Maeve Connolly’s talk, Media-based Time: Infrastructure and Temporality in 1990s Art, is programmed in relation to the exhibition IMMA Archive: 1990s, From the Edge to the Centre.

The IMMA Archive: 1990s exhibition showcases the ongoing digitisation of IMMA’s collection of time-based media works, including film and video. These works can be especially challenging for museums and other collecting institutions, in terms of archiving, conservation and display, particularly if they involve media formats and standards that have become commercially obsolete. Yet, precisely because they are connected to earlier behaviours, processes and technologies, time-based artworks also have the capacity to inform analysis of complex and ongoing transformations in the lived experience of media, which might otherwise be overlooked.

Many artists working with film, video and photography during the 1990s were highly sensitive to changes in media technology, because they experienced the transition from analogue to digital media, as well as the growing importance of the internet. Media-based Time: Infrastructure and Temporality in 1990s Art makes reference to these important cultural and technological shifts, but the talk also addresses several aspects of media and communications infrastructure that are more specific to the Irish context. These issues are explored through in-depth discussion of three works in the IMMA Collection that were made during the 1990s, by Willie Doherty, Caroline McCarthy and Alanna O’Kelly,

Presented in partnership with the MA in Art & Research Collaboration (ARC) programme at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology (IADT);

This talk co-incides with the exhibition IMMA Archive: 1990s, From the Edge to the Centre, and the new online initiative i.

Dr Maeve Connolly is a Dublin-based researcher, focused on changing cultures and economies of art and media practice. She is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Film, Art & Creative Technologies at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dublin, Ireland, where she co-chairs the MA in Art & Research Collaboration (ARC) and teaches studio modules on the BA in Art.

She is the author of TV Museum: Contemporary Art and the Age of Television (Intellect, 2014) on television as cultural form, object of critique and site of artistic intervention, and The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (Intellect, 2009), on aspects of the cinematic turn in art. She is also the co-editor, with Orla Ryan, of The Glass Eye: Artists and Television (Project Press, 2000), a collection of artists’ projects exploring the televisual.

Recent publications include contributions to the anthologies Women in Irish Film: Stories and Storytellers (Cork University Press, 2020), Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2019), Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image (Bloomsbury, 2019) and European Women’s Video Art (John Libbey, 2019). Her current research focuses on artists as agents, analysts and archivists of infrastructural change. See more details here here

Erika Balsom, Lucy Reynolds and Sarah Perks, ‘Introduction’, Artists’ Moving Image in Britain since 1989, (London and New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press, 2019): 1-20. See more here

Wolfgang Ernst, ‘Dis/continuities: Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multi-Media Space?’, in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (eds.), New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, (London and New York, Routledge, 2006): 105-124.
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Hal Foster, ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, Vol. 110 (2004): 3-22. See more here

Mark Godfrey , ‘The Artist as Historian.’ October 120 (2007): 140-172.See more here

Martin McLoone, ‘The Commitments’, Fortnight Issue 321 (1993): 34-36.

Alanna O’Kelly, (interview) in Katy Deepwell, Dialogues: Women Artists from Ireland (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2005): 138-148. See more here

Donald Preziosi, ‘Collecting/Museums’, Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S Nelson and Richard Schiff, second edition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003): 407-418. See more here