Split/Flip

Split/Flip is a series of moving image works made through animating photographs. They evidence the in/compatibility of subjectivity, in relation to the mental image we have of ourselves. I follows French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s assertion that the subject is always split (and therefore incompatible) but that image we project – through others, in mirrors and, more importantly in art – shows us a total Gestalt, a subject that makes sense and is compatible. This image, he writes, is an illusion.

The videos emerge from a series pf photographic diptychs taken in Porto in 1999.

A specially edited version of these films was shown in As We Speak, an experimental film screening event as part of the2010 Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, at Stereo in Glasgow on the 28 April 2010.

Split Flip (Flip)

flip, v. 1 turn over or cause to turn over with a quick, smooth movement. 2 toss (something) into the air so that it turns over. 3 (flip through) flick through. 4 informal, suddenly become deranged or very angry.
Concise Oxford English Dictionary, Tenth edition, revised in 2002 and edited by Judy Pearsall.

Split Flip (Split)

[…] the subject can never be anything other than divided, split, alienated from himself […]. The split is irreducible, can never be healed; there’s no possibility of synthesis.
Dylan Evans, Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1996, p. 192.

Split Flip (Misrecognition)

Misrecognition is not ignorance. Misrecognition represents a certain organisation of affirmations and negations to which the subject is attached.
Jacques Lacan.