Digital Art in Ireland: New Media and Irish Artistic Practice

By Anthem Press

Digital art is fundamentally digital; it is art which cannot happen without some contemporary media technology, some element of computation, some bit-based machine. Digital art goes by a lot of names – net art, electronic art, computational art, multimedia art, new media art, screen-based art – but generally, this is a domain in which the objects of discussion rely absolutely on modern and contemporary electronics to achieve their artistic purpose. 

This collection of essays explores digital art in Ireland, filling a major gap in the national media archaeology of Ireland by bringing together a collection of timely perspectives from scholars and practitioners engaged with screen-based expression. In no way is this book a true representative selection of forms and figures, but it is, hopefully, a small contribution to addressing what remains an intellectual void. 

Wonderfully creative things are happening with computers, screens and machines right across the spectrum of artistic practice, but through disciplinary isolation – by focusing only on fine art, literature or film – we are blinding ourselves to contemporary media art as a wider cultural upheaval. The intimate connections being formed between the digital and the expressive, and how such production is mediated through national contexts, will only be fully revealed when considered through an interdisciplinary gaze. This book, comprising contributions from EL Putnam, Anne Karhio, Ken Keating, Conor McGarrigle, Kieran Nolan, Claire Fitch, Kirstie North and Chris Clarke, attempts to do just that, treating what it means for art to be both digital and Irish.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Feb 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785274800

Book preview

Digital Art in Ireland

Digital Art in Ireland

New Media and Irish Artistic Practice

Edited by James O’Sullivan

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2021

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2021 James O’Sullivan editorial matter and selection;

individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-478-7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-478-3 (Hbk)

Cover image is from The Prairie Picture Show (2014), by Conor McGarrigle.

Copyright with the artist.

This title is also available as an e-book.

To Matthew, John and Mary, three valued friends

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Notes on Contributors

Chapter 1.Introduction: Digital Art in Ireland

James O’Sullivan

Chapter 2.Strange Mothers: The Maternal and Contemporary Media Art in Ireland

EL Putnam

Chapter 3.Between Aesthetics and Institutions: Irish Electronic Poetry

Anne Karhio

Chapter 4.‘to shine upon the original all the more fully’: Contemporary New Media Adaptations of James Joyce

Kenneth Keating

Chapter 5.Art in the Data-City: Critical Data Art in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism

Conor McGarrigle

Chapter 6.Experimental Arcade Video Games as Self-Reflexive Media Art

Kieran Nolan

Chapter 7.Folding, Unfolding, Refolding Sound

Claire Fitch

Chapter 8.Treacherous Images and Animal Gazes: Ailbhe Ní Bhriain’s Reports to an Academy, 2015

Kirstie North

Chapter 9.Pressing Send: Distribution and Curation in Irish New Media Art

Chris Clarke

Index

Illustrations

2.1. Aideen Barry, Not to be Known , 2015, Single-channel video. Courtesy of the artist

2.2. EL Putnam, Rendered , 2017, Digital performance. Courtesy of the artist

5.1. NAMAland (2010–12), Augmented Reality Mobile Application

5.2. 24hour Social (2014–16), Data-Driven Generative Video Installation

6.1. Control (2013) installation at Materiality, NUI Galway, May 2015

6.2. Arcade Operator (2017), in-game screenshot

7.1. Pre-composition reference score, graphic presentation for score sections, brass band score, and retro disco score for And The Birds Sang (2016)

7.2. Pre-composition time template created from Frank Zappa’s The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet (1966) and text for Murdering The Time (2017)

8.1. Installation view, RHA, Dublin, 2016. Photo by Mike Hannon

8.2. Reports to an Academy #1, Video & CGI composite, colour, sound, 2015. Courtesy of Domobaal Gallery, London

Acknowledgements

The editor would like to thank Megan Greiving and everyone at Anthem Press for their contributions to this project. He would also like to thank his colleagues at University College Cork, particularly Órla Murphy, Graham Allen, Mike Cosgrave, Shawn Day and Máirín MacCarron, for their support and collegiality.

Anne Karhio would like to acknowledge funding from the Irish Research Council, and the European Commission via Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions.

Part of Kieran Nolan’s chapter is based on the article Arcade Operator, an Art Game Experiment about Arcade repair from Issue 1 of VGA Reader (2017), published by the Video Game Art Gallery, Chicago: videogameartgallery.com/vga-reader.

Notes on Contributors

Chris Clarke is senior curator of the Glucksman, University College Cork, where he has curated numerous exhibitions of Irish and international contemporary artists. He has also curated international exhibitions including Innsbruck International 2020 and 2018, Innsbruck, Austria; Under the Surface: Newfoundland & Labrador at the 55th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; WADE IN at Eastern Edge Gallery, St. John’s, Newfoundland; and The Second Act at Arts Centre de Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, Netherlands. He has published numerous texts and reviews of contemporary art and is a frequent contributor to art journals and magazines including Art Monthly, Source, VAN and Photography & Culture.

Claire Fitch is a composer of electoacoustic music, completing a PhD in Sonic Art at Queen’s University of Belfast in 2019. Many works are inspired by electronic literature and game design, with performances on RTÉ Lyric FM and RTÉ Radio One; at conferences such as Electronic Literature Organisation and Kylie: The Symposium; and at festivals such as Music Current, HearSay, Hilltown, First Fortnight and SPIKE. Claire is also a cellist and a lecturer. She was a member of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland from 1995 to 2012 and is programme director, MA/MSc in Music Technology at Dundalk Institute of Technology.

Anne Karhio is an Irish Research Council Laureate Project Fellow at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is a graduate of the University of Helsinki, holds a PhD in English from NUI Galway and has worked as a lecturer and researcher in various institutions in Ireland, Norway and France. Her research interests include contemporary poetry and poetics; digital technologies and aesthetics of space and landscape; and Irish poetry and human rights. She has published widely on contemporary Irish poetry, literature and landscape, and digital aesthetics. She is the author of ‘Slight Return’: Paul Muldoon’s Poetics of Space (2017), and a co-editor of Crisis and Contemporary Poetry (2011).

Kenneth Keating is the author of Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Canon: Critical Limitations and Textual Liberations (2017). Kenneth has held research and lecturing roles in University College Dublin and University College Cork. He has published widely on modern and contemporary poetry, and is the editor of Smithereens Press. He is co-founder of Measuring Equality in the Arts Sector (MEAS). As a postdoctoral researcher he worked with Professor Margaret Kelleher on the Digital Platform for Contemporary Irish Writing and contributed to the ‘Joyce Today’ project.

Conor McGarrigle is an artist and researcher working primarily with digital media. His practice is characterised by urban interventions mediated through digital technologies and data-driven explorations of networked social practices. He is a lecturer in Fine Art New Media at the TU Dublin School of Creative Arts. He has exhibited extensively internationally including the Venice Biennale, Fundació Miro Mallorca, the Saint-Étienne Biennale, Redline Gallery Denver, SIGGRAPH, FILE São Paulo, Art on the Net Tokyo, Seoul New Media, SITE Santa Fe as well as EVA International, Tulca, Green on Red and the Science Gallery.

Kieran Nolan is an artist-researcher exploring the aesthetic, material, and connective properties of arcade video game interfaces, through digital art, design critique, and platform histories. He is a lecturer in Creative Media at Dundalk Institute of Technology, and Co Director of DkIT's Creative Arts Research Centre. Kieran completed his PhD thesis ‘The Art, Aesthetics, and Materiality of the Arcade Videogame Interface: A Practice-Included JAMMA Era Arcade Platform Study’ through the GV2 Research Group at Trinity College Dublin’s School of Computer Science and Statistics in 2019. See https://kierannolan.com.

Kirstie North is an independent curator and art historian based in the United Kingdom. She has published writing on Tacita Dean, Sean Lynch, Jeremy Millar and Lucy Skaer. Recent research projects include a survey of the 1990s for Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.

EL Putnam is lecturer in Digital Media at National University Ireland, Galway. She is an artist-philosopher writer working predominately in performance art and digital technologies. Her work focuses on borders and entanglements of gesture, particularly the interplay of the corporeal with the machinic. Through her artistic practice, she explores hidden histories and emotional experiences, testing the limits of their un-representability. She holds a PhD from the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. Her research focuses on continental aesthetic philosophy, performance studies, digital studies and feminist theory. She is member of the artists’ groups Mobius (Boston) and Bbeyond (Belfast).

James O’Sullivan lectures in the Department of Digital Humanities at University College Cork. He has previously held faculty positions at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Sheffield. James is the author of Towards a Digital Poetics (2019). He has also edited several collections, including Reading Modernism with Machines (2016) and Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities (2020). His scholarship has appeared in a variety of international publications, most notably, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique and Digital Humanities Quarterly. James’s writing has also appeared in popular venues like the Guardian, the Irish Times and LA Review of Books. See https://jamesosullivan.org for more on his work.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

DIGITAL ART IN IRELAND

James O’Sullivan

What do we mean by ‘digital art’? Much art, as one would expect with any type of cultural production in the twenty-first century, is framed by the digital. But art which is digitally remediated only so that it can be stored or shared via computers is not necessarily digital art. Acts of digitisation can change aspects of a work and influence reception, but if we are to see digital art as a distinct formal category, then we must recognise the distinction in works which draw upon new media as an essential part of the creative process. And yet, many works of digital art owe a debt to the analogue arts, to non-digital processes and materials, indeed, many digital works might feature a mix of forms. As the editor of this volume, I believe that digital art is fundamentally digital; it is art which cannot happen without some contemporary media technology, some element of computation, some bit-based machine. And yet, as many of the contributions to this collection will show, the digital can co-exist within a constellation of aesthetics, including its non-digital others.

As articulated by Christiane Paul, one of the foremost scholars and curators of the form, ‘Digital art is predominantly understood as digital-born, computable art that is created, stored, and distributed via digital technologies and uses the features of these technologies as a medium’ (2016, 2). Perhaps this book might be seen, in the first instance, as a response to Paul’s position. However classified, digital art goes by a lot of names – new media art, electronic art, computational art, net art, screen-based art – but generally, this is a domain in which the objects of discussion rely, either absolutely or in part, on digital technologies to achieve their artistic purpose.

In the summer of 2019, I had the pleasure of co-curating, with Chris Clarke, an exhibition at the Glucksman gallery in Cork city (Clarke and O’Sullivan 2019). Titled Peripheries, the show was part of University College Cork’s hosting of ELO2019, the first time that the annual Electronic Literature Organization Conference & Media Arts Festival was held on Irish shores (O’Sullivan 2019). As would be expected of an exhibition running as part of a conference on electronic literature, the curation privileged literary contributions, pieces which, while multimodal, rely heavily on the expressive value of words and language. But our intention was to use Peripheries as an opportunity to curate a wide range of forms, including pieces of digital art that are not explicitly literary. Furthermore, despite the annual ELO conference being an international gathering, we hoped to include a significant volume of Irish artists. We were somewhat successful in our attempt to go beyond the word, as evidenced by the inclusion of works like ‘52.2297° N, 21.0122° E’ by Marcelina Wellmer (Clarke and O’Sullivan 2019, 43), but in our bid to attract a high volume of contemporary media artists from Ireland, we were less successful.¹

Ireland has as rich an artistic tradition as anywhere. The ideal of this island as a land of creative invention is not just a romantic notion propagated in the American imagination for the benefit of tourism – you see it when you live here, whether you seek it out in the attics, the blind pigs and kinos or simply pass it in the streets; you find it screaming at you from social media. And in such a tradition one would expect to find an abundance of any form.

It is difficult to determine the condition of digital art in Ireland, because screen-based practices remain somewhat marginalised by those institutions in control of the national canon – typically, when one enters the island’s major galleries, they will not encounter a great deal of multimodal content. This trend is mirrored in the lack of scholarship which specifically treats digital art in an Irish context. While no literature review is ever truly exhaustive, there is an alarming lack of material on Ireland’s digital artistry, particularly when one considers the generous extent to which many of the island’s other cultural forms have been documented. Though not on aesthetic matters, Aphra Kerr and Anthony Cawley have written on Ireland’s video game industry (Kerr 2012; Kerr and Cawley 2012), while electronic literature (Karhio 2017; O’Sullivan 2018) and theatre (Causey 2007; Foy and Travis 2016; Johnson and O’Dwyer 2018) have also received some treatment. Trish Morgan, who has penned one of the few papers to deal specifically with digital art in Ireland, draws upon three case studies: Conor McGarrigle’s NAMAland, Cliona Harmey’s Hawaii 5010 and Benjamin Gaulon’s Hard Drivin’ and Corrupt (2013, 149–52). Adding to the three works identified by Morgan is no easy task, as while artists may be out there, the extent to which they have been effaced by canon-making institutions, however unintentionally, makes them difficult to find.² If Ireland does have a thriving community of digital artists, they are generally being ignored by scholars and critics.

This collection of essays is intended as a response to the said issue, in that it hopes to begin filling a major gap in the national media archaeology of Ireland by bringing together a collection of timely perspectives from scholars and practitioners engaged with digital art. In no way is this book a truly representative selection of forms and figures, but it is, hopefully, a small contribution to filling an intellectual void. Part of the problem is that nobody talks to each other: there are digital art forms which benefit from sustained critical attention, practices like film, to give the most obvious example. But scholars of well- and lesser-known stuff need to occasionally come out of their silos – however big or small a particular silo might be – and see the value in treating contemporary digital art somewhat more holistically. Wonderful things are happening with computers, screens and machines right across the spectrum of artistic practice, but through disciplinary isolation – by focusing only on fine art, literature or film – we are blinding ourselves to contemporary new media art as a wider cultural upheaval. The intimate connections being formed between the digital and the expressive, and how such production is mediated through national contexts, will only be fully revealed when considered through an interdisciplinary gaze. This book attempts to do just that. In drawing together contributions from a multidisciplinary array of scholars and, quite importantly, scholar-practitioners who critically reflect on their own artistic contributions, this collection seeks to address such questions, exploring what it means for art to be both digital and Irish.

The bodies of women in Ireland have long been subjected to particular biopolitical apparatuses, enforced through legislation, religious ideology and national culture. This includes the enshrinement of a woman’s place in the home and, up until 2018, the banning of abortion. Such regulations inform constructions of motherhood in Ireland, with images of the maternal being heavily influenced by the Virgin Mary, Kathleen Ní Houlihan and ‘Mother Ireland’. In her chapter, EL Putnam investigates how certain artists – Aideen Barry, Laura O’Connor and indeed, she herself – use digital media as a means of rupturing existing presentations of the Irish maternal, creating artworks that are self-consciously informed by the Irish political and cultural context while taking advantage of formal properties of digital media in order to disrupt these constructions.

In her essay on electronic literature, Anne Karhio considers electronic poetry as a form of emerging and experimental literary practice in Ireland. It does so by examining the relationship between digital literary aesthetics and institutional frameworks in the development and dissemination of new poetic forms. It outlines some of the challenges faced by poetry as a medium and a form of cultural production in Ireland as it encounters issues related to new digital technologies and realities. Poetry has a prominent place in Irish culture, cultural production and literary reception: it has continuing cultural capital with complex historical underpinnings and present-day manifestations. Electronic poetry must therefore be examined in the context of Irish literary institutions, as well as the institution of Irish poetry itself. This raises questions as to what kinds of works are being created and presented as poetry – electronic or print – how they are disseminated, and how they are received in networks with local as well as transnational reach. Literature in the digital environment is also disseminated within the cultural economy of literary heritage and tourism, as well as in the context of the country’s strong embracing of the multinational digital economy more widely. What are the consequences of this to experimental literary work that takes place outside the explicitly ‘literary’ domain? How can poetry as a form of creative practice interrogate and critique the established forms of literary production as well as the more problematic aspects of the digital economy in Ireland, and beyond?

Ken Keating’s essay explores the interplay between page and screen, locating itself at the intersection of adaptation studies and new media studies to examine and contextualise recent new media screen adaptations of the work of Irish writer James Joyce, analysing new media texts in the light of their status as adaptations and their relationship with the relevant original texts. Keating contends that recent apps and websites represent ‘enhanced books’ which share many features with emergent electronic literature, and as such they should