System Interference 2022-2024: Touring post-conceptual art exhibition with public engagement events. The works related to the contemporary landscape, both the digital infrastructure and heavier aspects often connected with that: the growing presence of wind farms, the road network with its traffic flows, and other usages for leisure and sport.

Description:

Commissioned by Arts Council of Ireland, solo exhibition 'System Interference' toured three major centres, West Cork Arts in 2022, Wexford Arts Centre in 2023 and Highlanes Gallery, Drogheda, completing in February 2024. It featured large inflatable wind turbines, upturned cars, digital artefacts, and ideas like Turbogolf: converting golf courses into wind farms. Interactive elements, public engagement events and media coverage also extended the exhibition's reach, highlighting environmental and democratic concerns and sparking critical discussions on our technology-driven society. Philosopher John Roberts discussed this and other work to produce a new book dissecting the impact and role of technically literate artists today.

Underpinning Research:

My approach to inquiry and practice - carried out under the moniker Mocksim (mocksim.org) – maintains a critical stance in relation to both technological developments and instrumental uses of art. I utilise strategies, akin to clowning, referred to initially in my PhD (2016) as ‘artificial stupidity’. Ethical misuse, misunderstanding, lampooning, and tinkering are means to unearthing the poetic and absurd in everyday, often dysfunctional, technologies and systems. Not only the much-discussed computational/algorithmic, but the older heavier networks, comprising road systems and physical machineries, are of interest. The analogies are important here: real movements of packages and multifarious forms of transportation mirror invisible information flows via 'packet switching' (the basis of the internet) on digital platforms. Past work involved 'mild hacking' and re-presenting ostensibly mundane tracking information. Data and substantial physical ‘readymades’ are exhibited along with photography and moving-image pieces, methods are shared, discussions organised, and writing is completed on related topics.

Real-world Need?

The proliferation of new tools, including AI, poses new challenges and opportunities for practitioners. There is a need to understand how to adopt a usefully critical position without resorting to late-romantic anti-technologism.

The recent decade has also seen a rise in socially engaged, and often consciously didactic art or art-activism. The question of how contemporary art can function in relation to these realms is rarely interrogated but it is something I have written about separately: the exhibitions and dialogue would test these ideas in practice.

Interdisciplinary research is encouraged but there is a need to clarify what this looks like in practice. The commissioned works and their dissemination, by definition, would mean delving into the value of interdisciplinarity, not least because I draw upon different bodies of knowledge, arising firstly from two decades of post-conceptual art activity with elements of dramaturgy, but before that in mathematical modelling/simulation specialisms, and via deep engagement with political economy and activism.

A challenge for art institutions, post-Covid, was to understand their role given the turn towards online sharing. These exhibitions were intended to consciously demonstrate the value of physical space in combination with digital approaches and activities which extend reach beyond the gallery walls.

Non-academic Audiences:

All three art centres reported increases in groups who would not typically visit.

West Cork recorded 4037 visitors over 6 weeks, 97 attending the opening event, and 327 on Culture-Night Ireland 2022. Four school workshops were held and 36 attended a political panel to which I invited a Senator, a TD (Irish MP) and three others. The Wexford show attracting 3500 visitors, included a gallery conversation with renowned folklorist Michael Fortune, and 200 on Culture-Night 2023.

One significant piece, an upturned car, positioned just outside each centre drew particular attention, including two Irish Independent articles, a South East Radio (46K listeners) interview and more. Visitors’ comments were recorded and numerous exchanges took place online, postings and repostings, plus a tiktok film which went viral. Drogheda-Highlanes recorded 2200 visitors, 134 at paid events over 55 Days, registered 8 local press articles, and over 200000 online impressions.

Close relationships have been forged with the main institutions, their directors, other stakeholders and networks within the Irish art scene.

Change Outside Academia:

The process itself, and particular attitude to appropriation-art, woven together with expertise in digital and physical technological systems, and employing comedic strategies, is original in both the Irish context and generally.

The gallery conversations/Q&As in each venue were part of a new methodology which sought to marry necessarily non-instrumentalised fine-art activities with broader concerns. These events organised in-situ, i.e. surrounded by the exhibited work, were interdisciplinary in nature involving politicians, environmentalists, historians, sports people and scientists, different age groups and demographics. The works operated as adjuncts to thinking or provocations, about, ‘technological solutionism’, the risk of ‘greenwash’, local democracy, transportation and road safety, landscape architecture and planning, and other cultural and entertainment arenas.

Another innovation was that, rather than producing a standard exhibition catalogue with accompanying reverential text, the artworks were made available on their own merits, with John Roberts’ book distributed as a separate outcome. The text foregrounds the ‘critical demands required to being a technically-literate artist' today and Roberts is currently referring to the new ideas generated, in talks to creative practitioners and papers, in Berlin and this in The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, entitled 'Unfitting: Art and Labour from Conceptualisation to AI': https://tidsskrift.dk/nja/article/view/148451/191463

Part of the intention with the show as a whole was that material extended beyond the physicality of the gallery spaces, both digitally – specific materials were available online only - and literally, with objects on roofs and adjacent stairwells, and events organised to bring non-art conversations and activities into the exhibition. Whilst ‘Institutional Critique’ remains a necessity, the approach here was to advocate simultaneously for the seeming opposite, an ‘Institutional Defence’. Frameworks within the art system and beyond it – think of public libraries, say - which permit critically engaged cultural activity to continue, against a sometimes-reactionary backdrop, are not to be dismissed. With these desires in mind, ‘staying with the trouble’ and managing the paradox of putting work inside the gallery but letting it seep out, was an important aspect of the Systems Interference tour.

And, the new demographics, referred to already above, visiting all the centres represents another change from their modus operandi.