Our practice is always one of ritual. We intend a performance that will allow those who dare participate to move from work time (utility) into sacred time (play). Our practice affirms transformation: we are concerned less with mundane consciousness than with cosmic consciousness. We believe in a baroque practice as the only appropriate response to these troubled and terror-stricken times.

As Packer pointed out during his tour of the exhibition, Atlantis was part of a broader yearning in the 1970s for the pre-modern, when the promises of modernity were losing their appeal and alternatives were being sought. Over the intervening decades of frenzied acceleration, these alternative cultures of the seventies were dismissed as backward-looking, but didn’t entirely disappear – mutating instead into environmental movements, organic farming (like Atlantis itself once it had relocated to Columbia) and other ecological activisms. Packer maintains that the art-world remains by and large beguiled by techno-progressivism and the culture of competitive innovation, which has kept it away from in depth exploration of that counter-culture that issued from the hippy ‘revolution’.
 
There was much food for thought in Packer’s propositions, which were responded to imaginatively by the participating artists. It was not an easy exhibition to experience in full, but it was one that rewarded you for what time you could invest. Thus it was somewhat disappointing that the curator elected to present the artworks in the catalogue with one liner commentaries – in 140 characters or less – as if they had been formatted for the needs of social media promotion. But perhaps we can then take heart in Twitter’s decision to double its characters limit: it might yet herald a new dawn in utopian thinking. #280
 
Tulca 2017 ran from 3 – 9 November. The full text of Plastique Fantastique’s manifesto is available at plastiquefantastique.org.

 
It comes as no surprise, then, that the market is the subject and title of a project Curran has been working on since 2010; this is presented alongside reiterations of five other projects in this exhibition. The earliest of these other projects, Stoneybatter, Dublin (1998) is a series of small-sized colour photographs of children and teenagers in the streets of the traditionally workingclass
neighbourhood. In tracksuits or school uniforms, they face the photographer readily, while tower cranes hover, cross-like, on the horizon. The construction boom
was then in full swing and the pictures bear witness to a place and its people on the eve of a radical architectural and social transformation.

 
Southern Cross (1999-2001), a series of framed medium-sized photographs, takes a closer look at essential sites of Celtic Tiger mutation and the workers involved: road and building construction sites and the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) which offered the lenient (or non-existent) tax regulations credited for much of the Irish economic miracle. Portraits of construction workers are presented next to those of office workers, possibly accountants or tax advisors to international banks and corporations. Each portrait, however, belies its generic category by insisting on its singularity: Inner City (Bishop Street, Dublin) (2000), for instance is a portrait of a young male worker at the IFSC whose mismatched jacket, loose tie and unruly red hair have little of the sleek appearance we would expect. Alongside the portraits there are details of the workers’ employment environment – a stack of concrete blocks wrapped up in cling film, overlapping layers of tarmac, in one instance, a lone tree amongst the grid-like stone and glass buildings in another. Photographs of places and portraits are presented in an undistinguished square format establishing a continuity between them.

 
The Breathing Factory (2002-2005) takes its name from the flexible economic management system implemented by Peter Hartz on the factory floor at Volkswagen – and later applied to the German nation as a whole – where workers’ hours fluctuate according to production demand. Taking the employees and the production spaces at the Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing and Technology Campus in Leixlip as its subject, Curran presents photographs, interviews and a video of the production line as part of this work. It investigates with the artist’s usual attention to details, what the faces of ‘the most globalised country in the world’ might be like. The photographs are unframed and hung with bulldog clips, so that they are easily removable like the workers they portray, Curran explains.

 
These three projects share a desire to look into the human and material manifestations of such ready made formulae as the ‘Celtic Tiger’, the ‘Property Bubble’ or the ‘Most Globalised Country in the World’ that came to characterise Ireland during the ‘Boom’ years. With Ausschnitte aus  EDEN/Extracts from EDEN (2003- 2008), Curran looks at the evolution of global capital and its impact on people in Lusatia (Lausitz) on the German-Polish border. The region has had a striving industry since the 19th century of which only open pit coal mining remain. Curran describes the exhibition as fitting into a shoebox, thus reflecting the dematerialisation of the economy. In the gallery the project is conjured up through two slide projectors. One projection is a series of colour slides of empty workstations at the former Steilmann textile factory whose site closed down after 150 years in 2006. Seen alongside the other projects the human absence in these images is striking. The human is brought back through the second projection composed of extracts from interviews Curran conducted in the area. They are typed in white over black, giving the words a ghostly presence.

 
The Market (2010-ongoing) is the most ambitious of Curran’s projects to date, it presents works in a variety of formats including photography, video, printed documents, soundscape and 3D animation – in an earlier iteration it had also included a 6ft high column of A4 sheets. The gallery has been partitioned to allow fluid circulation between the different works. There are portraits of employees of stock exchanges in London and Addis Ababa, as well as photographs of their places of work. There are tables with desk lamps and brown folders containing transcripts of interviews with traders and analysts, some heavily edited. One of the most recent works is a HD video Algorithmic Surrealism (2015). It is filmed in the landscaped gardens surrounding the Zuidas Global Financial District in Amsterdam, which specialises in algorithmic trading. The camera slowly pans over shrubs whose leaves sway in the breeze, offering an occasional glimpse of the glass and concrete façade of the buildings beyond. A female voice-over with a German accent reads a text by Brett Scott, a former broker and now a prolific blogger. It opens with:

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, a high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithm, connected to a stock exchange via ‘low latency’ trading infrastructure, could make, perhaps, 1,000 trades. I say ‘perhaps’, because it really depends on how long you pause on those commas I put in the sentence. In an essay for e-flux journal in 2013, ‘Too Real an Unreality: Financial Markets as Occult’, Philip Grant discusses the relationship of money to magic and how popular characterizations of contemporary finance as occult may not be so far off.

 
Just as the Enlightenment destroyed magic, but rests on a magic of its own, so too finance, through its rationality – the force of its numbers, the logical brilliance of its algorithms – destroys earlier, nonrationalized understandings of how value is created, and yet finance’s public – regulators, legislators, critics, the public, us – continues to be dazzled by it.

 
A large part of Curran’s work is not easily amenable to an exhibition context. The photographs are the end result of an engagement with institutions and people that took years to come to fruition. His practice, informed by social concerns and conducted with an ethnographic methodology offers a wealth of material. Gaining access to factory and trading floors is not easy, nor are the people working there necessarily willing to be photographed. The documentation of how Curran failed to gain access to the Frankfort Stock Exchange indicates some of the administrative difficulties involved but is at risk of looking like a poor cousin to more radical institutional critique practices. The transcript of interviews with traders, analysts, brokers and bankers from London and Addis Ababa can appear gimmicky in their bureaucratic aesthetic and yet are anything but. They form a body of research of their own, giving intriguing insights into the daily life of City workers – they all agree that what they do owes much to intuition and feeling, or as a senior analyst seems rather proud to admit: ‘it’s an art rather than a science.’

 
Perhaps most fascinating is the account by Dr. Eleni Gabre-Madhin on how she came to set up the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) in 2008. Dispelling the dazzling haze surrounding financial activities, her account brings us to the basic ground of goods and commercial exchange. Haunted by the memory of the 1984 Famine, she was inspired by a research paper indicating ‘that there was a surplus in the western part of the country while there was a famine that killed a million people in the  North’ to dedicate her doctoral research to studying Ethiopia’s grain market. She thus set about resolving such problems as: how does a buyer know where to find a seller? How does a seller know how to find a buyer? How do you know what the grade or quality of the grain is? How do you get the price information in time? etc… These questions eventually led to the establishment of the ECX, taking as its structural model the open trading pits of the Chicago Board of Trade (which first opened its trading pits in 1848 – many of these were closed in 2015).

 
The exhibition includes a photograph of a bell at the Irish Stock Exchange’s decommissioned trading floor. The disused bell stands as a lonely reminder that trading floors in many ways belong to the past: they are steadily being replaced by electronic trading. Strange the things we find ourselves nostalgic for.

 
The overlapping artistic and the ethnographic methodologies in Curran’s practice may not quite find resolution, but these tensions, along with the artist’s open-ended approach, offer us much towards apprehending the conflicted realities we live in. At the end of the The Economy of Appearances, the algorithmically produced sounds stop and the graphs are allowed to disappear in the distance without being replaced by new ones. For a few seconds there is darkness and silence, conjuring both dread of the void and hope for a different discourse.

 
The Economy of Appearances was on view 4 September – 30 October 2015.

Once we have dismantled and reassembled the process of literary composition, the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading. In this sense, even though entrusted to machines, literature will continue to be a “place” of privilege within the human consciousness, a way of exercising the potentialities contained in the system of signs belonging to all societies at all times.
Italo Calvino, ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’

An Entirely Lyrical Instrument is a wall mounted flat screen in the Atrium of the Limerick City Gallery of Art: it shows an algorithmically generated page from Italo Calvino’s essay ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’.

The letters of the words are permutated in successive sequences, altering different parts of the text. From the random jumble of letters new meanings sometimes merge with that of the original text we are attempting to decipher. In this essay Calvino speculates on the possibility of a machine for writing literature based on the reader’s capacity to produce meaning from a random series of discrete elements: “The true literature machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder.” This capacity of the reader/viewer to produce meaning from arbitrarily assembled elements is further tested in Untitled, algorithmic selection from the Permanent Collection. Dennis McNulty and curator Mary Conlon applied a set of rules as guiding principles: they chose ‘untitled’ artworks from the gallery’s collection list – that is, works either deliberately called ‘untitled’, or simply never given a name – and presented them by date over three walls. Although fully aware of the rules directing the exhibition, we are not long in associating themes, colour and shapes to spin meanings from these assembled works.

PROTOTYPES, McNulty’s overall exhibition, presents itself as a series of discrete elements whose connections are left to the visitor to make. But as our own propensity to find significance combines with the artist’s multiple propositions, meanings start to proliferate: this is perhaps what the artist is referring to when he speaks of a cumulative effect ‘that makes sense on an extended timeline’, in a conversation with John Gayer (‘On Density, Flow, and Destabilising the Visual’ [2011]). Buildings and their architecture offer a way to find one’s bearing, and having been trained as a civil engineer McNulty has an ongoing relationship with constructed spaces and their materials. Working from a blueprint of the latest alterations to LCGA, the artist invested voids and transitional spaces with new and recast dropped ceiling structures. In the North Gallery, The Wall marks an unrealised partition; in the Ante-room, Unstable Co-ordinates signals the passage to the recently extended South Gallery; and in the Atrium, Portal Fragment leads to the Permanent Collection Gallery. These pieces function as partitions but also as vectors of spatial translation: the dropped ceiling, a structural element that was initially developed with modernist architecture for acoustic purposes, also separates the living space from the ‘plenum’ which is used to house the electronic hardware necessary to the building. This separation of living and functional spaces was addressed in the video 1949 (2010), a single shot of Philip Johnston’s Glass House in which was reflected the Brick House containing all the support systems. The dropped ceiling’s interface is thus transferred to the gallery space generating speculations about which side we might be standing on.

Portal Fragment (2012/2014) brings in another dimension, as the orthogonal grid of ceiling tiles are cut into a hexagonal frame – although the two grids do not coincide. The regular geometry of the hexagon is a recurring element in McNulty’s work and connects with different elements of the show. One is Flomatic (algorithmically generated moving images), which is a version of the ‘dice drawings’, another is Gateway (redux) (2009/2014). A screen onto which two hexagonal grids are projected, one sliding over the other, stands between two panes of two-way mirror glass set at a sixty-degree angle. The reflections and the reflected reflections of the screen form a three-dimensional hexagon. Gateway (wiki) is a print-out of the Wikipedia page dedicated to a novel by Frederik Pohl. In this science fiction story, humans are exploring the technology and artefacts of a long gone alien civilisation, the Heechee. Most notable among these is ‘Gateway’, an asteroid inside which hundreds of ships are ready to launch to an unknown destination in the universe through a pre-programmed system. It is speculated that the Heechee were 3-D oriented and that their prime ordering was from front to back.

The first part of the video, The Archivist, follows the methodical proceedings necessary for the archiving of knowledge at Brown University Library Collections Annex in Providence. In the voice-over an archivist remembers her first encounter with the Thought Interface, a memory-composite software which enables the recording, editing and subsequent archiving of memories. The second part of the video could be the recorded memory of a visit to the Ohio History Center with its brute concrete surfaces, geometrical forms, historical artefacts, taxidermic animals and attempts at reconstituting cultures of the past. Throughout the film sixteen-segment displays are used as inter-titles of sorts. These basic electronic constituents return elsewhere in the exhibition spelling out song lyrics one letter at the time: a lonely one in the Link Gallery loops ‘maybe everything that dies someday comes back’; another, ‘And you may ask yourself …’, encased between two panes of plasterboards, asks ‘where is that large automobile well how did I get here’; and, somewhat ominously, a visual messaging board set up in the park runs the words from Arthur Russell’s song ‘Keeping Up’: ‘Getting to know what you like and what you love’. Are these words of longing, loving, dying clumsily appropriated by the machine to get to know us?

For the opening event of Tulca 2013 ‘Golden Mountain’, McNulty curated a film projection on the subject of technology and its ideologies: it included an ad for Google glasses and a TED talk on High Frequency Trading – how the stock exchanges depend on algorithmically generated buying and selling, outside of human control, exemplifi ed by the ‘May 6, 2010 Flash Crash’ also known as ‘The Crash of 2:45’. The entrusting of our fate to sentient technologies appears not unlike the boarding of a Heechee ship: not knowing whether we will strike it rich, be swallowed in a black hole or starve on the way. The collaboration with Conlon has brought fresh ways of engaging with McNulty’s existing works as well as generating new ones. They have put together an exhibition that keeps on giving, no matter how long one stays with it.

Additionally, as the four viewing posts are on site, a third scene superimposes itself – one which we cannot help checking, as if to confront the random visual tricks the films play with reality – a change of weather or a wandering dog. As the work is time-dependent it will also offer a glimpse into the past: the fact that a new bridge has been built since the scenes were shot already brings this dimension into play. Beyond the science involved in the project – Cleary and Connolly regularly work with researchers in various perceptual sciences – these unspectacular viewing posts have the capacity to become part of our daily walk, and introduce a somewhat skewed vision of our surroundings (suggesting intriguing potentials in spatial perception, like the ability to travel by ‘folding space’ in Frank Herbert’s Dune, perhaps).

 
As my journey through Mayo took me to Ballina the stereoscopic vision lingered, filtering my impressions of Varvara Shavrova’s two exhibitions. For the month of May, the artist presented work in the exhibition space of Ballina’s Civic Offices and the Arts Centre’s gallery. In the former was shown the film and photographs of Untouched, with the black-and-white photographs mounted on board arranged in two parallel rows. The artist drew from her peripatetic existence, between Beijing and Ireland, to compare the dissolution of the rural village and community of Ballycastle Co. Mayo with that of a working class neighbourhood in Beijing. The film focuses on the people and is a montage of interviews on site, while the photographs focus on the dilapidated walls from both places. Shavrova shows a real empathy for her subject matter, which gives a warmth to the film, and contrasts with the cool black-and-white photographs. That the exhibition is taking place in the civic offices in Co. Mayo extends the underlying sense of community; however, these juxtapositions follow too simple a thread and have little more to say beyond the truism that ‘people are people everywhere’ – even in China – sharing the same concerns and the same nostalgia for a communality of old – and ‘walls are walls’, I suppose.
 
The Opera also functions by way of a principle of juxtaposition, this time of art and life as well as of genders, but is more sophisticated in both form and purpose. The film and black-and-white time-lapse sequence show the transformation of two actors of the Peking Opera from their everyday selves to their heavily made-up and accessorized stage personae; and vice versa. Inspired by the Peking Opera’s highly artificial forms of costume, singing, dancing and acting, which she describes as ‘a world of pure art’ (following an art as artifice trope), the film is in two sequences, each following the transformation of an actor/actress into their reversed-gender theatrical persona. What might have otherwise been a concept with predictable outcomes is complicated by the androgynous and almost indistinguishable look of the two actors before transformation – both are dressed in black and have short hair – which contrasts sharply with their stage appearance – endowed with all the stereotypical signs of gender – moustaches, head gear, lace etc. Thus it is the hyper-conventional space of the Opera that allows the undifferentiated, caterpillar actors to become fully expressive butterflies. The film is also made mesmerizing by Lee Welch’s seamless editing of overlapping slow-motion images in colour and black-and-white, accompanied by an original score by Benoit Granier mixing traditional Chinese opera singing with electronic sounds.
 
Interestingly, both Cleary Connolly’s and Shavrova’s work played on duality and juxtaposition, but only succeeded when they managed to convey a third dimension transcending dichotomies: Untouched’s relation to the local authority space in which it was displayed, the undifferentiated genderless world preceding the over-determined stylisation of The Opera, and, most intriguingly, On Sight’s functioning as an artwork embedded in the everyday experience of the passing walker and as a suggestion for alternative understandings of space.
 
 
On Sight was opened on 20 April 2012. Untouched and The Opera ran from 3 – 26 May 2012.