Institute of Failure | Failure of Speech 

 

 

Headed by Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment) and Matthew Goulish (Goat Island), the Institute aims to map the face of contemporary failure - deliberate or otherwise. In avowedly cross-disciplinary style, the project brings together artists and writers from fields as diverse as fine arts, economics, computing, architecture and performance. 

For new territories, members of Forced Entertainment and Goat Island read from a collaborative lecture composed by Tim Etchells and Matthew Goulish. The event explores some contemporary and historical linguistic failures, drawing material from sources including the 1958 movie The Vikings and the miswritten 1855 traveller's phrasebook English As She Is Spoke. 

The Institute of Failure is an ongoing project founded in 2001 and currently plays host to the inaugural papers by Etchells and Goulish. These take us into a world of broken lifts, personal disasters, historical catastrophes, bridge collapses, absurdist documentation and philosophical arts projects. Recent additions to the website range from the conceptual slapstick of Howard Matthew's Manual of Assisted Appliances, including a self-assembled collapsing chair, to Sarah Jane Bailes' distracted writing on Distraction. The site also contains links to other failure-related materials on-line from documentation of bankrupt dot-coms and failed frauds, to the study of obsolete media and long-defunct superheroes. 

Matthew Goulish has been a collaborative member of the Chicago-based performance group Goat Island www.goatislandperformance.org since it began in 1987. His book 39 Microlectures in Proximity of Performance was published by Routledge in 2002. 

Tim Etchells is artistic director and writer with Forced Entertainment www.forced.co.uk , 'Britain's most brilliant contemporary theatre company', the Guardian. His publications include The Dream Dictionary (for the modern dreamer), Duckworths 2001, and a major collection of essays on performance Certain Fragments, Routledge 1999. 

A Shooting Live Artists project funded by the BBC and the Arts Council of England.