Jane Frances Dunlop

Dr Jane Frances Dunlop BA (Hons), MA, PhD

Lecturer in Digital Media

Jane Frances Dunlop (b. 1987) is an artist, researcher and educator. She creates installations, videos, essays, poems, and performances. She exhibits and performs in galleries and cultural institutions internationally including Kunstlerhaus (Vienna, AU), Turner Contemporary (Margate, UK), ACMI (Melbourne, AUS), the European Cultural Centre (Venice, IT), among others. Her writing has appeared in journals and digital culture publications, including Real Life Online and Performance Research. Dunlop holds a PhD in Art and Media from the University of Brighton and sits on the board of Performance Studies international. Her most recent work, select important things (2022), is currently being exhibited during the Venice Biennale as part of the European Cultural Centre’s Personal Structures.

Recognition
  • Board Member (Lexicon Officer) Performance Studies international, 2019 – 2022
  • Visiting Artist Scholar, Sensorium at York University, Autumn 2019
  • Member, Sonic Cyberfeminisms Collective 2017 – Present
  • Member, Dance Critical Theory Group 2013 – 2018
  • Member, Salon Flux Art Collective 2012 – Present
  • Member, Performance Studies international 2010 – Present

Research / Scholarly interests

Jane Frances Dunlop creates installations, videos, essays, poems, and performances driven by research into contemporary systems and critical theories, and seeks to capture how these shape-shifting ideas are lived, narrativised, and performed. Her work begins with the concrete structures and abstract ideas that make the world, shaping how we are together. It ends in aesthetic propositions that provide no answers.

Between 2015 and 2018, she created a body of artworks that interrogated the cultural functions of internet communication tools through their misuse: minor fabrics (2016); exercises in nervousness (2016); (tfw) spin measure cut (2016); hurl outward at a certain pace (2016); weaver (2017); speculative and palimpsestic documents (2017); collected dissonances (2018) and minor documents (new effort) (2018). Disturbing the standard use of digital communication tools was, in this series, a way of understanding how they already trouble, and glitch, our everyday lives. The research that accompanied the project was presented at conferences as well as in essays and articles published by scholarly journals and digital culture publications.

Her current project, _select important things_ (ongoing) brings together stock footage, memories and subjective definitions in order to probe the how we make knowledge for ourselves and for machines, and how that knowledge in turn makes the world. It is supported by grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.

Key funded projects

Dr Dunlop's current project, select important things (ongoing) brings together stock footage, memories and subjective definitions in order to probe the how we make knowledge for ourselves and for machines, and how that knowledge in turn makes the world. It is supported by grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.

Media activity
    • Crisis and the habit of being oneself, Programme Essay for Joe Moran’s On the Habit of Being Oneself, Sadler’s Wells, London, UK. (September 2017)
    • Through the Wires, Essay in Real Life Mag, Online Publication (26 July 2017
    • Nervous? We should be, Essay in Real Life Mag, Online Publication (18 July 2016)
    • Care in Crowded Spaces, Essay in Exeunt Magazine, Online Publication (13 Oct 2015) http

Recent publications

Presentations
  • Dissonance: theatricality in internet-situated performance practices, Theatricality and the Arts Symposium, University of Lancaster. Sept 2017.
  • Weaving a collapsed network: sound in hurl outward at a certain pace, Sonic Cyberfeminisms, University of Lincoln. May 2017.
  • Navigating & Positioning Tangles (co-authored with Mira Loew), Twofold: the Particularities of Working in Pairs, Birkbeck University of London. March 2017.
  • Talk to you later: address and atmospheric affect in internet-situated performance, PSi2016, University of Melbourne. July 2016.
  • Nervousness as/is noise International Symposium for Electronic Arts, City University Hong Kong. May 2016.
  • Care as Proximity in Internet-situated performance, Conventions of Proximity, Birkbeck University of London. May 2016.
  • Les Yeux d'Argos: Visual spaces of online performance in Selma & Sofiane Ouissi's Tate Room Live Performance, International Visual Methods Conference, University of Brighton. September 2015.
  • Side by Side: Performance, Proximity, and Collapse in Networked Art, Arts in Society, Imperial College University of London. July 2015.