Category Archives: exhibition

A Visibility Matrix | Sven Anderson & Gerard Byrne at The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin

The Douglas Hyde Gallery presents an ambitious new artwork that explores the politics and conditions of visibility. Initiated by Dublin-based artists and long-term collaborators, Sven Anderson and Gerard Byrne, A Visibility Matrix assembles contributions from a distributed panel of artists, film-makers and others within a synchronised, multi-channel video installation that will be presented for the first time in Gallery 1 of The Douglas Hyde Gallery.

A Visibility Matrix unfolds as a response to the ambitions of abandoned art and technology projects from the 1960s–1980s that prioritised multiscreen video projection, monitor arrays, communications networks and algorithmic composition principles. These projects explored visual excess and hyperstimulation prior to the development of the Internet, and before multi-screen video displays expanded into the vernacular backdrop of everyday public and private life. Considered now, the plural voices of these experiments in perception and communication simultaneously prophesise and bypass the homogenised conditions that have come to be accepted as network culture.

See Douglas Hyde website for more information (link above).

Land / Sea / Signal | Group Exhibition at Rua Red, Dublin

From overhead satellites to underwater sea cables — network infrastructures and algorithmic software systems are as ubiquitous as they are invisible. Today’s internet infrastructures are complex adaptive systems; they encompass data centres, software protocols, mineral mines and assembly line workers; connecting the flow of information beaming from satellites to the smartphones in our hands.

We are firmly embedded within these structures — impacting our online-dating profiles, making transactions in financial markets, discerning our credit scores and optimising our cities, playing an increasing role in the exercise of power and the restructuring of society. These spaces are sites of endless flux and transformation enabled by hardware and software updates and intelligent algorithms that observe data and make decisions. Everything we do touches or is touched by infrastructure but what is needed in terms of infrastructure for cultural production today, and what type of users of these systems do we want to be?

Land / Sea / Signal explores how we perceive and understand these spaces as their image is constructed by the frictions between people, machines, interfaces, data and infrastructure. By considering the complex entanglements between environmental and socio-political conditions that are involved in the configuration of infrastructure space, the artists in this exhibition bring about a new understanding of infrastructure and its materialities. They connect to geography, protocols, economic markets and communication grids, building a discursive space of practice that aims to move beyond critical concerns of these issues to move toward the imagination and speculation of the potentialities of what infrastructure could be.

Curated by Nora O Murchú

Address
RUA RED, South Dublin Arts Centre, Tallagh
Dublin
Dublin

Dublin 24.
Ireland

A Decade of Centenaries • Century Ireland.ie

The Century Ireland project is an online historical newspaper that tells the story of the events of Irish life a century ago.

Century Ireland is published on a fortnightly basis, beginning in May 2013, and is the main online portal for the Irish decade of commemorations, 1912-23.

News reporting on life in Ireland 100 years ago is supported by a wealth of visual, archival and contextual material to facilitate an understanding of the complexities of Irish life in the year between 1912 and 1923.

Century Ireland is produced by a team of researchers at Boston College Ireland and the project is funded by the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

Century Ireland is hosted by RTÉ and the site is complimented by their broadcast schedule and material from the RTÉ archives.

At the core of Century Ireland is a collaborative partnership between the major cultural and educational institutions in Ireland. By working so fruitfully together, the various partners are making a range of rarely (or never) seen material available that will bring the events of a century ago to life. Century Ireland was awarded an Eircom Spider award for best Irish Arts, Culture & Heritage website in 2013 and shortlisted for a prestigious Prix Europa, one of the biggest international prizes for public service television, radio and online production.