Lapsus

five settings:
swamp
office
toilet
graffiti
bedroom

— holly childs (@hol_l_y) 5. února 2018

PAF Olomouc 2018: Lapsus

The main focus of PAF 2018 is the lapse in its various forms and constellations. Rather than accepting the traditional notion of lapses as unwanted situations and errors that need to be fixed, PAF strives to explore the aesthetic and theoretical effects these creative failures, breakdowns and deviations can produce. Leaving behind a cultural diagnosis of their causes, this year’s edition of the festival takes on the question of what exactly contemporary artworks and moving images have to do with lapses and how do they interact with their viewers.

The festival program has been prepared
in dialogue with filmmakers, theorists, curators, film and art historians. Since our gradual familiarization with various fields
of lapses has led to many reflections and embarrassments over their both positive and negative meanings, we have decided to make this hesitation visible and turn it into a program structure that allows for free traffic between screenings, lectures, installations, performances and concerts. As a result,
the program is divided into three main parts which, although corresponding to a specific function of lapsus, necessarily overlap(se) and complement each other. The initial idea was to shift the traditional conception of lapsus: no more would it be just a mere faux pas, a gap or a technological and system error, but rather it would become a possibility opened up by the intentional disturbance to the situation, environment or form itself. The first field of lapsus that the festival program strives to explore, is provided by Encounters of Human and Nonhuman. This section offers various metamorphoses, transformations and shifts, both from the perspective of posthumanism and in the context of social, political and environmental changes. The second program part, entitled Short-circuit Constellations, involves crossing the wires of viewers’, visitors’ and listeners’ expectations, habits and aesthetic standards. In order to name the third domain of lapsus, we have employed the neologism Unfilm which systematically refers to the Freudian “unheimlich” (uncanny), a concept signifying the return of the repressed, i.e. something disturbingly unfamiliar and horrifying yet long familiar.

Throughout the exhibited works and moderated discussions, the lapse will
come about as a creative and affective operation that activates our mental and emotional responses while producing moments of irritation, discomfort or loss.
On the one hand, the lapse will be examined as a formal strategy, based on placing images, sounds and figures into disturbing and risky relationships; on the other, such lapses generate situations in which the audience’s expectations and experiences are radically betrayed or distorted. Ultimately, it
is this very unpredictability of the lapses that allows us to step beyond an anthropocentric perspective toward the media relationships between objects, technologies and humans. But is that really so? Lapsus.

Tomáš Jirsa & Martin Mazanec