JACINTA GILES - EXPOSURE INTERNATIONAL OPEN CALL

Time Out of Joint is a visual imagining of the literary themes of American science fiction author Philip K. Dick. Considered as one of the most influential writers of the second half of the 20th century, Dick’s future-based works are still regarded as a rich source of insight into our contemporary world. Dick’s stories typically focus on the fragile nature of what is real and the construction of personal identity, with his work starting with the basic assumption that there cannot be one single objective reality and that everything is a matter of perception—the ground liable to shift under your feet at any point in time. Dick’s characters are often unsure as to whether their memories, or their very identifies, are real or artificial and what constitutes a human being is a major subject within his work. 

The images used in this project explore different motifs in Dick’s writing, as identified by Eric Carl Link in Understanding Philip K. Dick, with images on the theme of Know Thyself, The Android and the Human, The Theodicy Problem, The Evolved Human, and Technology, Media, Drugs and Madness. This project pays homage to Dick’s prophetic vision that the world we would find ourselves in would challenge our notions of humanity, as we become increasingly aware of its ephemeral construction. The photograph itself is also a recurrent theme in Dick’s stories, with it providing a record of an otherwise unbelievable truth or finding some reality behind the façade of images deliberately manufactured to hide it.

BIOGRAPHY

Jacinta Giles is an Australian-based photographer who is interested in finding new ways to compose, inhabit and create encounters with the televisual. Through revealing television’s narrative gestures, textural layers, and shifting velocities, her work brings to light new structures of digital matter—materialising our blind spot to the televisual’s fleeting contingency and its unique way of mediating our existence. As the impact of the televisual on the way we make sense predominantly goes unnoticed, Giles’s photographs offer an alternative pathway for seeing digital embodiment as part of our contemporary condition.

Giles holds a PhD and a MA Visual Art from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, and has exhibited across Australia and internationally, including in the United Kingdom and United States.