Reflections from four residencies completed by Micheál O'Connell at Uillinn: West Cork Arts Centre in 2021-2022 to create new work in response to an Arts Council Commissions Award granted in 2020. Initially the work forms a solo exhibition, 'System Interference', which opened at Uillinn on 17th Sep. 2022, and then, thanks to Touring and Dissemination funding, travelled to Wexford Arts Centre (from Aug. 2023) and Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda (from Nov. 2023, end 17th Feb 2024).
Conducted more chats with people today, in between other work, including with top artists Tomasz Madayzcjak, Ayelet Lalor, Michele Horrigan, Mick Holly and Sean Lynch, companies I consider myself to be partnering with, Thornhill Electrical and Barry Brothers, and people at the laundrette in what was once a petrol station.
Continuing with defining through listing what (I think) I oppose: To the following:
Making,
Escapism, and
Beauty,
I'd like to add,
Representation.
This is old stuff but worth remembering.
I programmed the timers for the IWTs and got the sequence working. The plug, adaptor sequence itself amounts to a piece. A potential title is The Internet of Nothings.
Thinking out loud: If ‘creativity’ is to mean anything, existing bodies of knowledge constitute its arch enemy. In other words, anti-intellectual tones are not always reactionary. Breakthroughs arising from kinds of deliberate ignorance may play off prevailing canons, and eventually will be incorporated into them, but creativity is impossible without what, at first, presenting itself as ‘stupid’. Hence the tension for ‘art as research’, and for what is often termed ‘creative practice’, within academic realms.
Extending this thinking further, other normalising forces are at play. The stress on collaboration, collectives, group work, the fresh undermining of notions of authorship, in art contexts, in recent years may have its drawbacks. Standard understandings are contained also in the minds of others. Controlling and extreme conservative tendencies, variations of the much feared ‘mob rule’, are surely also inherent to any social situation, including today's socially engaged and participatory practices. However unfashionable it is to state: the individual and individualism matters.
Could the quote, above, from Amanda Coogan, minus the two words 'of making' (and the 'the' before 'physical activity' obv.) be something to adopt? Each to their own, right? Minimalism, as a trend or movement, happened a long time ago and art history is peppered with other attempts to disassociate from the hand, or even the eye, and certainly the various sets of traditional craft skills, but things have regressed. The essence of photography for example, is that no effort is required to create mesmerisingly precise representions of scenes, things, people, and let's not forget cats, but still many insist that the little bit of talent involved in pressing a (shutter-release) button, or simply appropriating images, constitutes activity similar to the handicraft of old. Hostility to the idea of 'making' does not go down well with many, and triggers retorts of the 'But you are making; of course you are!' variety. 'Look, even though you ordered that thing from an online shop, and it was produced in a factory in China, and then transported via distribution centres and smaller warehouses, wholesalers and retailers, and ended in your hands eventually: because you are presenting it in a different context to intended, that is making'. Part of me thinks fine, but isn't that broadening of the notion of 'making' in precisely the way you lot, usually, appear averse to, so that esoteric, and even anti-art approaches are brought under comfortable umbrellas, a bit odd? I realise that even the arguments I am putting here are tired. For my part, I feel opposed to both making and escapism; the latter being generally seen as a key part of the artist's role as well, but more about the objections to it later. Thirdly, the common implication (you hear it from scientists who collaborate with artists especially) that art is about locating or creating something called beauty, is infuriating, as if the job were to prettify a barbarous world, or put crudely, 'turd polishing'. Avoiding any of these (making, escapism, of inadvertently finding beauty or enchantment amidst the horror) is impossible, especially if their definings are expanded. When one thinks about these matters for any length of time, the incongruities mount up, but, as I say, steering clear of such specious assumptions about what art is, remain important intentions for me. Today at Uillinn, Photo credits Louise Forsyth:
and then found the location online, and the Street View images from 2009:
At least I think it's the same car.
Unfortunately the Citroen Picasso (see https://uillinn-mocksim.blogspot.com/2021/07/residency-2-day-15-art-isnt-only-social.html), I had my eye on, to exhibit in September, has been bought by a mysterious other party. Now I'm looking into alternatives, for example bailed scrap cars, and miniature toy cars. Am keen on pursuing this and am not sure where it will end up exactly. Cars are handy, most would agree, but they are also an accepted form of extreme violence, in our midst. Some driving is necessary, driving has its charms too, but so does heroin (I am told). Background material on artists using cars: https://uillinn-mocksim.blogspot.com/2021/07/residency-2-day-9-i-am-interested-in.html.
Installed myself in the studio today. There isn't much to say. Met a load of familiar and some new faces. conducted a number of both short and medium-length intense conversations. Saw some very fine work installed and on display by Michael Holly in one gallery and Tomasz Madajczak in another. Very helpful discussions were had, and actual live experiments were carried out, at Thornhill Electrical of Skibbereen, whom I now consider myself to be partnering with. Purchases resulted. Bought some crayons as well. Later I began 'programming' my joke Internet of Things' (IoT)/ stupid devices, which are always better: Add the 'Id' to IoT and you get Idiot.
Tomorrow I begin the third of four residencies at @UILLINNwestcorkarts which runs to 23rd April. The plan is to resolve commissions kindly supported by @ArtsCouncilIreland. Work is being carried out in preparation for an exhibition which will open at West Cork Arts Centre on September 17th and then travel to https://HighLanes.ie/ Drogheda in 2023 and https://www.WEXFORDartscentre.ie/ in 2024, thanks to a touring and dissemination award also granted.
Activity, thoughts, whatever will be logged daily here. Drop in, email (m@mocksim.org) or message.
'Oh, Fortuna, blind, heedless goddess, I am [glad to be] strapped to your wheel.' What I mean is that today involved two delightful breakthroughs, and - regardless of the frequent precarity of my own situation, and the numerous calamities unfolding around the planet at any one time - there is no greater pleasure to be had than the Eureka moment. To have two in one day is, like, almost too much!
The first relates to my experimentation with the long-awaited Internet of Things (IoT). Clunky design is often a factor with new technology, and that is no less the case with the various IoT items coming available now. I won't go into boring detail, but let's just say they are one step short of what a person like me needs. I want to do something simple, namely: have a power source switch on, and remain on for 5 minutes, then switch off, and then remain off for 5 minutes, repeatedly. Once I mention this to the maker fraternity they start talking Arduinos. Apart from the fact that I am conceptually hostile to making anything, I'd even go as far as to say that 'making' is bad art: pathetic, fragile, soldered together Arduino circuits seem like the worst examples of why that is so. I have a mind which is naturally inclined to being able to build things up with logical systems, to code and use mathematical principles even, and I've taught in technology art and digital art realms, but in my view it is important to resist these crude urges. It is important to resist, for the same reasons that innocent uncritical thinking about 'representation' is important, and for the same reasons that practices of appropriation became interesting ('in a world full of objects'), and for the same reasons that the common love-affair with pretend-anti-intellectualism is a problem. Put succinctly, you can shove your Arduinos 'where the sun don't shine', and put the IoT items in the cupboard for a period.
The original (non IoT) timer plug in use currently at Gallery Dodo, allows me to switch the power off and on as described above but only for a maximum of 10 cycles, i.e. for 100 minutes. The idea had occurred to me before, but whilst having a coffee on Friday with Jon Carritt and Daniella Norton, the former, somewhat playfully, stuck three or four plugs together (see https://www.instagram.com/p/CasatKMsDBh/). His fidgeting reminded me again of the simple solution I had been pondering.
The problem with IoT plugs is that they need the internet (obviously) but I just want to do something basic, and it is still the case that bandwidth can be weak, routers fail and so on. But, but, but, wait for it! I can obtain 3 more ordinary timer plugs of the non IoT type and stick them together and set the schedule up to cover 4 x 100 minutes i.e. 6 hours and 40 minutes. As it happens that is very close to the duration Uillinn is open on a typical day. Aha!!! Later when discussing this with Tomasz Madajczak, he pointed out that the same could be done with the even older mechanical timer type plugs which generally have four slots per hour and, so, three of them could be connected and set up out of sync with each other.
The second discovery occurred whilst describing the 'Immersive Interactive Installation' work, completed in July 2021, to a friend this very afternoon. I got thinking about the, possible resistance to or at least low level of interest in, my request to have the default synthesised voice changed, by the manufacturers of the 5-storey lift in the West Cork Arts Centre building. I know this must be possible, having experienced Martin Creed's Elevator Music, his Work #409, in a few different venues. But now, suddenly I don't care. The old principle of Truth to Materials, in my interpretation, means submitting, to some extent, to what is pushing back at you. I am a proponent of this. Though the origins of Truth to Materials as a concept go back 150 years, are connected with early modernism, the Arts and Crafts movement and/or the Bauhaus I believe, I am drawn to it, almost as a philosophy for life. The approach fits with certain cybernetics ideas too, about getting along with systems one does not need to understand. That's not to argue for ignoring one's own agency in a situation, but these elevator lads (meant in the common non-gender-specific sense) have not been responding eagerly to Stephen Canty's requests on my behalf. I was on the brink of 'reaching out; to them myself but instead it is time to accept the message, a dive into the feedback loop.
Here is the plan. In the morning, I'll ask Stephen whether the Immersive Interactive Installation video, recorded on the LG (Life's Good) phone last summer, can simply be installed in the lift itself. This would mean hanging a screen (with the longer dimension vertical) in the lift, with sound on, and simply setting it running. So, as people go up and down in the actual lift, there'll be a video in the lift, of the lift going up and down, with the acoustics overlapping and going in and out of phase, depending on the level. How good! How bad! This solution is right up my street. An obvious extension would be to then film the installed work, and play the result on the screen, and so on, repeatedly, de Selby style, but I don't care to follow that line, for a few reasons which will not be gone into here. Anyway, problem solved, job done, as they say. x
By chance I visited Uillinn on Wednesday in between shows: I believe the MA Art and Environment students will exhibiting next, and that I am looking forward to seeing. Stephen Canty was able to let me carry out a few experiments with the IWT situated there. We also organised a video call between the two IWTs, the kind of thing that should excite Actor Network Theory (ANT) fans but, really, the objects were oblivious to each other. Bruno Latour would have been have been proud of us in another way too. At long last, the Internet of Things (IoT) seems to be happening. I had brought a 'smart plug' along. Unfortunately, it didn't work.
Even since the offer to try out one of the IWTs at Gallery Dodo (within a complex called Phoenix) presented itself I've been unable to escape the idea that it would be better to not let the things extend to their full capacity. Dodo is, I don't know, maybe 2-2.5m in height, and this would reach 5.5, given the chance. The sight of it bent against the ceiling with air being compressed into it is something!
I'll finish this post some other time. The still above shows Kara Hearn's new video playing on a screen next to the deflated inflatable.
In the past year, I have been commissioned by The Arts Council of Ireland to create new work using my typical approaches, for an exhibition which will open in September 2022, and may tour, and most likely there will be peripheral events and dissemination taking place beyond the institutional spaces.
The relationship between landscape and technology interests me. During residencies and periods in West Cork, I have been looking at the increasing, and dramatic presence of wind turbines, existing networks such as the road system, transportation, as well as the giving over of space for the purposes of sport for instance. For me technology incorporates not only the much talked about software, code, algorithms and apps, nor the ubiquitous new devices and computational network, but also the older and heavier, perhaps mundane machineries, and not only that, but also analogous bureaucratic codes and systems. All these are linked to each other, but some are the subject of critical conversations, whilst others are ignored and taken for granted.
One aspect of the new work I have been doing arises from the thought experiment, or entrepreneurial idea, if you like, that golf courses could be turned into, wind farms. The suggestion is that the changes would not only fit with environmental imperatives, but would make the game more interesting. Already there are traditional obstacles such as rough and bunkers; most courses will either have penalty areas, trees, bushes, or sometimes water, that present a challenge to the player. And, let us not forget, that in many countries there exists the sport of crazy golf.
I have been posting this proposal on TripAdvisor sites for golf courses, golf links and resorts around the world, together with mock-up images, to give an artist’s impression of what the new and improved game would look like.
Sometimes these proposals are removed, and in other cases they stick. Human gate keepers are clearly involved and perhaps algorithmic policing is a factor too. Google translate is useful for converting the text into the local language. Trump International Golf Course in Dubai, wrote back to me in Arabic thanking me for my visit and inviting me to come again soon. I’d been clear that the visit was a virtual and not real one - I’d looked at images of the course online and through maps - but perhaps that counts nowadays. I found another resort in the Amazon rainforest, or in what was once part of the Amazon rain forest, and posted the TurboGolf proposal there successfully, in Portuguese.
This is work in process, and as I say, just one aspect of the observations, interventions and interferences connected with technology in the landscape, in preparation for the exhibition at the West Cork Art Centre, or Uillinn, in 2022.
Links – and please excuse that pun - could be made with nineteenth century romantic-art concerns, and notions of the picturesque. Garden, park, and golf course design, employs methods such as prospect-refuge-theory which emerged then, and design principles such as Savannah-preference are relevant, as they were in the very successful children’s TV series, Teletubbies. Perhaps Golf is Teletubbies for adults, but I’d like to stress that in no way am I interested in mocking those who play the sport. The elitist connotations of golf may still be a factor, but women and working class people made claims on the game long ago, and the situation is different now. I see no reason why wind turbines, one on every green perhaps, would not make golf a more stimulating experience.'
Well they need to be seen, the IWTs. (Email me if you want to find out what the acronym means.) I had already visited David Shrigley's suppliers in Essex, 'U'K. Today's in Brussels were also impressive, and the time given me to look at and experiment with them was appreciated. I have two or three concerns, a minor one about transporting these beauties, another about the costs, and so it will be important to do some more thinking, working out and discussing with critical friends.
Whilst on the return trip, for obvious reasons but ones I will not go into here, I was pondering on the subject of 'trade-offs'. So many problems are presented in this way. Environmental imperatives inevitably mean that people must make individual sacrifices. The bailing-out and money granted during the year or more of pandemic will have to be paid back apparently: there will be negative consequences, and for everyone. Such arguments miss important points though. The idea that money is a tangible thing for example, that is one underlying presumption. The facts that the rich and powerful have not the slightest intention of paying for the Covid-19 crisis themselves, and that government parties representing them will be voicing nothing of the sort, are overlooked. For some reason the majority should pay: jobs will be lost, 'stagflation' is on the cards and austerity is being mooted again. Climate catastrophe is presented as connected with individual morality and to do with widespread human selfishness. The systemic nature of the climate emergency and the impossible relationship between business motives and environmentalism are conveniently ignored.
When teaching the ABCs of photography to people it makes sense to point out the various trade-offs in operation there. In order to expose an image adequately, the shutter may be held open for longer, or aperture increased, but the former can result in motion blur, and the latter will reduce depth-of-field. Increasing ISO results in poorer image quality (noticeable film grain in the past and compression artefacts now). In the extreme there my be no way to deal with unforgiving lighting situations. On the other hand photography (and sight) also demonstrates an opposite, seemingly miraculous, phenomenon. Photography works on the principle that if a small hole is permitted to penetrate one wall in an otherwise blacked-out 'room' (the Latin for which is camera) and it is bright enough outside, then a highly detailed, inverted, image will appear on the wall opposite that aperture. Camera Obscura and pinhole cameras never cease to enchant - please experienceone if youhave not before - and it is all the more impressive when you think about the logic involved. The effect is counterintuitive, a real example of getting more from less. Human vision and photography are based on this, taken for granted, conundrum. Restricted aperture may reduce the absolute quantity of light coming through but it results in more information being provided about the world outside.
So not everything is about miserable trade-offs: perhaps there is a need to escape the accountant-mindset more often. Energy is not hard to generate as it happens and even the language here is problematic. In fact, energy is not generated at all but, as the first law of thermodynamics asserts, but is merely converted from one form to another (except in the case of nuclear reactions, our sun's modus operandi, and some argue about the prospects for a safe functioning fusion reactor, but these are subjects for another day: let us not digress). 'We' could be more imaginative. There is such a thing as a free lunch. Burning fossil fuels is just one mechanism for obtaining energy but also, it should be possible to think beyond the currently limited range of, undoubtedly still too crude and unproven, green energy solutions. And, certainly we should not, in my opinion, complacently treat the issue as being purely to do with personal ethics either: that habit is probably due to a combination of lingering old religious attitudes and overly transactional ideologies.
