Category: Uncategorised

Experimenting with language.

Irish occupies an important but fraught place in the history of the island, inextricable from notions of nationhood and authenticity. As a result of colonial oppression, most Irish people no longer speak their native tongue. Indeed, since the founding of the state successive attempts to re-educate the populace have largely floundered.

As such, the language holds the potential to be viewed in purely symbolic rather than linguistic terms. Divorced, for many, from its utility as a communicative device it my be seen as representing a form of Irishness unattained by many. Such a reading speaks to post-colonial and continuing hang-ups around Irish identity and the countries place in the world. As the title of Fintan O’Toole’s excellent personal history of the state suggests, “We Don’t Know Ourselves”.

Further experiments in print using a collage-based approach.

Megalith 01 (Legananny Dolmen).
Single colour hand-pulled screen print.
150GSM Frosted Silver paper
420 x 594mm

Pattern created from Megalithic forms – possibly to be used in the creation of a jersey for a local football / GAA team? Repurposing folkloric / mythological forms towards community-orientated ends.

Hillen, Seàn (1995) The Oracle at O’Connel Street Bridge [Collage]. Available at: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/sean-hillen-the-oracle-at-oconnell-st-bridge-dublin (Accessed: 27 September 2022).

“When I go on about climate, people always say, ‘sure we’re Ireland, we’re tiny, we’ve a tiny carbon footprint, what’s the point if we do anything?’ and one thing I always like to remind people of is that our carbon footprint is tiny but our cultural footprint is massive. We were the first to do the smoking ban and that was copied all around the world, we were the first to have the plastic bag tax and that was copied, St. Patrick’s Day or Halloween, these are Irish holidays celebrated around the world – let’s make St. Patrick’s Day about the environment.”

– Blindboy Boatclub speaking on RTE’s The Late Late Show (November 2019)


Following this train of thought, I was initially drawn to the idea of adapting folkloric traditions to help meet the challenges of modern living. I experimented with the form of Wrenboy costumes (also know as Mummer’s across Britain). Traditionally made from straw, Wrenboys still wear these costumes in parts of West Cork and Kerry. Originally a part of hunting traditions and festivities surrounding rural weddings; I sought to remake these costumes from recycled materials. Unfortunately this proved more of a challenge than I was capable of, with my ideal material (cardboard) being less-than-suitable for weaving.

(Year Unknown) Strawboy’s Hat [Straw]. National Museum of Ireland. Available at: https://www.museum.ie/en-IE/Collections-Research/Folklife-Collections/Folklife-Collections-List-(1)/Religion-and-Calendar-Customs/Straw-costumes-and-objects (Accessed: 30 October 2022).

Quinlan, G. (2012) Aughakillymaude Mummers, Fermanagh. Available at: https://grainnequinlan.com/strawboys/aughakillymaude-mummers-fermanagh-2/ (Accessed: 30 October 2022).

RTE (2019) Blindly Boatclub on How Ireland Can Change the World. 02 November 2019 Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuK9_YzQS-Q&feature=emb_imp_woyt (Accessed: 30 October 2022).

A short piece outlining some key points concerning death and social media sites. The writing itself functions to clarify and hone my practice around the subject. It is presented as a text cycle on a webpage, an inherently unwelcoming form for an essay that demands concentration and patience from the reader (qualities not usually engendered by contemporary technologies). The background of the site comprises grid a design representing the number of Facebook users who have passed away since the site’s inception – a visual proposition that is flawed and thus provokes questions as to the suitability of the internet as a site of remembrance.

The site is under construction.

https://deathandfacebook.cargo.site

Working Draft.

A few thoughts on Facebook + death. Each icon on this page represents 1000 Facebook users who have died since the site’s inception. At the time of writing, a number estimated to be more than 30,000,000. An inelegant representation for sure. But given the bandwidth restrictions in making this site, it shall have to do. At the very least, you’ll have something to doing with your hands whilst reading this text.

We tend to think of digital spaces as permanent. Once you put it on the internet, it’s there forever! In reality, such spaces are far from eternal. Indeed, they are contingent on a vast range of variables including (decaying) hyperlinks, (outdated) markup languages, (unmaintained) servers, and many more. This reliance on such an expansive infrastructure begets the involvement of corporate supranational organizations in our everyday lives. One does not order a takeaway, message a lover, or pay for the bus without invoking the invisible network that underlines our existence. Now its seems, that even death will not spare you from participation in the hyper-globalised free market. That is not to say that your loved ones may not simply delete your profile. Though they cannot always do so. For the purposes of our (oneway) conversation however, let us imagine your Facebook / twitter / instagram (insert site here) page is maintained. In addition to aforementioned corporate collusion, interesting aesthetic questions arise.

Whilst the materiality of a gravestone may succumb to physical decay, it will retain a shadow of its form until time claims it. The (most likely serif) typeface on one’s headstone does not change. The form of one’s memorial page, in contrast, is subject to the whims of web designers. You may indeed find yourself memorialized under the banner of a corporate style guide. All of this begs the question – are digital spaces really suitable for memorializing the dead? Given the direction or world has been / is / shall be heading in, such is a impotent line of enquiry. Besides, in many ways digital spaces provide fertile grounds for personal and vernacular modes of mourning. Once upon a time, the traditions surrounding death were the exclusive domain of (religious) institutions. Muttered words and sweeping solitudes proclaimed from a pulpit. Now-a-days the internet allows for a secular and personal space in which communities can remember loved ones together in their own ways. This being said, the technological restrictions through which we access the Web 2.0 also present many drawbacks.

To begin with, the same screen unto the (cyber)world which we use to engage with a (web)site of mourning is also the same screen we use to engage with other sites. When the write-up of a family member’s tragic passing exists on an interface, a mere click away from a delightful cat video in the next tab, a certain sacrosanct quality is lost. Moreover, as each person’s Facebook / Twitter / Instagram (insert site here) is viewed in isolation from all other pages on any given site, the communal aspect of traditional places of mourning is somewhat compromised. The immersive web 3.0, as characterised by the ever-approaching metaverse could offer solutions to this. Ever-expanding digital cemetery sites could situate digital memorials to whole communities side by side. But space is infinite in the context of 3D digital worlds, and as a result the objects contained within such space become inherently cheapened by their replicability and scalability. Take this very webpage as an example. The multitudes of people represented therein form but a backdrop to this text and by virtue of sheer number lose all meaning. Digital spaces are not physical, and without a certain level of physicality these spaces remain at a distance from ourselves. Mediated, enclosed within, and contained by a screen.

Arnold, M, Gibbs, M, Kohn, T, Meese, J, & Nansen, B 2017, Death and Digital Media, Taylor & Francis Group, London. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [17 May 2022].

Greenfield, A. (2017) Radical Technologies. London: Verso.

More Responses to the Brief

The feedback from our tutorial was mostly positive. The other group felt we had engaged with the project in an open-ended manner, exploring many avenues before settling on one direction. They said we have done a good job at highlighting the underlying issue that the spikes were designed to solve, and how they do not really do so at all. They suggested that we could perhaps look at ways in which we could further the project to talk directly to people without housing directly in the future.

Our developed project is based around concepts of interactivity and engagement. The public is invited to use an online calculator which places the spikes in a monetary context (understandable by all). By counting the number of spikes at a given location, users can customise the posters to show how much a business has spent on spikes compared to what said money could have done to help the homeless community. A downloadable origami guide shows how to create paper cones which can be used to cover the spikes and reveal their presence to passers-by.