LUX/ICA Biennial Student Symposium: On Failure

Programme

• Keynote address: Jan Verwoert, Why Rudie Can't Fail

  Jan Verwoert is a critic, writer, curator, art historian, and contributing editor to Frieze magazine.

• Anirban Gupta-Nigam: Failure as Possibility: Reading Two Fragments of Moving-Image Work

  Conventionally, in radical political and aesthetic practice, the body of the exhausted person is sought to be energised, radicalised and politicised. Failed, exhausted bodies must be re-energised so that they can engage in the project of (political) transformation. Following a different path, through a reading of two fragments of moving-image work, this paper argues for failure as possibility and attempts to locate exhaustion and failure as potentiality, as moments when, freed from the teleology of the search for a ‘better future’, we see every moment in the now as being open to various possible futures.

  Jawaharlal Nehru University, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Delhi

• Robert Rapoport: The End of Ethnographic Representation in Huyghe’s The Host and the Cloud

  In The Host and the Cloud (2010), Pierre Huyghe initiated a number of events in an abandoned museum of French folk culture. The film that attempts to document these events questions the very possibility of ethnographic representation today. Jean Rouch in Chronicle of a Summer (1960) concluded that the camera can only ever represent the social artifice it creates; Huyghe goes further, suggesting an incommensurability between the grammar of film and contemporary social forms.

  Ruskin School, Oxford

• Rosa Menkman: The Intentional Faux-Pas

  Today it is completely normal to pay for aesthetically appealing plugins like Hipstamatic or Instagram, that imitate (analogue) imperfections or nostalgic errors (artefacts), like lens flares and lomographic discolorations. While Twitter and Facebook deliver these ‘faux vintage’ images almost every minute, this relentless flow of ‘faux vintage’ imagery is starting to look more and more like a collection of ‘more of the same’ effects. Is this over-indulgence in intentional faux-pas a ‘new’ phenomenon? And how does the growing fetishisation of nostalgic, ‘faux vintage’ imperfections relate to the growing trend of glitch art, a strand in art that celebrates the digital flaw?

  Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne

• Emily Candela: No signal: Failures of transmission in the moving image from analogue ‘snow’ to the ‘blue screen of death’

  This is a farewell to snow, the vibrating speckled image that appears when analogue television reception fails. As we switch to digital television, a frozen or – in many cases - blue screen replaces snow in these moments of failed transmission. The contrast between snow and the blue screen, and the corresponding opposition between ‘transparency’ and the ‘black box’, are explored in this talk through artworks that employ artefacts and glitches of viewing technologies, as well as through found YouTube videos.

  Royal College of Art and the Science Museum, London