Lunchtime Talk
Fri 5 Feb 2021 13:00-14:00 at YouTube Live
Making Through Failing
We are delighted to be joined by Digital Artist & UWE PhD Researcher Rob Eagle for this Lunchtime talk. Rob will be discussing failure & its many facets & how it's often an unavoidable part of the creative process.
c/o Rob Eagle
Speaker
Rob Eagle
Rob Eagle is a PhD researcher, employing virtual reality and immersive, interactive media to documentary stories of non-cisgender lives. Both the creation and the resulting interactive works will raise questions for how to tell stories that focus on complexities around embodiment and non-cisgender subjectivities. His PhD is AHRC-funded as part of the 3D3 Centre for Doctoral Training.This Lunchtime Talk will be broadcast live on Watershed's YouTube channel.
Quentin Crisp supposedly once said: ‘If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style.’ In this talk, digital artist & UWE PhD researcher Rob Eagle will not be romanticising failure or pretending it makes us stronger. Failure hurts. And it’s an unavoidable part of the creative process.
Inspired by Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, this talk embraces techniques of failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking and not knowing. These are actions and feelings many artists, academics and queers know all too well by ‘not fitting in’ or achieving the usual societal metrics of success. Once we embrace our outcast status, everyday failure can open up opportunities for us to live non-normative lifestyles, form alternative kinship groups and create work that is true to who we are and how we see the world.
Rob will provide ample illustrations of his own failed creative projects. He is an interdisciplinary artist and practice-based PhD researcher at UWE Bristol, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council through the 3D3 Centre for Doctoral Training. He makes work in formats from film to audio and interactive installations. His recent augmented reality installation, Through the Wardrobe, has been exhibited at film festivals and galleries 2019-20, including Sheffield Doc/Fest (nominated for the Best Digital Storytelling Award), HOME Manchester, International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (nominated for the Best Digital Experience Award), the Barbican Centre in London and Goethe-Institut China in Beijing.
Join us on Fri 5th February, 13:00-14:00 for the talk and to take part in the discussion afterwards.
