The Arts And Changing Rural Places, Bernadette Quinn Dr

Blog Posts

This blog post reflects on how recent changes to rural Ireland is influencing the arts. It recognises that rural places are very vibrant and dynamic, and that this offers many opportunities and challenges from an arts perspective. The blog also reflects on a panel discussion that the FADE project team hosted on ‘The arts and changing rural places’ at the Arts Council & Local Government’s biennial Places Matter conference in March 2022.

The research activities conducted for this publication were funded by the Irish Research Council.

Data Narratives: Aesthetic Activation Of Urban Space Through Augmented Reality, Conor Mcgarrigle Dr., John Buckley

Books/Book Chapters

This chapter discusses Data Narratives, a commissioned augmented reality artwork resulting from a period as artist in residence with Dublin City Dashboard. Data Narratives focused on working with city data to create hybrid artistic representations of Dublin’s ongoing housing affordability crisis, acting both as activist artistic engagement with the socio-political-economic space of the city and aesthetic activation of urban space through augmented reality. As data describes and defines so much of our digital every day, the project and residency programme asked how it could be leveraged as a medium for artistic creation and how could art supply new insights …

Merging Modest With Complexity, Mark Garry

Doctoral

This thesis will enable a retrospective critical examination of aspects of my practice as an artist from 2005 - 2020. The research question addresses the implication of multiple forms of inter-reliance enabled in the practice. This will be enabled by opening a discursive space that retrospectively, integrates and critically examines the role and function of inter-reliance as a structural methodology and how this is implicated in the practice over this period.

This thesis will use term inter-reliance to define a play of relations where individual art works when viewed in isolation exist only in partial illumination as a form of …

Handouts Don’T Exist. Hustle Or You Don’T Eat., Conor Mcgarrigle Dr.

Articles

It is well established that AI has a bias problem; however, black-boxed machine learning systems render it difficult to even understand and visualize the nature and extent of the problem, let alone find solutions. This paper discusses an artistic research approach toward highlighting AI bias and explores the aesthetic potential of machine learning through a case study of an AI artwork called #RiseandGrind.The artist trained a recurrent neural network on a dataset extracted from Twitter hashtags (#Riseandgrind and #Hustle),which were selected to represent a specific filter bubble (embodied neoliberal precarity) in order to produce a biased AI that generates tweets …

Flesh And Circuit: Rethinking Performance And Technology, Conor Mcgarrigle, E L. Putnam

Articles

The live, embodied, material, and interactive qualities of performance have made it a notable means of exploring the creative potential of technological engagement, acting as a critical vector for revealing and resisting the technological colonisation of everyday life. The innovative collaborations of Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) during the 1960’s with artists such as Yvonne Rainer and Robert Rauschenberg, Stelarc’s extreme body modifications, Dumb Type’s intermedia performance, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena and La Pocha Nostra’s poetic and speculative imaginings, have mapped the advances in technology and opened new creative fields to explore embodiment. However, there are still some significant oversights …

Tools For Wellbeing, Barbara Knezevic, Michael O'Hara, Claire Louise Bennett, Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll, Linda Quinlan, Suzanne Walsh, Maja Ćiric, Maeve Connolly, Sue Rainsford, Peter Maybury

Books/Book Chapters

No abstract provided.

Art In The Data-City: Critical Data Art In The Age Of Surveillance Capitalism, Conor Mcgarrigle

Books/Book Chapters

This chapter considers the role of digital art practice, with an emphasis on the Irish context, in what is described as the data-city, that is a theorisation of this contemporary urban condition so infused with opaque data-driven systems that almost every action is described by and enacted through data. The ubiquitous deployment and action of data assemblages – the networks of hardware and software that enable data-capture regimes – in urban space are changing the nature of the city itself in ways that are not readily apparent. Critical data art practices it is suggested, provide a method to highlight and …

Care Full Objects, Barbara Knezevic

Articles

No abstract provided.

Femagogical Strategies In The Art School: Navigating The Institution, Barbara Knezevic, Amy Walsh

Articles

This writing aims to define and examine ‘femagogy’ and the transformative potential for an inclusive intersectional feminist teaching practice in Fine Art education in the context of the contemporary Irish art school. This writing will trace the influence of linguistic power structures and the influence of broader institutional patriarchy in an educational setting and outline the inspirations and genealogies of femagogy. This writing provides situated embodied examples of femagogy in practice. It proposes the femagogical model of teaching as one that situates itself outside prevailing patriarchal models and proposes strategies to reimagine knowledge production and navigate the prevailing structural patriarchy …

Art In The Age Of Financial Crisis, Conor Mcgarrigle, Marisa Lerer

Articles

This issue addresses the long financial crisis of 2008 and the nature and diversity of artistic responses to it. This financial crisis is understood as a globalized result of late capitalism that nonetheless is experienced differently at local, regional, and national levels. It is multi- faceted in nature, a phenomenon that has historical roots and precedents that inform contemporary responses. Artists are not restricted to engage with the economy through one specific vehicle of inquiry or one type of medium and message. Therefore, the central question that this issue poses is: what is the artist’s role in finance, crisis, and …

Laboratoire DéBerlinisation: Art, Finance, And The Legacies Of Colonialism In Contemporary African Art: An Interview With Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, Conor Mcgarrigle, Marisa Lerer

Articles

Mansour Ciss Kanakassy (b. 1957) is a Berlin-based Senegalese artist whose practice addresses the legacy of colonialism in contemporary Africa, in particular as it is expressed in the financial systems of the former Francophone colonies of West Africa, where the currency, the CFA franc, historically tied to the French franc, is now pegged to the euro. The acronym CFA originally stood for Colonies Françaises d’Afrique – French Colonies of Africa – and now Communauté Financière Africaine – African Financial Community. In 2001, Ciss Kanakassy created the Laboratoire Déberlinisation (Déberlinisation Laboratory), a multifaceted project that traces contemporary African issues to the …

Art Interventions And Disruptions In Financial Systems: An Interview With Paolo Cirio, Marisa Lerer, Conor Mcgarrigle

Articles

Prior to the release of the 2016 Panama Papers and 2017 Paradise Papers – leaked documents that uncovered the movement of funds through offshore tax havens – conceptual artist Paolo Cirio’s (b. 1979) project Loophole for All (2013) revealed and documented the mechanics behind offshore financial centers. In this interview, Cirio expounds upon his investigations of offshore banking practices, describes his projects for instituting alternative financial models, and explains his hacktivist (i.e. Internet activist) strategies that engage with legal and economic systems. Defining the foundational movements that inform his work, Cirio in turn illuminates his methods of direct provocation and …

The Us’S Economic Promises Are Over: An Interview With Miguel Luciano, Marisa Lerer, Conor Mcgarrigle

Articles

Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September 2017. The island was left without electricity and clean water for months. However, the natural disaster was not the only cause of this lasting devastation. The financial fall-out from predatory loans, which led to Puerto Rico’s inability to invest funds in its own infrastructure, caused an enduring humanitarian disaster. Artist Miguel Luciano (b. 1972) in this interview discusses his work in relation to the 2017 Puerto Rican debt crisis and the legacy of the over 100-year span of Puerto Rico’s colonial status as a US territory, which gives the US disproportionate control over …

Insurgent Finances: An Interview With Gabriela Ceja And Fran Ilich, Marisa Lerer, Conor Mcgarrigle

Articles

When the financial crisis of 2008 exposed the opaque workings of global financial markets, it led to calls for alternate economic models to replace the excesses of contemporary capitalism. A decade on, it can seem that those calls went unheeded. However, in the collaborative social practice of Fran Ilich and Gabriela Ceja, sustainable alternatives modeled on ancient modes of exchange are being developed with projects that are deeply embedded in economic practice; whether that is running a functioning microbank complete with complex financial instruments in Spacebank or serving Zapatista coffee from Chiapas, Mexico in the Diego de la Vega Coffee …

Walking Code, Conor Mcgarrigle

Articles

This paper describes an early stage research project that seeks to apply Situationist concepts of psychogeography to urban walking as artistic and activist practice. The project seeks to ultimately create a syntax that can be used to describe and codify the subjective spatial practice of walking in the city. This process is a conceptual and discursive exercise to generate new knowledge about urban space as embodied data space that seeks to create a practical open framework that can be deployed to algorithmically generate walking experiences tailored toward specific desires and activities.

This will be achieved through the development of algorithmic …

Impact16 Transdisciplinary Symposium, Pact Zollverein, Essen Germany, Conor Mcgarrigle

Other resources

IMPACT16 is an encounter with HOOD, RYBN.ORG und FORMATIONS, three expert collectives whose diversified forms of cooperation and flexible working practices transcend disciplinary boundaries.

How and where do alternative realities come about both in and between different fields of knowledge? How can we productively uncover contradictory ›rift zones‹ in today’s world? What kind of frameworks for action can we cultivate?

Informed by multiple perspectives and practices in the arts, politics, technology, sociology, economics and science, the contributing collectives’ inquiries and strategies circumvent disciplinary limits and constraints and open up new spaces for thought and action.

The transdisciplinary symposium offers 30 …

A Site Of Change: The Masterplan, Brian Fay

Exhibition Catalogues

Essay on the community based art project The Master Plan curated by Jennie Guy with artists Ella de Burca and John Beattie.

Mark Garry: A New Quiet, Mark Garry, Georgina Jackson, Caroline Hancock, Declan Long, Brian Cass, Joanne Laws, Cristin Leach Hughes

Books/Book Chapters

A survey of ten years practice.

Catalogue Essay For Kiera O'Toole Solo Exhibtion, Brian Fay

Exhibition Catalogues

A catalogue essay discussing elements of O'Toole's practice as it responds to recent contemporary drawing practices and the specifics of the history and architecture of the Wicklw site.

Kiera O'Toole - A Fragile Intensity, Brian Fay

Catalogues

This catalogue essay discusses the Irish artist Kiera O'Toole's practice in relation to serial drawing practices of the 1960's and Alain Badiou's observations on drawing.

Locative Media As Remix, Conor Mcgarrigle

Books/Book Chapters

While data-driven art is not new, recent developments in technical, artistic, and social spheres have coalesced to produce new opportunities for artists and activists who remix data with space and place to form locationally specific political critiques of great power and flexibility.

Brian Fay Contribution To The Lismore Castle Arts Public Discussion- Painting As A Dream, Friday 25th Of April, 2014, Brian Fay

Other resources

Brian Fay contribution to the Lismore Castle Arts, Waterford, Public Discussion- Painting As A Dream, Friday 25^th of April, 2014

Paper - A Reserve Or Backgound?, Brian Fay

Conference Papers

Paper: A Reserve or a Background?

“Using examples from contemporary practice and my own research, this presentation will discuss two models for the role of paper in drawing: as background and as reserve. It will focus on Walter Benjamin's definition for the graphic lines almost metaphysical relationship to the background, and compare it with Norman Bryson's model of the paper as a reserve, for him an 'area without qualities'.”

Forget The FlâNeur, Conor Mcgarrigle

Articles

This paper discusses the connections between the ‘flâneur’, Baudelaire's symbol of modernity, the anonymous man on the streets of nineteenth century Paris, and his contemporary digital incarnation, the ‘cyberflâneur’. It is argued that, although the flâ- neur could be successfully re-imagined as the cyberflâneur in the early days of the web, this nine- teenth century model of male privilege no longer fits the purpose. It is suggested that it is time to forget the flâneur and search for a new model to consider the peripatetic nature of location-aware networked devices in the digitally augmented city.

Augmented Resistance: The Possibilities For Ar And Data Driven Art, Conor Mcgarrigle

Articles

This article discusses the possibilities for Augmented Reality (AR) as a driver of data based art. The combination of AR and Open Data (in the broadest post-Wikileaks sense) is seen to provide a powerful tool-set for the artist/activist to augment specific sites with a critical, context-specific data layer. Such situated interventions offer powerful new methods for the political activation of sites which enhance and strengthen traditional non- virtual approaches and should be thought of as complementary to, rather than replacing, physical intervention.

I offer as a case study this author’s “NAMAland” project, a mobile artwork which uses Open Data and …

Brian Fay Interview For Peel Magazine, Brian Fay

Other resources

This interview is from a series of artist conversations around the use of and relationships to the materials they employ in their practice. Other interviewees include Alexandra Hughes, Nadia Scola, Rachel Sharp, James Watts and Zara Worth.

Temporalities And The Drawn Response To The Conservation And Restoration Of Paintings, Brian Fay

Other resources

This paper will consider the temporal implications for drawing in the light of conservation and restoration treatments to paintings by the Seventeenth Century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

Using three critical frameworks: Norman Bryson’s becoming model for drawing and the relationship of liminality to a painting during conservation/restoration, George Didi Huberman’s anti-chronological reading of the detail and the pan in painting, and Walter Benjamin’s definitions of drawing the paper will seek to address some implications for a drawing practice that responds to a pre-existing museum artworks.

The paper will present some findings from my own drawing practice that responds to Vermeer’s …

The Construction Of Locative Situations: Locative Media And The Situationist International, Recuperation Or Redux?, Conor Mcgarrigle

Articles

A trend exists within locative media art of invoking the practices of the Situationist International (SI) as an art historical and theoretical background to contemporary practices. It is claimed that locative media seeks to re-enchant urban space though the application of locative technologies to develop novel and experimental methods for navigating, exploring and experiencing the city. To this end, SI concepts such as psychogeography and the techniques of detournement and the de ́rive (drift) have exerted considerable influence on locative media practices, but questions arise as to whether this constitutes a valid contemporary appropriation or a recuperative co-option, serving to …

Art In The Life World, Review, Niamh Ann Kelly

Articles

No abstract provided.

Milestones / Miles’S Tones: A Coincidence, Brian Fay

Exhibition Catalogues

Milestones/Miles’s Tones: a Coincidence is a catalogue essay published in the 25^th. anniversary catalogue for Black Church Print Studio’s, Dublin.