Output details

The Nabokov Paper: 'Percale Thrip'

Percale Thrip is a video work made for ‘The Nabokov Paper: An experiment in novel reading’.

The project interprets Vladimir Nabokov’s famous class taught at Cornell University, New York State, ‘Literature 311-312: Masters of European Fiction’. Wylde focused on Nabokov’s pedagogic approach to Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.

The video work highlighted Wylde’s exploratory approaches to ‘processes of performative assemblage(s)’, Wylde’s term articulating super-disciplinary foci including linguistics, philosophies, gender studies, social theories and art practices. Such approaches draw attention to accumulation, arrangement, movement, and that which is improvisatory, multi-modal or otherwise unpredictable.

The work includes live actions for the camera and ‘recycling’ of image, text and audio data through methods of appropriative processes.

Following two of Nabokov's questions on Kafka’s work, the project deconstructs, bothers and re-positions any hermetic hermeneutic by appropriating material from Wikipedia factualities and Google image searches. These online operations were disrupted with inappropriate of grammatically incorrect text input generative of aberrant juxtapositions, imagery and sound effects. The machine translation service, Google Translate, was used to dislocate text from one language into another. These ‘incorrect’ activities privilege modes of contingency, multiplicity and overlap to recover online image, sound and text data used to hybridise postproduction filters, transitions & generators. These ‘performative assemblages’ of ""things"" or pieces of ""things"" parallel ideas of non-linear historiographies, otherings and the hauntological queer of literature, performance art and film.