Secondments

Dates of Secondment
19/11/2023 – 02/12/2023
9/05/23 – 23/05/23

My SPACEX secondment took place split in two instalments. This allowed me to spend the first part researching and visiting relevant areas to begin my research and then for the second secondment to consolidate some of these ideas and my own practice in the form of an artist talk and pick up on connections and key areas in more detail.

I investigated how Red Vienna had shaped Viennese living and learnt about the housing system to draw comparatives to the history of housing and urban planning in Ireland and its current policies. During the secondment I visited over ten different Superblocks such as Karl Marx Hof, Metzleinstaler Hof, Rabenhof etc.

I met with SPACEX researchers Jaspar Josef Leseter, Paul Rajakovics, artist and Social Design tutor Christina Schraml, artist Marlene Hausegger, Elke Rauth who runs Bikes and Rails and URBANIZE! INT. FESTIVAL FUER URBANE ERKUNDUNGEN and the curators of Hoast.

My meeting with Elke Rauth and others who she introduced me to at Bikes and Rails a passive housing project she co runs and lives at was extremely informative and beneficial in seeing a contemporary project successfully realise excellent quality housing which is gives back to the community, costs little to run, is passive and is funded through lending.

On my second visit in November I was able to catalyse some of the initial discussions and meetings from the first secondment. I gave an artist talk to the masters students at the school of Social Design at the Angtewadte, made a insert for inclusion in the Derivé architecture magazine and also partook as a guest to Barbara Holubs seminar and will continue working with her and her student Lisa Napravnik on making a Manifesto for the ‘Learner and the Learned’ which asserts a set of actions and beliefs on pedagogy and examines the role of art education.

I was seconded to Sirius, in Cobh Ireland between 1st February 2024 – 2nd March 2024. My research activities across the 31 days were split across three activities, networking, creative production and writing. I will touch on my networking activities here.

I wanted to spend the first part of my residency and secondment to Sirius getting a sense of the kinds of arts organisation, museums and artist-run spaces are across Ireland. To do this I followed the networks and suggestions of the people I met, where they had previously worked, exhibited artworks, have studio space or frequented to attend events or workshops. Here is a non-comprehensive list of where these networks took me:

I spent my first 10 days in Cork, where I connected with fellow SpaceX Researcher Aideen Quirke who introduced me to her own networks and guided me to places of interest around the city.

Cork – Cobh:
Aoife Barrett – PrintVanGo, The Glucksman, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork Printmakers, Lavit Gallery, Backwater Artists, Project Guesthouse, Laneway Gallery, Living Commons Cork and SIRIUS

Thank you to the many people I met, chatted with over a tea, and shared their experiences of being an artist, facilitator, educator, activist and arts worker. Across many of these conversations points of interest kept looping together, the state of Arts funding in Ireland, the trial of the Artist Living Wage scheme and the prominence of artist-run and residency spaces in comparison to more formal institutional models. 

Next, I spent a short amount of time in Dublin, where I connected with fellow SpaceX researchers Emma Mahony, Fiona Whelan, Seoidín O’Sullivan at NCAD, Benedetta Bronzini who was also on her secondment to NCAD and Sara Greavu at Project Art Centre. I was thankful to be invited along to a guest lecture by Dr. Bronzini and attend an artist talk at NCAD by Iz Oztat who was exhibiting at IMMA.

Dublin:
Ireland Museum Modern Art, Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, The Hugh Lane Gallery 

I was very fortunate to be able to reconnect after attending the Dublin Training Event back in April 2023 and took the opportunity to continue some of the conversations and topics with caught my interest during this first visit to Dublin. My interest in artist-led models bubbled up during this first training event where I found a book exploring the term-limited governance model of 126 Gallery in Galway. During my short stay in Dublin, I picked up another text which looks at artist-run spaces across the UK and Europe, including Pallas Projects in Dublin.

This following the networks began to inform how I learned about the differences and similarities to arts public funding models and the different struggles formal institution bodies face between Ireland and England where I am based. This period of networking will inform my PhD research as I write about social practice through institutional and infrastructural critique.

My SPACEX secondment to the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, was an opportunity to initiate fieldwork for the second iteration of my ongoing research project entitled Institution as Praxis. This is an interdisciplinary research project that investigates the epistemic capacities of curatorial programming in the expanded field of exhibition practices, against the grain of neoliberal imperatives and the coloniality of museum practices. At the Van Abbe Museum, I met with colleagues who oversee the curatorial programme – director Charles Esche, curator Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide and curator Nick Aikens – to discuss their curatorial priorities and responses to the decolonial debate. When I began my secondment, the multi-sensory collection exhibition Delinking and Relinking, curated by Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, had just opened and provided a very stimulating and rich backdrop for these conversations. One day, Yolande and I sat in one of the exhibition rooms and teased out the multiple connections (some more visible, others more speculative) offered by the object on display and the curatorial set-up.

During the month-long secondment, I extended my practice review to other organisations in the Netherlands, including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Head of Research Charl Ladvreugd) and Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam (Head of Agency for Architecture, Design and Digital Culture Francien van Westrenen), and visited many more. I also had the opportunity to speak with artists working on related research questions, such as Aldo Ramos – who had an exhibition at A Tale and a Tub (Amsterdam) – and Jeanne van Heeswijk (Rotterdam) – currently artist in residence at Bak in Utrecht.

This experience provided a rich understanding of the diversity of views on the role of research in contemporary art organisations, and the idea of repurposing exhibition studies for a study beyond exhibition-making. A discipline capable of investigating a wider arena of contemporary cultural practices.

Based on the experience of the first lockdown in 2020, a narrative was created in which the Rosa-luxemburg Platz is seen as hermetically sealed from the rest of the world. It thus becomes the ultimate setting in a future in which humanity no longer leaves its homes and can only remember a past civilization that still had a public sphere based on information about its immediate living space.

The NABLA performance/tour takes place live on site and is a kind of “Performative Introduction” to the discourse surrounding the area, the Podcast tells a different story with a real background in videos with audio plays in each episode, and the Fandom, in turn, represents an online encyclopedia with space for all facts about the area written from the perspective of the future. This is an excellent example of how performance art, storytelling, archives and urban exploration can not only co-exist but also reinforce each other.

My objective in this secondment was to initiate some practical experiments in ‘ethnographic AI’, which I define as an investigation into whether artificial intelligence can gain specific cultural understandings. Engaging with Festival dei Popoli’s ethnographic film archive online and on-site, I used ml5.js to create experiments in AI image classification, image and video generation, pose tracking, and object identification.

I also included experiments in creating randomised compositions, using the Festival’s archive of posters and programme leaflets. Alan Turing, in his 1950 paper ‘Computing machinery and intelligence’, proposes that randomness might be an important element of creativity.

In using the coding environment ml5.js, I uses small, portable datasets for two reasons: (1) to explore whether small, highly curated datasets could facilitate specific cultural understandings; and (2) to mitigate the high environmental cost of AI by minimising processing and network operations.

The work raises questions about AI in terms of identifying, classifying and describing humans in terms of what and who is seen, and what can be inferred from individual and collective actions. Also, the training datasets used in many existing AI systems (including the ones I used) are very limited and culturally-specific, for example in the objects they are capable of recognising. This relates to the programmer’s expression ‘Garbage In Garbage Out’ which describes how the outputs of a system depend on the quality of its inputs. I found that the ‘seams’ in AI systems – for example the unnatural joins between surfaces in images, or the artificial ways Large Language Models attempt to replicate human writing – expose the artificiality of such systems, yet perhaps keeping these seams visible is important for maintaining transparent AI systems.

I made all my code freely available – the code and the experiments can be viewed at https://ai.postdigitalcultures.org

The project for this secondment consists of carrying out research on the geographical site that the Mexican Embassy in Berlin occupies today, its transformation over the years, especially during the 20th century and its probable problematic history. I am interested in researching urban palimpsests and the layers of memory of places, whether present or destroyed.

As a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art, a British institution, I am interested in investigating this area of Berlin, since the land that I am studying belonged to the British Sector in the years following the Second World War (1945-1949). I will look at events that took place at that time and in that specific site, linking it later with the events that took place before and during the war, the History of West Germany, Unified Germany, and the origins of the Mexican Embassy there in 2001, the construction of the building, its symbols, and its relationship with the architecture of the Bauhaus.

In this research, I will experiment with the methods that I am applying for my doctoral thesis. The methodologies used are critical, empirical, and embodied.

From this transdisciplinary investigation that is taking place over two summers, (13 days in July 2023 and 18 days in July 2024), I will create sculptures, videos, and texts that will be included in my thesis, in publishable articles and an exhibition.

This research questions erasure and oblivion in the history of Mexican diplomacy in Berlin. My aim is to create visibility to the layers of memory contained in the space that the Mexican Embassy in Berlin occupies today, opening doors to stories that include Germany, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and perhaps other countries.

My Space X secondment in Berlin is taking place with the Kunstverein am Rosa Luxemburg Platz with the additional support of the Mexican Embassy in Berlin. The research will culminate with an exhibition presented at one or both spaces.