Panel: Conflict of Practice
Friday 27th March 3pm
Bailey Allen Hall, NUI Galway
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Contemporary audio-visual culture, of which the internet is the culmination, may be seen as a form of continuous assault. An onslaught of imagery and constant connection dissolves borders as ubiquitous screens create new horizons. Territories are breached and annexed, in both geographical and human terms. This is an assault not “only” on our senses, but an assault on our very senses. In what Paul Virilio has defined as an age of optics, sight is taxed. Meanwhile we are deprived of touch, taste and smell. Our personal spaces, our physicalities are simultaneously eroded and extended, as our sense of space and time is transformed. What is happening to the body? The gruesome image of dismemberment is often evoked in talk of fragmentation and disembodiment in relation to audio-visual culture. I propose that positing resistance in terms of a mythic “return” to the body is both unattainable and naïve. How to move in this landscape? I attempt to chart a tentative reconnaissance, engaging with Paul Virilio’s apocalyptic visions of technology, Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler’s concept of the pharmakon, among others. I propose that to navigate this territory, we must dance with evolved bodies.
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Visual artist Jessica Kelly defines her work simply as "moving images". Her practice extends from video to dance, and she often collaborates with other artists and performers, relishing the connections and clashes between different creative philosophies. Her present work is informed by the visual paradigms and implications of the internet. She sees it as the apex of audio-visual culture and the screen as the new transhorizon. Time and space contract and expand. Hyper short video loops open up time warps. Her images do not seek to tell stories, but rather open windows, portals to sensation and contemplation. Kelly graduated from the National College of Design, Dublin in 2007, and from 2009- 10 was a resident artist of Daghdha Dance Company, Limerick. She moved to Belgium in 2011, and completed her Masters in Multimedia in KASK, Ghent in 2014. Aside from her art practice in Ormond Studios, Dublin, she is also a member of the Digital Studies seminar group in GradCAM. Jessica Kelly: https://jessicakelly.wordpress.com
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