The Digital as Everyday in the Work of Contemporary Irish Artists (John Thompson)

Presented at the 1st Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland
The Shtepps, University College Cork, June 2022
Abstract
In this paper, I analyse how a number of contemporary Irish artists document our contemporary digital landscape in a less than direct manner. I am interested in the digital as an aspect of works that are not about the digital per se, i.e. they do not show their device nor do they create a programme or engage in coding. Rather, I am interested in works where the digital is a minor theme whose minority precisely shows us how the digital is incorporated as a part of the everyday.
These moments of works include places where work has an online component by chance, where a website or platform does some work in the artwork itself without being the focus of that piece. The moments help us see how the digital environment acts to facilitate and form the central themes of these works. In Cork artist Lily O’Shea’s Slow Puncture (2021) for instance, a work dealing with the precarity of contemporary existence as an artist (and more broadly), digital platforms such as ‘Indeed’ and formats like ‘JPEG’ are referenced as parts of the environment faced by the precarious artist. I want to place a bit more focus on reading into digital platforms in this context. The artists and works I analyse and survey in this paper include Lily O’Shea’s Slow Puncture (2021) and Catherine Harty’s 600 Euro a Month Max (2010), a work dealing with the housing crisis which used appropriated images from DAFT.ie.
The artists I engage in this paper are of varying ages and career stages but all work has been produced in post-crash Ireland.
About the Speaker
JOHN THOMPSON is a PhD student at University College Cork with supervision through the Departments of French and Philosophy as well as the department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies. His research project is on the ways in which conceptual art practice can illuminate areas of materialist philosophy, and vice versa. His broader interests are in aesthetic theory, the history of materialist philosophy and contemporary art. He also practices visual and sound art and has written art criticism and philosophy reviews for a number of publications including the journal Art History, Enclave Review, Visual Artists Newsheet, Corridor 8 and Marx and Philosophy Review of Books.
About the Symposium
The Symposium on Digital Art in Ireland is a joint initiative of Sample-Studios and the Department of Digital Humanities and Future Humanities Institute at University College Cork.
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