Application Image Behavior

 

Tell us about your relevant experience. Please include details of previous screenings, events and/or exhibitions. (500)

For a number of years I’ve exhibited and performed either on my own or as part of a collaboration with the art collective AAS. I have broad practice across sculpture, performance, film, painting, music, and publishing. A constant thread in this work has been engagement with the form, codes, politics, and culture of cinema, television, and video games. 

As part of AAS I produced a number of projects that either incorporated or were fully realised as moving image works. Of particular note was 2015’s “Young Castle for The Elder Sun”, a four hour multicamera internet television show filmed Newcastle and broadcast live over Twitch to Flux Factory in New York. In 2016 AAS produced a number of works that combined performance with prerecorded and live video using a range of image sources, outputs, and means of editing and manipulating them in real time. This culminated in my final project with the collective, “Chaotic Good” in 2016, a performance primarily experienced through “the monolith”, a repurposed server tower with embedded screen, that allowed the audience to manually choose between the 16 tracks of live and prerecorded audio and video using a patch bay, the resulting edit being broadcast over the internet and formed the final document of the project. 

In 2016 I left AAS to pursue a PhD exploring art practice through videogames and horror cinema. I see my work as an artist and researcher as two paths through the same field, something most apparent at the overlaps between academic presentations at research conferences and art performances, both incorporating a live presentation alongside a projected screen. Examples include “Creature of Havok” at SERF, Leeds, and “TFW: The Formless Wastes” at Res. London (both 2017) where a live performance incorporated front and rear projection video loops that were used as variables to dictate parts of the performance in the manner of a dice roll. 

In 2018 I produced my first web specific artwork, entitled “The Inhuman Ecstasy of Toxic Waste” for WORMWORM.org. This took the form of layered and looped video built from scenes of “toxic waste” from late 70s to mid 90s tv and cinema, and a text on the same subject in the form of a script to be read aloud by the audience. In the same year I performed other works that incorporated interaction between live performance and moving image at contexts including Whitechapel Gallery, Art Licks Weekend, and Reading University. In 2018 I also produced a video entitled “TFW: The Formless Wastes 2” by screen capturing a playthrough of a videogame I had designed for this purpose. I also gave performance lectures on cinematic affect in horror films and videogames at a number of academic conferences including at London Southbank University, University of Hertfordshire, Edinburgh University, Northumbria University, Newcastle University, and Liverpool University. 

Since the outbreak of Covid 19 I have produced online moving image based projects for Kim? Contemporary Art in Riga, FACT Liverpool, Wysing Arts Centre, Shape Arts, and Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Collabs

Penance Stare is an experimental metal band based in and around Newcastle Upon Tyne, established in 2017. 

Vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Esme Louise Newman has been active in music since the late 00’s, performing punk and noise rock with the bands Etai Keshiki and Commiserations, as well as electronic music as Melting, among several others.

In 2017, Newman began to self-record  and release solo material under the Penance Stare name from her new home in the North East of England, eventually issuing an EP and two full-length albums. In contrast to the sounds of her former projects, this new project explored influences from black metal, shoegaze, darkwave and doom metal.

In 2019, drummer Sklyar Gill, formerly of doom metal band Proboscis, was recruited, and work began on a third album as a duo, as well as several live shows and a short tour. 

The project has received positive attention from press outlets such as Wire, The Quietus and Noisey, and have shared stages with like-minded acts including Big Brave, Wrekmeister Harmonies, Bong and Plague Rider. 

Outside of the band, the duo maintain multiple additional projects, Gill is a vocalist in the ambient drone band Möbius, plays drums in Black Holes Are Cannibals, and has appeared on several Lovely Wife recordings. Newman produces noise and dark ambient music as 1727 and black metal as Petrine Cross.

 

Penance Stare are -

Esme Louise Newman - vocals, guitar, synthesiser, electronics

Skylar Gill - drum kit

Leyya Mona Tawil [Lime Rickey International] is an artist working with sound, performance, and hybrid transmissions. Tawil is a Syrian, Palestinian, American engaged in the world as such. Her 24-year record of performance/installation scores that have been presented in cities throughout the US, Europe and the Arab world. Tawil was the 2020 ISSUE Project Room Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellow and a 2018 Saari Residence Fellow (Finland). Lime Rickey International’s Future Faith (2019) was nominated for a 2019 Bessie Award in Music. Tawil has received commissions from Abrons Arts Center (NYC), KONE Foundation (Helsinki), Pieter Performance Space (Los Angeles), Gibney DiP (NYC) and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation (Oakland). She is the founder and director of Arab.AMP – a platform for experimental live art and music from the SWANA diaspora.

Tawil uses voice, microphones, interactive surfaces and electronics to build hybrid performances and sound compositions. Her work slips between codes of fiction, concept and embodied action in a manner that challenges cultural legibility. In her “diasporic imaginary,” she digs into how specific reference points collide and transmit nomadic knowledge through sound signaling and distortions of visual, physical and digital form. These ideas, relayed through voice, body and object, are meant to cue new ways of listening and future building.

WHY SIGNIFICANT TO DEVELOPMENT (150)

Changes to the world around as well as my own health in 2020 have meant my practice has shifted to an almost entirely digital one. Last year I completed my first full video game Animal Agency (which involved a collaboration with the band Penance Stare), and this year I have both produced browser based games and worked with a professional production team to make an artwork in Augmented Reality (AR). All of these projects have seen increased opportunity to explore audio and animation. Alongside this shift I have been researching the relationship between AR and early both 2.5d game environments and earlier rotoscoping technology, producing gifs as sketches toward a larger animation project.

The opportunity provided by Image Behavior comes at a very fortuitous time, to build on these combined experiences, research, and experiments, to produce a complete animation, with voice acting in collaboration with performers and musicians.

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Gloomland (working title)

Gloomland is an animated science fiction artist’s film set in a village on a future headland where beings and systems arise from the collapse of old ecologies and industry. Huge mining robots repurposed by joyous gangs of monstrous children dance to draw worms out of the earth. Rotten downed satellites leak a crystalline wax that is traded in a complicated socio-political game. A general strike of chemical producing organisms is led by a charismatic bird. 

Gloomland is presented as the field interviews, found documents, and other forms of research compiled by an agent documenting this interconnected society and landscape. It explores a world, the agent’s developing attempts to account for what she experiences, and the folding of these experiences into the community itself.   

Gloomland is part of my ongoing research into how the horror genre’s core of suspicion might be rearticulated as love and care. Gloomland is built in part from two recurring motifs in horror and science fiction: 

1: The epistolary form, where narrative is presented through documents, runs at least as far back in the history of horror as Dracula, while being seen more recently in mondo and found footage cinema of the last 60 years. [It’s mirror is perhaps the love letter] 

2: The related figure of the agent/investigator sent to a rural environment only to struggle to keep a distance between themselves and the object of examination. [In horror we see this in The Wickerman, The Wailing, and Twin Peaks, but equally in Local Hero and Sans Soleil]

On its surface, Gloomland is an animated film, taking the form of a far future agent’s reports, found documents, interviews, field recordings, and increasingly; interpretations and creative responses to a remote, post-collapse environment. Our agent recounts her meeting with sentient A.I.s inhabiting beached fishing vessels. She talks us through her map of subterranean tunnels where complex multi species burial rituals take place. She shows us things she has found but does not attempt to name. 

Gloomland seeks to critique the racist colonial structure that runs through the aforementioned horror/science fiction motifs through our agents' approach to archiving and engaging with the individuals, collectives, features, and tendencies she encounters. 

Our agent finds that she must adapt her process, it becomes increasingly creative, affective, and open. She refuses any claim of objective observation and instead creates her own fiction. She sings songs, makes sound collages, and writes her own stories to articulate things beyond any direct comprehension. 

Over its duration, the narrative increasingly emphasizes environmental storytelling, unreliable narration, and world building that encourages an audience’s active speculation rather than fixed resolution.

Gloomland is about a person falling in love with a whole ecosystem and trying to articulate their euphoria at this experience.

Working with highly creative musicians and performers allows this project to centre audio and speech as much as imagery. Gloomland is articulated through its sound design and music, and through the agent’s voice and the songs she sings. 

Tech requirments

Gloomland has been developed with an online streaming environment in mind, but it would be possible to be adapted for show in a cinema should this be required. The intended tone and visual language is aimed at the audience watching via a web browser. In large part this is about accessibility (I personally would not be able to travel to the ICA for screening), but it's also a context that fits the how Gloomland references archival footage and videogame streams. With a simple web hosting platform I would also like to use a description text to embedded further documents that expand the world, such as maps, schematics, timelines etc. 

Gloomland is produced primarily using digital animation, principally in Synfig and editing in Premiere. Audio is recorded in home studios in Newcastle and Oakland (to allow for Covid19 restrictions).

Please describe how your proposal could be developed further with a production grant of £30,000 in 500 words or less.

Gloomland is a complete project of around 10 minutes duration with the majority of work produced by myself, but I see it also as a proof of concept towards something larger with more sophisticated production.

 

The opportunity to expand this budget, this would allow me first of all employ additional animators (the largest resource cost of a project like this). This would open the possibility of longer duration, but also different kinds of animation. 

I’ve worked with stop frame animation using DragonFrame setups before and I would very much like to incorporate this into Gloomland, not least because it would mean I could work with the visual language isometric RPG videogames such as Fallout and Planetscape. With the project’s original budget I have focused on working with processes I can do entirely at home, with the expanded budget I would be able to rent a studio, produce clay models and work with professionals who have skills and hardware to produce non-digital animation. I would also then have the time and space to explore more animation using hand drawn elements which are then scanned and rigged (I experimented with this in my game Animal Agency, and its effects are fantastic, but it is too time consuming to employ in the standard budget).

Additional resources to production would mean more possibility for experimentation. The disorientating greenscreen work of early FMV games such as Myst has long been an aesthetic I’ve found exciting, but it needs more resources in terms of time and space than I have so it is not something I have been able to work with so far. Furthermore, while I am a competent video editor, an expanded budget would allow this role to be taken over by a professional. 

The expanded budget would mean I could experiment with such processes and take further risks, working with outside practitioners with more experience and knowledge than I have.

Most importantly, an expanded budget, which allows for employing additional animators, would allow this project to expand its audio component, and give it more space for experimentation. This is an area I am particularly excited about with Gloomland. For the standard budget I have talked with musicians and planned the audio based around an economical use of time. I am commissioning sound design and ambient music elements which I can then edit myself, and the dialogue is based around a single voice actor, and what they can comfortably record in two days. With the expanded budget I would be able to develop this area significantly, allowing a complete score, more integrated sound design, additional musicians and additional voice acting. 

Supporting Images: https://umabreakdown.neocities.org/research/IC1.html

Application, BALTIC Bursaries

 The pandemic has been a very difficult time that required drastic changes to my art practice and life. 

Prior to 2020, my entire professional life was structured around face-to-face situations, as an artist working in installation and performance, and as an art educator specialising in work with young children with disabilities. Becoming unemployed just as the pandemic began, three years and 250 miles from my previous professional network was a challenge, as most organisations or contexts that might have previously offered me work, as either artist or hands-on workshop leader were uncertain as to their own future, or in the process of restructure themselves. 

In response, over the last year I have committed to adapting my practice to a digital environment, finding new routes to elicit the same level of audience agency and narrative collapse that I had previously explored in my interactive performance work. 

Alongside this shift, the change in the everyday and new redundancy of previous coping strategies had the result that my long standing mental health problems became significantly worse. This further restricted my ability to earn an income, which in turn, further impacted my mental health. 

With great fortune, I (along with 3 other artists with disabilities) was approached by Shape Arts to produce artworks for an exhibition in Augmented Reality (AR), with support from a professional AR developer. I produced animations and text which were then incorporated into the AR environment, as well as working alongside Shape to ensure the work’s accessibility to the widest possible audience access requirements. This was a pivotal experience for me, and is the basis of my application for the Baltic Bursary. 

The production company used the software “Unity” to produce the exhibition app. Unity is free and very well supported with tutorials and guides for self teaching. The Baltic Bursary would afford me the computer upgrades needed and a month of living expenses to allow me to focus on learning to produce my own web and app based projects in Unity, taking time away from applications for other paid work and investing in a longer term set of skills. 

I see this as important both for sustained professional development (that accounts for the still changed world, and my own inability to work in the way I had previously, due to health), and to make my art more accessible. Using Unity means I will now be able to make artworks that function on a simple smartphone rather than require a PC, and the month of focused self teaching will also enable me to better facilitate a broad range of access needs (i.e. recording audio descriptions, learning how to give the audience the ability to set their own control system etc).

I have attached supporting images that show my previous practice, a screenshot from the game I produced myself in 2020, a test image from the AR project supported by a production team, and three short video loops showing the new direction in practice I would like to explore.

proposal// Call for Web Residencies No 14: Post-Doom For Akademie Schloss Solitude’s

 

The Endless Hallucinatory Love of the Riders at The Long Point of Death

Earlier this year, in a state of grief combined with a down-swing of my mental pendulum, I tried to write a short story. It followed two riders who continually criss-crossed the continent of North America on horse and wagon watched over by their reconnaissance drone, after some unspoken apocalyptic event. My riders had a role. The role hidden in the patriarchal, colonial violence of "The Cowboy", a role of love, palliative, and end-of-life care for animals and humans alike (think about Chloé Zhao’s “The Rider”, think about Valeska Grisebach’s “Western”). 

My riders would travel to where they were summoned, and stay with those approaching death and later carry the bodies back to a site where once long ago had existed a “Body Farm”. Here scavenger creatures still remember and that previous form of research has folded into a new kind of knowledge-making that would have been recognised by Melanie Klein or Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as "The reparative". In depresion we enter a void to make new tools through repetition in darkness. Doom as production, the riders are called out endlessly. 

This story fragment is my starting point for a series of diagrammatic digital drawings each with a parallel speech-audio that divines a story these same drawings. Each is an unstable constellation concerned with horror rebuilt as love. Each drawing is repeated/remade in new versions, and so is the audio. Repeated attempts at showing/telling the love/grief stories which shift in sympathy to the telling.

Uma Breakdown is a disabled artist/writer/researcher working around horror studies, feminist literature, and queer RPGs. This year they finished a PhD about The Evil Dead, care, trans* écriture féminine, disaster and play. In 2020 they presented a plant horror RPG at Kim?, Riga; a video game about sleeping on the ground next to animals for FACT, Liverpool; and a short story about SSRIs and Artaud for Ma Bibliothèque. They are currently researching criminality as love/writing in Genet and Cixous.

Tetley Jerwood Comission

 Uma Breakdown

I got nominated to submit a thing to this. Beyond happy to be asked. Brutal word limit.

Statement For Tetley Jerwood Commission, October 2020

My practice lives in the overlap between queer feminist philosophy and theories of literature, speculative horror, and the collaborative exchange of role playing games. As a disabled artist I’m interested in how each of these areas offer their own respective languages and approaches to instability, brokenness, love, and affect.

My work asks how uncertainty and the encounter with difference can be made welcoming and empathetic. I explore this question through open and experimental practices of writing and image making that welcome the audience as collaborator. From these collaborative processes I produce texts, games, diagrams, videos, sculptures, radio plays, lectures and performances. In each instance my work centres expressions of solidarity while inviting the speculation of horror

This year I made a plant sentience RPG for KIM? In Latvia, published an article on a Russian horror game and Hélène Cixous’s writing on death, and wrote a scifi story on trauma, SSRIs and Antonin Artaud. I also finished a PhD mostly about Deleuze, The X Files, and dogs. 

Fig1: Planning Diagram for this commission proposal. 

Proposals: ‘Thinking Through Extinction’ Writing Residency (Corridor8)

 

Proposal

“Thinking Through Extinction” (TTE) offers an opportunity to develop, share and combine strands of my research with those of other practitioners and produce a kind of writing I am very eager to pursue at this point.

I am interested in the resonance between écriture féminine, and non-human life and systems. Following the former, (a Simon O’Sullivan’s provocation for “art history as a kind of creative writing”) I would approach this writing residency with the aim not of writing something that attempts to encapsulate or translate the ideas, workshops and artworks of TTE, but of making a new creative work that reconfigures and derives something else from them via experimental speculative fiction.

Dying, mourning, (individual/species) death, and the encounter of non-human scale time and subjectivity are concern for writers like Acker and Cixous (in both her theory of writing, and her analyses of the author Clarice Lispector), just as they are for speculative fiction authors such as N. K. Jemisin and Rivers Solomon, or EcoGothic writers.

Working closely with Laurence Payot, the rest of the team, and the public workshops, I would use writing techniques such as “appropriation”, “diagrammatics”, and “parataxis” to take the aesthetic, ethical, and theoretical positions and develop an oblique approach through speculative fiction.

Dealing with the impossibility of representing alterity (whether the non-human, death, or the scale of extinction events) through worldbuilding and experimental approaches to text, allows this writing to sit in collaboration with the rest of the project, rather than as an account, distillation, or translation.

Relevant experience

Patricia MacCormack’s concept of the “Ahuman” propose how animals can be recognised and given ethical consideration not in their relationships-to, or differences-from Human, but as beings in their own right who are never knowable to humans.

My PhD used “the Ahuman”; the practice of artists like Tai Shani; and the theory of Cixous and Acker; to propose an approach to art practice which normalises the incomplete, unknown, or collapsing, through the prioritising of care.

Continuing from my PhD work on Acker and Cixous I have a chapter on ecology and death forthcoming in Revenant journal’s forthcoming issue “Apocalyptic Waste: Studies in Environmental Threat and Nightmare Spaces”. In June my collaborative project on plant horror opens at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, and I am presently one of FACT’s artist fellows developing an interactive text which merges écriture féminine with ecosophy.

I have previously been commissioned to create a creative response to artists' work via eco-horror, including for “Its Origins are Indeterminate” for Whitechapel Gallery, and “Alembic” for Res. (sample attached) both in 2018.

For seven years I facilitated an award winning collaborative art programme at a North London SEN school, and the examination of the ethical and power relations when supporting agency in a diverse group underpins my interest in, and approach to, collaboration. I also ran a collaborative publishing and curation project which examines the economies of power in art, and was part of the collective A.A.S. Last year I co-produced the collective crip solidarity publication “Horse Bites Fence”.

Proposal 2020, Paul Mellon Centre Research Continuity Fellowship

Title of research project

Tai Shani's Cities of Women

Outline field of your research

400 word limit

The final chapter of my just completed PhD focused on "Phantasmagoregasm", an artwork by British artist and 2019 Turner Price co-winner Tai Shani. The artwork is part of Shani's long term project "Dark Continent" (DC), as series of works that speak from the point of view of female characters and archetypes, forming an expansion and departure from Christine de Pizan's 1405 proto-feminist work, "The Book of the City of Ladies".

Artworks have been added to DC over the five years since the project began to be presented, and each has been repeatedly revised in terms of both its core text, and in the manner also that it is realised. Different versions of Phantasmagoregasm have for example; been published at least twice, performed as live work in different iterations, and realised as a virtual reality installation.

My methodology is to identify external texts concerned with processes that resonate with processes identified in the artwork and to analyse how these relate or clash with one another. The research is concerned with the artwork as a site of processes and a mutually illuminating relationship with other texts.

I examined Phantasmagoregasm alongside philosopher Luce Irigaray’s rare direct addresses to art “The Natal Lacuna”, and the surrounding debate regarding the perceived conflicts between Irigaray's conclusions and her larger body of work. Focusing on some of the key aspects of the artwork (its Gothic setting that focuses on familial care, its destabilised narrative voice(s), its focus on incoperarial energy and movement) I placed it alongside analysis of cinematic techniques, various practices of écriture feminine (including those of Kathy Acker and Hélène Cixous), and a merging of queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s analyses of “The Gothic” from the beginning of her career with her final research into “reparative readings”.

I will take the methodology developed for examining Phantasmagoregasm, and apply this to the other works in DC.

Research questions:

What are the processes present in each work of DC?

How does the instability of form/language/voice in DC’s central texts resonate with its concept “woman”?

What other creative process focused texts have a mutually illuminating relationship with DC?

What are the political implications of an artwork always under revision?

Despite awards and large museum shows, Shani’s work has only recently begun receiving recognition, and is the subject of only one small book published less than a year ago, so it is already overdue such art historical attention.

Outline the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on your current research

250 word limit

I have just completed a PhD that brings together resonating creative processes from feminist literature, game design, queer gender politics, post-structuralist philosophy, and horror cinema. It uses these to articulate an art practice which is unstable and generative both for the artist during the process of production, and again for the audience. It asks how to negotiate art practice as involving processes which are unstable, affective, and resistant to structures.

In the second week of March I passed my viva (with no corrections) over Zoom video conferencing, but I also lost the job that I had just been offered as the museum where it was due to begin was forced to close due to Covid19, and my hire fell outside the window for furlough. My AHRC PhD funding had already ended in December and so my savings had already been used up by this point. My only income at present is from freelance art and writing commissions, applications for which take up the majority of my time at present

My research paper “Gothic Vectors and Gothic Lacuna: Gender, Reparative Love, and Unseen Agency in Tai Shani’s Phantasmagoregasm” was accepted by University of Sheffield’s “Reimagining the Gothic 2020: Bodies and Genders” conference this May, but that event was cancelled due to Covid-19.

I am passionate about studying this artist's work further but the outbreak has halted this momentum by removing both opportunity to present and refine this research and the resources of time and money to pursue it further.

Outline how you will use your grant funding to sustain your research in the upcoming months

400

I am disabled and already limited in the range of employment I can potentially take up. Up until 2018 I was taking medication to manage my anxiety, however their side-effects of severely impeded concentration and memory (on top of my Dyslexia) forced me to stop taking them, in order to complete my PhD. With the conditions of the outbreak, I have found my mental health problems have increased, reducing the kind of work I am able to do even further.

My PhD funding finished in December 2019, and while I was eventually successful in being offered a job at a museum in March, this coincided with the closure of such spaces and so the offer was withdrawn. I have been fortunately successful in applying for some small art and writing commissions, but the researching and writing of these applications (not to mention the work of fulfilling the successful commissions) takes up all of time and energy seven days a week.

The Research Continuity Fellowship would allow me to pick up the most exciting thread of contemporary British art that my PhD has set out, and continue to pursue it, right at a time when it feels so relevant. Having guaranteed income for the remainder of the year would be an immeasurable relief, and would mean I could just stop all other work, and focus my time and energy on this research project. The conclusion of my PhD established for me the skills, knowledge, and enthusiasm to begin professional research, the arrival of Covid-19 completely stopped that professional research before it started.

The Fellowship would on its own financially support me for the rest of the year. This means I could spend seven months on this project, all of which can be done from within lockdown.

This work includes:

The reading required from figures like Acker, Cixous, Irigaray, Sedgwick as well as others including Griselda Pollock, Bridget Crone, and Bracha Ettinger.

The correspondence with the various institutions that hold documentation of the many versions of the works.

Interviews with the artist herself, including regarding her “Transmission 2020” project of curating live performances of the internet through lockdown, which has a relationship to DC in both its content and form.

The dissemination of parts of this research via art journals and some of the many online provisions set up since outbreak.

Abbreviated curriculum vitae

Please provide an abbreviated curriculum vitae
500 words

I am a Gateshead based artist, researcher, writer, and educator with a special interest in feminist horror literature, art, games, and cinema. I am disabled, genderqueer and use they/they pronouns.

As an artist I have exhibited and performed internationally for a number of years as either R. Dorey or Uma Breakdown, and as a core member of the collective AAS from 2014-2017. My work has been shown at Whitechapel Gallery in London, Helene Nyborg Contemporary and KPH Volume, both in Copenhagen, NEXT Art Fair in Chicago, and The Armory Centre for The Arts in Pasadena.

I have taught or presented at institutions including Baltic, Birkbeck College, Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Brighton University, Open School East, Queen Mary University, Reading University, The Royal Geographical Society, The Science Museum, South London Gallery, and The University of Edinburgh.

Upcoming projects include: “NET//WORK” at Wysing Arts, Cambridge; “Dungeons & Disaster” at New Bridge Project, Newcastle; “Fact Together” a Fact, Liverpool; “All Flesh is Grass” a Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga.


Education:

AHRC funded Practice based PhD, “Becoming Ahuman: making it desirable to abandon certainty, including certainty of the self, and play in this chaotic situation” Northumbria University, Newcastle (2020).

MA Sculpture, Royal College of Art, London (2008).

BA Hons (First Class) Fine Art, UEL, London (2006).

Select recent publications:

Breakdown, U. (2020). As Plain as its Meaningless Name. In S. Kivland & R. Jagoe (Eds.), On Care. London: MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE.

Breakdown, U. (2019). Widening Circles. In S. Kivland & D. Holmes (Eds.), THE GRAVESIDE ORATIONS OF CARL EINSTEIN. London: MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE.

Breakdown, U. (2018). Guage Fanfic. In E. Beber (Ed.), The bodies that remain (1st edition). Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum Books.

Breakdown, U. (2018). Axpansion. In J. Mockridge, D. de Sonneville, & C. Smiles (Eds.), PaperWork Issue 3: Iilwimi lipsing. London: Paperwork

Breakdown, U. (2018). Farmer 9. In S. Jury, H. Kaplinsky, & L. A. Sames (Eds.), Alembic. London: Res.

Dorey, R. (2017). Interview. In L. Martin (Ed.), Lossy Ecology. London: Flat Time House.




Select recent conference papers:


“Gothic Vectors and Gothic Lacuna: Gender, Reparative Love, and Unseen Agency in Tai Shani’s “Phantasmagoregasm”” to be delivered at “Reimagining the Gothic 2020: Bodies and Genders” at University of Sheffield (postponed)

“Bio-film Mansion Theory, or Making as Collaboration with Disorder” delivered at “Interdisciplinary Conversations Around Making”, Newcastle University, (2019).

“There is no reason for you to live: ‘No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist episode 2: Aperitif’ as trans* Écriture Féminine” delivered at “Beyond the Console: Gender and Narrative Games”, London Southbank University, London, (2019).

“Smeared into The Environment: Queer Horror and The Ahuman” delivered at “Don't Look: Representations of Horror in the 21st Century Symposium”, University of Edinburgh, (2018).

“Coming Soon, From Your Cemetary: Horror / Play / Instability / Desire” delivered at Reading University, (2019)

“Bio-Film Assemblages and Ahuman Horror” delivered at “Current Research in Speculative Fiction”, University of Liverpool, (2018).

“The Revolutionary Praxis of Urban Galls” delivered at “Open Graves Open Minds & Supernatural Cities present: The Urban Weird” University of Hertfordshire, (2018).

Proposal 2020 E-flux fellowship 2020

Uma Breakdown

E-flux fellowship 2020 proposal

“Voids”






[Image: Bettinelli-Olpin, M., Bruckner, D., Gillett, T., Martinez, J., McQuaid, G., Silence, R., Swanberg, J., Villella, C., West, T., & Wingard, A. (2012, September 6). V/H/S [Horror, Thriller]. 8383 Productions, Bloody Disgusting, Studio71.]




Background

My PhD research proposes and analyses an approach to art practice as the negotiation of something that overwhelms, or as a “machinic” process that is always collapsing, or as something hidden that can only be understood through how it changes things it comes into proximity with. This work uses existing frameworks from other disciplines such as the écriture feminine of Kathy Acker, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray, the systems of tabletop role playing games, and the theory of horror cinema. Within a chapter on the artist Porpentine Charity Heartscape I wrote a footnote (which coincidentally also references a classic text from e-flux Journal) marking out a loose thread for future research that does not fit within the thesis.

“12. The ellipses in Aperitif along with its other instances of expressiveabsences or damaged/low definition information and therefore could be furtherexamined in terms of writer and curator Legacy Russell’s theory regardingglitches and “sliding between identifications” (Russell, 2012, 2013). Thisline of inquiry could be then further pursued via artist Hito Steyerl’s conceptof the “poor image” which can create “disruptive movements of thought andaffect” (Steyerl, 2009). Likewise theorist Steven Shaviro’s text on the titular“found-footage” horror film “The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activityand the Technologies of Vision”, presents another point of departure viaThe deployment of absence and noise in horror cinema (Shaviro, 2017).Shaviro’s analysis that “We are affected (and oppressed) as much by theirglitches, gaps and limitations as we are by their successful operations”(Shaviro, 2017, p. 331), like those of Russell and Steyerl open up the breaksin digital images as a site of both politics and affect.”

The thread of vital noise/absence/glitch runs through the e-flux archive, appearing repeatedly as the edges of images/politics to Steyerl (#15, #60, #72…), as care to Mary Walling Blackburn (#26) as the with-without to Alenka Zupančič (#33), as capital itself to John Russell (#46), as corruption/revolt to Natasha Ginwala (#67), as the flexible terrain on sonic affects to Lamin Fofana (#79), as woman to Amy Ireland (#80), and the unspeakable/forgotten to Rob Goyanes (#84), as stateless/damaged Palestinian bodies to Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (#106)


For this fellowship, I would pursue this thread through the following questions:


-What is absence, noise, and glitch in the e-flux archive, including where they are not named as such and exist outside of the digital?


-What are their processes?


-What are the politics of formless or unidentifiable, yet dynamic, breaks? What are the politics of collaborating with or centring these?


-What are the tactics deployed for negotiating these unknowns?



Methodology

Through close reading I will identify texts which deal with glitching, volatile/vital absence/a-signification, both directly and tangentially. From these I will extract the processes employed to do so, and map out the differences of these across the journal’s archive. This work will be contextualised through the work of related theorists of absence, damage, and instability such as Georges Bataille, Félix Guattari, and Luce Irigaray.


Output


A taxonomy of absence/noise/glitch within the archive that accounts for the instability of these things, a glitching taxonomy.