“Conor McGarrigle: and whenabouts in the name of space” is the latest exhibit featured in the Victoria Myhren Gallery on campus exploring digital media and the interactivity it provides within the context of an art space.
Dublin-born digital artist and newly appointed assistant professor in Emergent Digital Practices at DU, McGarrigle says his exhibit aims to explore digital technology and its place in our daily lives.
“At a time when so much of our everyday lives are mediated through digital technologies I see it as vital that art practice becomes part of the conversation about the role and implications of digital media. Working within this field means that I’m engaging with, and hopefully contributing to, some of the most crucial issues of our time,” said McGarrigle.
The gallery exhibits several video and projection digital artworks based on James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” In a piece titled “Unreliable Narrations,” the first chapter of Joyce’s book scrolls across two screens that hang parallel to each other and project onto the floor.
When it was first shown in Dublin, McGarrigle had to censor the vowels featured in the chapter due to copyright infringement to the Joyce Estate. According to the wall text, the censorship “removed all meaning from the text, transforming it into a puzzle which the public [were] invited to solve.”
In January 2012, the copyright on “Ulysses” expired and the book entered the public domain. This allowed McGarrigle’s piece to be shown without censorship and “celebrated the event [as well as drew] attention to the continued threat of excessive copyright enforcement.”
“As an artist and creator I’m in favor of copyright, however, I think it has been brought into disrepute by being overextended far beyond its original intent and through a failure to account for the nature of digital technologies,” said McGarrigle. “This approach tends to lock down culture through restricting access to cultural production, often in nonsensical ways, which leads to a general erosion in faith in copyright per se.”
In another piece called the “O’Connell Bridge series” (2008-2012), the artist documents his “Joyce Walks throughout the world.” A Joyce Walk is a special walking tour that goes through Dublin, the setting of all of Joyce’s works.
The three parts that make up this series consist of photographs of Boston, London and Venice and each piece includes longitude and latitude coordinates of the photo’s location which represent the same point in the Joyce Walk where Bloom crosses O’Connell Bridge in Dublin.
“It’s really cool because I was considering going on a Joyce Walk of my own and it’s great that I can get involved with this art,” said Moira Heffernan, a graduate student in art and art history from Denver.
In a video piece titled “Mad Men: the bittorrent edition” (2011), one episode of the popular TV series is shown.
The wall text describes the piece as being “incompletely downloaded from the internet via bittorrent,” a file sharing process. The piece has no digital effects and includes all jump cuts and corruptions that occurred in the downloading process in an attempt to capture the “act of being shared by thousands of users.”
“I think this piece [“Mad Men: the bittorrent edition”] is indicative of our generation because illegal downloading is really huge,” said Janna Proehl, a senior majoring in art history from Houston, Texas.
McGarrigle, who received his Ph.D. from the Dublin Institute of Technology, is a digital artist who has been featured in several international exhibitions including the Lebanese Pavilion in Venice and the Fundacio La Caixa in Barcelona. He was also a funded research scholar for the Irish government at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media in Dublin.
McGarrigle is excited about the opportunities that have emerged by the further advancement and development of digital art.
“Digital media has expanded the range of possibilities available to artists; we can now do things which were previously not possible… a short number of years ago…[It provides] new ways of operating, new techniques and new challenges.”
The exhibition runs through Dec. 9 at the Victoria Myhren Gallery.
