The carnivalesque context of Nuit Blanche offers an opportunity to investigate the potentially ominous and calamitous pairing of falling and failing with a light and irreverent touch. Drop Out hints at the plight of the student, and the 1960s phrase turn on, tune in, drop out. The predominant culture of success streamlines achievement to a narrow array of scenarios. Alternative modes of accessing knowledge and assessing merit are consistently marginalized. To drop out is to fall out of the normative, and into an outside. The countercultural movements of then and now persistently work against the predominant grain to forcefully facilitate a distinction between an act of failure and a failure to act. As metaphorical illustrations of these societal conditions some of the works featured (video, performance, sound, installation) will descend, while others will stay in seemingly perennial suspension. While works featured in Drop Out will often seem to dwell on the tangible and the concrete, they will also function as acknowledgments that to dropout (however momentarily) can also be a momentous event leading to a perspectival shift or an epiphanic state. Or, invoking the aforementioned failure aesthetic, they might merely aggregate into a series of futile attempts. The fact that to defy gravity confirms its vertiginous pull is the intrinsic paradox explored in Drop Out.