Armelle Frenea-Schmidt, the French rocket engineer whose job it was to guide the students through the two-year process.

The two channels of Experiments switch back and forth based roughly on time passing through the week. The second channel shows the launch pad and landscape. A landscape of romantic projection. But it is a charged and contested space. The image contains invisible geopolitical borders, ravaged forest and earth, disrupted reindeer herding tracks, misused lands, bunkers to hide in if rocket debris falls from the sky.

The changing weather around Esrange can make it impossible for the balloon to launch. If the atmosphere doesn’t “cooperate,” the scientists have to wait. Both land and sky show their quiet influence in this work.

I filmed, recorded, and edited Experiments alone. The consumer video camera I use is another box that connected me to the young scientists, who were excited to discuss lenses and sensors. My camera box translates light and sound into digital images. These images give the impression of being real, like the piece’s editing gives the impression of being a documentary.

Using this camera and being present in the space, I worked in relation with the scientists. Arriving at the site, I felt the desire to impose my artistic vision on their scientific projects. I kept telling them what they were doing “looked like art.” But this was my misapprehension. I was there doing my research; it was not useful to theirs. We were engaged in encounters, and our work lived in relation.

The way Experiments is shot and edited corresponds to a term I use in my writing, verisimilitude. It might be useful to explain it here.

SHOW SLIDE WITH THIS DEFINITION TOGETHER WITH THE REST OF VIDEO

Verisimilitude
Noun: The fact or quality of being verisimilar; the appearance of being true or real; likeness or resemblance to truth, reality, or fact; probability.

I began incorporating the term during the last phase of the research process. I’m working with it as it relates to historian of science John Tresch’s scholarship about the work of Edgar Allan Poe and what Poe called “the potent magic of verisimilitude.”

Verisimilitude is not a replacement for truthful representation; it is something else. In my use, it’s a term that allows hoax, humor, fantasy and imagination to complicate a regime of truth-claims. The presence of things that appear scientifically accurate can support wider, wilder imaginative expression precisely because a base of apparently grounded material forms their foundation.

SLIDE: ILLUSTRATION FROM PFAALL

Besides the essay Eureka I mentioned previously, another essential text for my research, also by Edgar Allan Poe, is an 1835 short story called “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall,” a wild tale, written in the form of a letter, mixing imagination, and scientific fact to describe the poor but genius inventor Hans Pfaall’s balloon flight from Rotterdam all the way to the moon.

Poe writes detailed, scientifically accurate texts in the construction of his fictions. He knows that making things appear real is what makes the impossible possible and that a reader’s experience of the cracks between real and fictional is where the art lies. In applying scientific principles to the imagination, Poe brings story into being.

In my own research, I consider verisimilitude a device that supports speculation, imagination, and play. My use of documentary strategies and consumer video cameras in the research results engages this term.

SHOW LUMIERE AND MELIES BOXES VIDEO EXCERPT

While preparing to film at Esrange in 2023, I asked if I could put my own experiment on the balloon. But what kind of experiment should it be? Through research and correspondence, I learned about solargraphy, long-exposure pinhole photography. I built a camera from a 16mm film box. And I took a second box, put unexposed film in it, and sealed it.

SLIDE: MY BOXES ON CART BEFORE AND AFTER LAUNCH

My boxes were not allowed to be on the structure used for the official experiments. Instead, just before the 5am launch, a technician taped my boxes to the rope between the “real” experiments and the balloon. Kind of like tying the note to the balloon string as a kid. My boxes offered a correspondence with science but I had no hypothesis, no control, no tools of transmission.

I didn’t expect anything to come back and was overjoyed when my box camera revealed an image. As I mentioned before, what that image shows, what meaning or data it produced, is totally unclear. It corresponds to its experience but is uninterpretable.

Correspondence is an essential part of my artistic research. I use this term in several ways in my writing and in my visual work. Correspondence appears as exchange, letters, emails, phone calls, and in fantastical, dream-like ways that relate more to 19th-century French writer Charles Baudelaire’s poem of the same name.

SLIDE: STOOLS, WONDER, AND EXPERIMENTS

In front of the two-channel projection, there are small stools that correspond to the boxes the scientists are working on in the video. Designed and built by Jonas Adolfsen, these seats let you watch Experiments while keeping your eye on The Wonder, the balloon waiting to take off in the corner of the gallery.

You can’t watch both at the same time, but you try. It’s an absurd, frustrating, funny exercise: the balloon doesn’t seem to do anything; you turn your attention to the scientists, you miss the balloon launch again. While you try to access one kind of information, another one slips your grasp.

END OF PART 2

Thanks 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.

Upcoming events at the James 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.

This is the first part of the talk I gave for my doctoral defense on November 18. As you can see from the title, it was version 23.

To explain: as part of my doctoral defense in Artistic Research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, I was to give a public 45 minute talk followed by 90 minutes of questions from the committee and the audience. And answers from me.

So this is the talk.

I’ll post the entirety of it over the next few days, leaving the “stage directions” intact and placing images and video elements as best I can. I’m putting it here because I’d like to share it and have it somewhere other than in the hidden zone of hard drives.

And yes, I passed the defense!

EUREKA TALK PART 1

SLIDE: THE WONDER: SHOW VIDEO AND TIME THE STORY TO LAUNCH

I’m in my room, been writing a letter. Had to write extra small this time otherwise it wouldn’t work. I fold it until it’s the size of a postage stamp and cover it with plastic to keep it waterproof in case of rain. I tie this letter to the string of the balloon and test it: it rises to the ceiling without faltering. That’s good. I take the string and hold it tight as we hurry downstairs.

Outside, we’re standing in front of the house, the pine tree towering above on our left. Nothing too high up to the right. Hope the wind blows that way.

I look up, mumble a little message to wish the balloon a successful journey, and let go of the string.

We watch for a long time as the balloon pulling its letter struggles toward the sky.

You hope the letter gets somewhere, that someone finds it when it lands. You imagine the balloon’s height, its float, its bounce through the clouds and wind. You can’t envision where it might go. You’d love to be with it, to soar and find a place where you felt you belonged. But you can’t.

Growing up in a small town in the corner of a Midwestern state in the U.S. I felt alien, out of place. I looked different, my culture, my upbringing was different from people around, my interests, politics and dreams were “all wrong.” I spent a lot of time reading, falling into books, floating into worlds beyond--on words. I tied letters to all the balloons I ever got at a party, a state fair, or the mall.

Eyes straining upwards. There’s nothing left to see except blue sky, or other times, clouds. It’s gone.

The note I tie to the balloon always says the same thing: Hello my name is Jenny Perlin if you find this letter please write me back at this address.

SLIDE: TITLE TALK

Hello, my name is Jenny Perlin. Thank you all for being here.

The title of my artistic research project is “Eureka.”

The balloon you just saw taking off is from my film The Wonder. It’s a scientific balloon launching in the Arctic, heading towards the stratosphere. I’m filming the launch, and so excited (I’ve also been up all night, a couple nights in a row) I keep pressing the focus button to make sure this beautiful helium-filled thing stays sharp in the viewfinder. Like the others standing around me, I gasp at the moment of its liftoff and can’t stop watching until it disappears in the clouds.

But before I get into all that, let me tell you a few things about the title.

Eureka is an ancient Greek word that means: “I found it!” It’s a spontaneous exclamation the mathematician and inventor Archimedes shouted when he made a sudden scientific discovery.

But in my research, the main reference for this word is the title of an 1848 text, something between a lecture, essay, and poem, by American author Edgar Allan Poe, in which he claimed, using poetic, scientific, and argumentative language, to have figured out, definitively, the origin of the universe.

SLIDE: POE FRONTISPIECE EUREKA

To claim “Eureka!” involves speculation, imagination, research, and chance; mixing categories, media, approaches, and methods in unique ways. Throughout my research I use the term earnestly and, sometimes, with gentle irony.

In my project, Eureka, I inquire into strategies, tools, and historical and contemporary narratives used to envision and describe so-called “inaccessible” spaces.

SLIDE: PICTURES OF STRATOSPHERE

In my research I chose to focus on a layer of the atmosphere above Earth called the stratosphere. It’s a place where humans cannot go, at least not without special equipment.

The stratosphere is located above the habitable atmosphere, between earth and outer space. It starts at about 10 kilometers up and goes to around 50 kilometers high. The way people access it is by launching a large, plastic, helium-filled balloon and waiting on the ground to get it back.

I like thinking about this part of “near space” because it’s not fancy, like outer space. But lots of activity is happening there. People are sending up balloons to do experiments, weather prediction, and espionage. These balloons are launched all the time, all over the world.

SLIDE: BLANCHARD BALLOON DRAWING + JP AEROSPACE

My research project connects investigations into historical and literary depictions of the invention of balloon flight in the 18th century in Europe and the U.S., together with ways 21st-century stratospheric space and balloon technology are described. As an artist, I ask questions about what lighter-than-air travel might have meant in the past, how the stratosphere is characterized now, what kinds of claims are made on this space, and I speculate on what, if anything, the stratosphere might be telling us here below.

SLIDE: PFAALL ILLUSTRATION

Throughout the process, I asked, where can imagination bring me? I imagine myself into the position of a balloon. I try to send myself back in time to sit with authors as they write their stories. I dream of being carried along by the winds. But I remain firmly here on the ground. The tools I use to transpose my ideas, imagination, and research are 16mm film, video, 19th-century photo techniques like the pinhole camera and the photogram, and nonfiction writing.

SLIDE: AIROPAIDIA STILL + BALDWIN MAP

Eureka brings me to a space center in Arctic Sweden where scientists send experiments up on balloons. It inspires me to figure out how to put my own experiment near theirs. Eureka sends me to sites in the U.S. where the first balloon launched and landed in 1793. It carries me through studio practices drawing animations and to darkroom experiments right down the hall here at KHiO. Eureka’s exclamatory, imaginative power enables me to expand my research through the richness of combining visual artworks and the written word.

SLIDE: STILLS FROM BEXUS

Here, I’ll share a quote from Walter Benjamin:

The power of a country road when one is walking along it is different from the power it has when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of a text when it is read is different from the power it has when it is copied out.

In my research, I try to get as close as possible to the metaphor and state of production that Benjamin describes here. I “walk along” all kinds of texts, written, visual, and experiential, as physical paths, to spend time with and to respond to them in different ways. I don’t “fly over,” so to speak, reading for an overarching narrative that can answer all my questions at once. I work with material from areas including history of science, literature, geography, film, and visual art. Each offers a unique framework, new guidance, and signposts for my practice.

SLIDE: UNDETECTABLE PHOTOGRAM

I am compelled by the idea of misapprehension. To catch at or try to hold something, and to realize it’s not possible. In my research, I look for 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 to restore, renew, or compare, but to hold them as they are, in all their incomplete, imaginative pieces. The method I describe as holding in relation might offer generative resistance to disciplinary categories.

As an artist, I claim the space of imagination to draw out from these elements “the strange phosphorous of life,” as American poet William Carlos Williams put it. It is my intention to hold in relation the pieces and so-called “partial data” I gather.

SLIDE: LUMIERE NEXT TO THE BOX

What you see here is an image resulting from my research. It’s produced by a handmade pinhole camera launched on a scientific balloon that traveled to 27 kilometers above the Earth and floated for about 4 hours. The total exposure was about 12 hours. I made it while doing field research in 2023 at the Esrange Space Center outside Kiruna, Sweden.

Next to it is a picture of the box that produced the image. It’s a 16mm film box that I made into a simple pinhole camera. It’s a camera, of course, but it’s also just a box.

There is no way to interpret the image made by my camera-box. It is a record of its own experience, received back on the ground. What was up there and what I hold correspond to each other but are not the same.

I don’t know how my box traveled, what light rays it gathered, what this image says or shows. I misapprehend it, and have to hold it as is, like a hoped-for letter, an indecipherable correspondence that has come back to me.

These images transform my desire for narrative closure into something more introspective, more reflective. The process involves attentiveness, acceptance, and connection. I call this method and way of working holding in relation.

This means that I resist using the material to prove an already decided point. It means that bits and pieces of information will not be folded into a preconceived form. It means I commit to exploring what escape from expertise might allow.

Holding in relation means each encounter, experience, and result is part of an engagement on its own terms as much as possible, with reflection built into the process.

As scholar and filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha writes in her essay “Holes in the Sound Wall”:

One way of defining filmmaking is to say that it consists of entering into relations with things and people and making as many of these relations come into view/hearing as possible.

Holding in relation is a delicate space, eluding closure and requiring ethical commitment and care. I use this method on a macro level, in the research, in exhibition, and in the creation of the artistic results themselves.

SLIDE: WIP AIROPAIDIA PAINTING VIDEO

As time passed, I looked for more tools. I thought about how balloons move through the skies. A balloon can’t be steered; it drifts, moving and turning along currents of air.

By engaging methods related to a balloon’s drift, I gave myself permission to fully embrace interdisciplinary processes; to mix imagination, close reading, and active encounters with people and materials. In this way, I felt I could open space in my research between the pressures of literalism and the pull of romantic idealism.

Other terms and methods I use in my research are “misapprehension,” “encounter,” and “verisimilitude.” I’ll talk more about those as I go.

END OF PART 1

Thanks 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.

Upcoming events at the James 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.

There are so many things I will post here. In the last 3 weeks I’ve defended and passed my PhD, installed and opened an exhibition, and nearly wound up the semester’s teaching. In coming weeks I’ll post the talk I gave for the defense so it lives somewhere besides my hard drives (and backups), and some reflections on the show.

But that’s a lot. For now, an anecdote about misapprehension.

I use that word a lot and most of the time I love what happens when it happens.

In 1996 I moved from San Francisco to Chicago to attend graduate school at the Art Institute. Someone had recommended I contact another SF-based artist who was going there to get her MFA in Fiber Arts. We met for coffee to see about finding an apartment in Chicago together.

Her work consisted of organic cotton squares she transformed into handmade tampons, used, unfurled, and flattened to produce a species of tie-dyed pattern. She then produced quilts made of dozens of these squares. She was about ten years older than I, and deeply passionate about her practice. It goes without saying that we didn’t make for great roommates.

I don’t remember who found the place in Pilsen, a neighborhood just south of the Chicago Loop, a few blocks from the then-extant, messy and magical Maxwell Street Market. A developer called Podmajersky had bought up a bunch of buildings there and sort of half-gutted them into more loft-like spaces. I was excited because I’d lived in the Czech Republic for a few years and the neighborhood had been named after the Bohemian city where I’d also spent some time.

The apartment we rented had been a funeral home. My roommate took the ground floor of the loft, having had more lucrative employment prior to our arrival. I took the basement. Rickety metal stairs led to my basement abode, featuring a concrete floor with a steel drain right in the middle. In the ceiling just over the drain, a human-length, aluminum fluorescent-laden light provided copious nightmares as I tossed and turned on my lumpy futon.

My roommate was the only one with a car; I had a bike and took it to school, fall, winter, spring. Sometimes she would drive me to the grocery store; otherwise the gas station was the only food option. But I’m getting way ahead of myself.

My first day in Chicago I had shoved my suitcases into the gloomy basement and fled by bike to get some air and look around my new hometown. I headed west, and what to my wondrous eyes should appear a few blocks in: huge red banners hanging across the street. One after the next, each filled with Cyrillic words exhorting the community to be good, think of others, buy local. Slogan after slogan. Welcome to the neighborhood.

I was in seventh heaven. No English anywhere. All the businesses’ signs were in Russian. The bakery, the laundromat, the restaurants, the supermarket. Having studied Russian as a kid, then in college, then three years immersed in other Slavic languages, I couldn’t believe my luck. I was too excited to even get off my bike and go into the shops. I sped back to the grim apartment to call my folks. I had no idea! Can you believe it? I’m going to get to practice, maybe it’s all different Eastern European stuff and I can speak Czech and keep working on it! It’s going to be so fun. What are the chances! I just got lucky.

The next few days were spent biking in the opposite direction, hitting warehouse-laden dead ends and eventually figuring out how to get under the highway to bike the least treacherous route to school. Grad school days are long; art school days even longer, especially when you’ve never been. I felt like a person who finally reached the water fountain after a marathon. So thirsty to know, to make, see, and do. I had wanted for so long to go to art school and was going to try and learn as much as I could in the two short years of the program.

About a week after moving to Chicago I biked back into Pilsen, planning a major exploration of my adopted Eastern European neighborhood. Remember, this was before Google, before smartphones, before searching a glowing rectangle for the best artisanal whatever and having the device tell you which way to turn to get it.

I was excited to shop for dark bread, kasha, stuffed cabbage, compote, oddly decorated chocolate bars, and to start getting to know a Slavic community in the spectacularly industrial Chicago I’d moved to.

A film set, I was later told. The blocks I’d biked down had been dolled up to look like a 1950s Eastern European immigrant neighborhood. I biked down the same street, baffled. My eyes must have been deceiving me. Instead, Chicago’s magnificent, brightly-colored Mexican bakeries, laundromats, restaurants, and supermarkets revealed themselves in their rightful places, freed from the monochromatic crimson bunting and hastily-glued on signage. All I could do was laugh. And buy tortillas. Which were delicious.

After a year of freakish funeral home living with lots of roommate tension, I managed to score another basement apartment across the street, this time with windows half above the ground and an exit to an interior courtyard garden—that I could afford on my own. Many more Chicago adventures transpired, but those stories will have to wait until another time.

It’s hard to express how much joy this misapprehension provided me then and continues to now. The cinematic illusion, trickery and humor provide a buoyancy to my memory of an intense and tumultuous time. It seems fitting as an important kick-off to a life devoted to the constant surprise of art, encounter, and being-in-the-world.

And no, I don’t think I ever learned what film they were shooting there.

Thanks for reading.

—

In other news:

My solo exhibition “The Wonder” is up at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York. It’s a mini-retrospective, including works ranging from drawings from the early 2000s to the present. If you’re in New York between now and March 6 2026, I hope you’ll stop by.

Public programs during the run of the exhibition will include a launch of The Hoosac Institute Journal #16 (Feb 3), a screening of BUNKER (Feb 24), and a lunchtime screening and discussion of Happy are the Happy, a 1999 film shot in Prague and co-directed by me and Sarah Jane Lapp.

I recently found this segment of a text I wrote following a year-long collaboration with Nova Benway as she was doing her Master’s in Curatorial Studies at Bard. To make a long story short, Nova asked me to create a film in conversation with her curatorial research, which focused on Eleanor Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park, New York, called Val-Kill. The work was shown as Nova’s curatorial contribution to the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies’ 2011 exhibition.

Among other activist activities she engaged in, Eleanor Roosevelt helped write the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. The film I made, “The Object of Society Is” reflects excerpts of her notes and contributions to this text, among many other emblems that I derived by making personal and poetic associations with things I found in her writings, her archive, home, and biography.

The film was shown in a giant projection in a big space usually taken up by multiple works in these shows. It was so great to see this experimental, research-driven piece given a lot of room and resonance. I was very pregnant with my second child while making this film and remember walking around in the snow, carrying Bolex and tripod through the trails near Val-Kill. About a month after the exhibition opened, I gave birth.

Below is a fragment of something I think Nova and I wanted to use to start making a book about our process. I’m sharing this because I am in the middle of writing something that’s proving to be difficult, so I feel the need to reorient myself to other, older things I wrote. I am also fascinated lately by encountering things I wrote and made that keep pressing on similar themes over these many years. This is both good and dispiriting. Corresponding.

I’m grateful to Nova for this opportunity to learn and create.

Movement I Out and Back (the walk)

Designating a space that is not biography, not autobiography, and not fiction. That has been the project of the research and production of the film The Object of Society Is. The project has also been about exploring the complexities of a particular collaboration. Nova Benway asked me to consider making the film. During the same period, she wrote a master’s thesis about the process of commissioning the film and the ethics of the artist/curator relationship. The result of the year’s work was a film and a thesis. The process is what is most compelling; meetings and discussions and parallel research and notes taken, written, images filmed, edited, texts drafted, written, and revised.

This text will elaborate on the film and also unpack this process. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, who traveled the world and continued to come home to her favorite sanctuary, the humble Val-Kill, Nova and I set out on a path of research and debate that took us far afield and then home again, to a film and a text. But we were changed by our travels together, and that’s what this essay tries to express.

Out and Back.

There were problems from the outset. I did not want to make a film about Eleanor Roosevelt, really. Or rather, there was no way I was going to compete with the volumes of writings, endless films, recordings, and docu- ments connected with this extraordinary woman.

Space: Nova was interested in Val-Kill, Roosevelt’s home. Her home is only a few miles away from FDR’s mansion in Hyde Park, New York, but the abodes could not be more different. Val-Kill can only really be described using the untranslatable word “gemütlich,” a sort of cozy, cluttered, chinz-filled home pleasantly laden with trinkets contendedly lingering on shelves backed by wood-paneled walls. A happy home, a safe space in which Roosevelt could entertain unburdened by the painful trappings of First-Lady-dom. I didn’t know what to do with the place when I visited. I felt uncomfortable immediately with the idea of dealing with the home-as-museum, in much the same way as I felt about exploring biography.

Space: Nova and I had to figure out a collaborative space of working, which could be expressed as a space in which we felt comfortable discussing and not discussing. Long conversations in my studio wandering off into silences, then head-scratching and another burst of ideas. Digressions, free-associations, references to things I hadn’t yet read but meant to. Image-ideas that jumped to mind. An insistence on some kind of circular “feeling” that early on entered the idea of this film. A fascination with the sense that the intensity of Roosevelt’s life lived in public, and its daily practice of writing in public, masked another kind of pain or searching, one that was ever elusive. That’s the discrepancy between the public and private self. And a realization that no matter how far afield she traveled, she was compelled, by habit, propriety, or something far deeper and more personal, to come back home.

Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s home. A home as an escape from an unhappy marriage, a heteronormative culture, and an escape where Roosevelt could take on political issues of the day with a voice so strong and yet so often couched in domestic, self-effacing language. Roosevelt wrote a syndicated newspaper column called “My Day,” six days a week, from 1936 to 1962. The columns are a combination of public diary and political commentary, and the sheer number of pages, issues, and ideas Roosevelt discussed is astounding. Additionally, Roosevelt wrote to a monthly column, often answering a page of questions from the American public, in magazines such as McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal. Many of the texts quoted in The Object of Society Is come from those sources.

Roosevelt was constantly moving out and back, away from the appropriate domestic home (with the husband, the President) to a new home not far away where she could have the relationships she desired. She logged 20,000 miles in the South Pacific during World War II, talking, lecturing, conversing, greeting, and always writing and always returning to the humble space of Val-Kill. And as often as she could, walking Eleanor’s Loop, the one-mile circular trail behind the house, where she would walk alone and with friends, with diplomats and statesmen, conversing, thinking, and observing. The strongest image for the film relating to aspects of this life was the trajectory of a homing pigeon: out and back.

A walk helps you think; a body’s movement out and back in space generates ideas. The loop trail confirmed the idea: out and back, a daily walk, a brief escape or respite. Perhaps each trip, farther and farther afield, represented a hope of not returning, of spinning out into the universe, never to be caught back in Earth’s gravitational pull. Yet return happened. Out and back, the pull of something.

So in the winter of 2011 I filmed the trail, walking out and back. Snowy ground; someone’s footsteps kindly marked the terrain in front. Flat to hill, small pond, conifers and oaks, evidence of deer, up to the top and back down again. It took longer than I thought.

Thanks for reading.

BUNKER news: The film will screen at the Trondheim Architecture Film Festival, Octoer 18-19, in Norway.