A while back, in Lidl, the cashier was so fast in scanning my things I barely had time to open my wallet before she was done. I have never seen anything like it. Unnaturally quick, it was obvious her hands far exceeded the demands of any computer tick-ticking behind the scenes. Was it enjoyable for her, I wondered, to move quite so fast? My body was pushed into reciprocal action, and it was anything but.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about speed. Everyday occurrences like this one give the impression that, mediated and monitored by technology, daily life is becoming much faster. Nearly all of us now participate in this acceleration — most visibly, through incessant smartphone use. Emails and messages should be replied to immediately, when earlier they only could. Goods and services can be accessed instantaneously; previously, we needed the time to go somewhere else. The human body has not changed. But, thinking of the Lidl cashier — along with, for example, Amazon warehouse workers and Uber drivers — our bodies are clearly being brought instep with a new pace. However technological progress involves increasing automation, meaning some of us will likely struggle to keep up.

Evan Roth, Red Lines, Commissioned and produced by Artangel, Supported by Creative Capital, Web Source

This process of acceleration, as Wolfgang Tillmans’ audio work I Want to Make a Film (2018) makes clear, is largely incomprehensible. Presented at IMMA, the aim of the work lays the ground for another one: a visualisation — a film — detailing how we reached a point in which we cede power to smartphones (read: technology) to do just about everything. Tillmans is astounded at this situation: now, he observes, we hold super-computers in our hands, a prospect unthinkable back when the first hulking PCs came along in the 80s. But the film never gets made; instead, Tillman’s leaves a set of unanswered questions. What does technological change do to the brain, he asks or to photography? How have chips gotten smaller, as technological processes grow lightning fast? How is that even possible? Most listeners will share in his confusion. While created and used by humans, it seems technology represents a technological complexity unthinkable, and arguably even indifferent, to us.

Contemporary art, like all other fields, has shifted in line with technological change, taking place as much online as off. Dependent on worldwide communication and visibility, this is probably par for the course. Artists’ Instagram feeds draw gallerists and curators, while more and more art is being made and commissioned for online viewing alone. The recently opened Dublin gallery Berlin Opticians, for example, is not a physical space, but instead displays and promotes its artists online (after exhibiting it for a brief period in a traditional gallery space). In this, the gallery navigates the enduring problem of Dublin’s sky-high rents — explainable, at least partially, by Dublin’s status as the Silicon Valley of Western Europe — while also ceding to a more opaque drift online. Now, all art is ‘post-internet’ as the artist media theorist Maria Olson put it; all contemporary art in some way shaped as an afterimage of global, networked thought. Against this shift, it is then hardly surprising that making sense of technology has become a noticeable feature of recent art. Tracking and making visible the diffuse flows of networked techno-capitalism — what theorists Jeff Kindle and Alberto Toscano have described as an ‘asethetic problem’ in their book, Cartographies of the Absolute 2015 — is a preoccupation shared by artists including Forensic Architecture, John Gerrard, Trevor Paglen and Yuri Pattison – whose work was recently acquired by the IMMA Collection. Another example here is the artist, Evan Roth, whose Artangel-commissioned project, Red Lines works to re-materialise the internet, showing us and indeed inviting us to live with the actual preconditions of its use.

Just before the web was invented, and years before it became the mainstay of everyday life that it is today, theorist Fredric Jameson claimed that the complexity of post-modern life created a challenge for human thought. The task of gaining traction and situating oneself with the broader capitalist system — a process he named ‘cognitive mapping’ had become arduous to the point of impossible. As with the work of the aforementioned artists – it is likewise impossible to cognitively map the networked system in which smartphones participate: impossible, at least for most of us, to visualise the sequence of actions and conditions that allow them to do so much. For the smartphone to function, we need to factor in — among innumerable other things — undersea cables, industrial labour, data packets and mining, along with storage and cooling facilities the size of small towns. Probably, if were able to grasp the totality of this scenario, we would not permit it the uncontested power that it now holds.

In his recent, fairly terrifying book, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future (2018), the artist and writer James Bridle examines some of the many issues stemming from a limited view of networked technology. Particularly unnerving is the idea of automation bias, which describes the human tendency to prioritise technological knowledge over human observation. One example Bridle refers to, is tourists’ tendency to follow Google navigation — even when that involves contradicting their own real-world observations. Though we cannot fully understand how it works, such a bias means we lay more and more faith in technology. This blind assumption of infallibility has been known to lead some people to follow technological navigation even as they drive into lakes.

Watch James Bridle, Dark Age, New Dark Age Colonial Cables, Verso Books, Web Source.

Using smartphones involves an implicit acceptance of their suitability as a means of navigating the world; as a means of taking, looking at and sharing images; as a means of creating, displaying and exhibiting art; as a mode of consumption, and as a device that monitors and regulates the speed of life. It means to accept the exploitative and ecologically-ruinous conditions of their production and — whether we do so consciously or not — to accede to more and more of the same. This breeds even more complexity, rather than less. To wrest some control over the situation, we all have to be able to answer the questions Tillmans asks himself, and then to act. But, as Bridle makes clear: “Any strategy other than mindful, thoughtful cooperation is a form of disengagement: a retreat that cannot hold.” Luddite refusal will not suffice; instead, technology needs to be told that human hands can only move so fast.

Dr Rebecca O’ Dwyer is an art critic. Her writing has been published in Paper Visual Art Journal, Source Photographic Review, Art Review, Real Life, Enclave Review, Fallow Media, Spike, 032c, The White Review, Apollo, The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine, and elsewhere. From 2016-2018, she edited the online art writing publication, Response to a Request. She holds a PhD from the department of Visual Culture at the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, where she wrote about art criticism and capitalist realism.

This essay was commissioned by IMMA for The Edit #002, post digital e/Affect edited by Sophie Byrne. Read Editors Welcome – here. Also see the other articles featured by Jessica Foley and Charles Melvin Ess.

Further reading suggested by the Editor to accompany this piece:

To read more about Maria Olson’s coined term ‘post internet’ in her article, Post Internet, Art after the internet.

Download a text explaining Fredric Jameson’s ideas on Cognitive Mapping.

Existentialism builds from the motto, “existence precedes essence” and starts from “the ground up,” of highly variable contexts and our subjective experiences as embodied and emotive beings[i].

We all know in some abstract way that we shall die someday: but we usually do not always know this in a strongly embodied and emotive way. Rather, for most of us, realizing our own mortality may come only in experiencing the death of someone close to us. For existentialists, experiences of love, sympathy, loss and gratitude are necessary to taking responsibility and meaning for our lives and brings newly intense feelings of pleasure and joy.

Cécile B. Evans’, Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen, Still from Louisana Channel, Cécile B. Evans interview: The Virtual is Real. Web Source

The digital era has been defined by assumptions and goals that work directly against such existential awareness. Canadian-American sci-fi writer William Gibson inaugurated early enthusiasm for a “bodiless exultation in cyberspace.”[ii] This exultation was sought in early 1990s’, through forms of virtual reality and virtual communities – or in a digital immortality to be achieved by uploading our consciousness into computer systems that promise to sustain our disembodied minds forever. Early enthusiasms were soon countered by evidence that, for the most part, our senses of identity, as anchored in our individual bodies, were experienced as deeply interwoven with our online engagements. Nonetheless, Transhumanist dreams of digital immortality linger on. It is no surprise that the existential project is largely absent in the first two decades of the internet (c. 1990-2010), and is in keeping with a modern belief that technology will keep death at bay and human essence can be reduced to dis-embodied reason.[iii]    

Existential dimensions of the digital era

Networked communication technologies have brought many first-hand experiences of what it means to be a relational self. A Western modern sense of self, that is, emphasizes selfhood as primarily individual – a kind of psychic atom for whom relationships with others are optional, accidental, if not a direct threat. “The rugged individual,” “the self-made man,” exemplify such conceptions of individual freedom and rights to privacy, freedom of expression, and affiliated democratic processes and norms. On the other hand, this individual selfhood can become an egoism that is resistant, if not hostile to ideas of a public good and shared obligations towards one another, and so on.

By contrast, the purely relational self knows itself as nothing more than its multiple relationships – with friends, family, the larger community and society, and the larger natural and super-natural orders. These relationships, moreover, are strongly affective, and entail felt obligations to and dependencies upon others. As Martin Buber made clear, the “I” is not somehow an atom that exists prior to taking up relationship with another. Rather, our sense of “I” or selfhood only emerges through and within relationships with another, a “Thou.”[iv]

Social media and social networking sites are machineries designed precisely to facilitate and reinforce such relational selves. These web based media and sites open up unparalleled opportunities for creating and sustaining a near-infinite array of social relationships, a type of coexistence with others that opens up our possibilities of “seeking meaning communally.”[v]

Moreover, the complex internet machineries of relationality – such as constant updates, “push” notifications that intrude across our screens or alarm us with beeps and whistles on the mobile in our pocket, and the general social and business pressures to “brand ourselves online” – all of this can feel akin to a form of electronic slavery.

Amanda Lagerkvist describes how this relationality is akin to being “thrown into our digital human existence”: without any real choice in the matter, where we are caught in a dramatically unpredictable environment that render us vulnerable and dependent in countless ways – both individually and collectively. The toxic sides of our digital connected lives range from the irritating to the life-threatening: from unwanted trolls to anonymous death threats, revenge porn, ransomware attacks, or collective catastrophes such as fake news, mass surveillance, and multiple forms of cyberterrorism and cyberwarfare. In such situations, our everyday security is threatened, forcing us to experience our limits as vulnerable and ultimately mortal beings.

Art, ethics, and virtues in a technological era

Modern existentialists, beginning with Søren Kierkegaard and then Friedrich Nietzsche, build on the recognition that these quasi-universal but highly subjective experiences and realizations require art and the aesthetic – both as primary forms of expression and as primary sources of creativity and insight needed for coming to grips with our felt recognition of mortality.

In his Gay Science, Nietzsche famously announces that “God is dead,” and the consequence – a culture-wide nihilism. To move beyond such nihilism, Nietzsche’s primary recommendation is that we must all become artists. For Nietzsche, this project of creating ourselves conjoins both art and ethics: a core component of our response to the death of God, and thereby the loss of a compelling but externally imposed ethics. In the 20^th century, Hannah Arendt further enhanced the existential emphasis on creativity with her concept of natality, our primal capacity to create and sustain new life in the face of death – and thereby open up new beginnings and possibilities for human existence.[vi]*

Contemporary digital technologies help facilitate such creativity and natality in numerous ways. ASCII art and its graphic pictures were primary aesthetic expressions in the earliest days of text-based internet exchanges. Contemporary technologies offer a staggering array of aesthetic creation and expression – “broadcasting ourselves” as artists, whether through blogs, photos on Instagram or videos on YouTube, and so on. While such internet based media foregrounds the emotive and the sharing of our emotions, they yet signify the very earliest stages of developing digital technologies in existential directions.

For Nietzsche, to foreground art is to foreground ethics – beginning precisely with such core notions as taking responsibility for our own lives and for others. Resonant with Nietzsche, the contemporary philosopher of technology, Shannon Vallor, argues that in our day, virtue ethics is especially well suited to our existential contexts, challenges, and opportunities.[vii] Most simply, virtue ethics aims to foster good lives of contentment and flourishing. To do so requires us to acquire and cultivate the skills and abilities – virtues – necessary to both human communication generally and to our most important relationships, with friends, family, intimate partners and social groups foster precisely deep experiences of individual and collective harmony, fulfilment, and contentment. Vallor has shown how virtues such as patience, perseverance, empathy, and, indeed, loving itself are essential to such relationships and contentment – and all the more so in the digital era.

Vallor also finds that much in our contemporary technological environments offers us great convenience and new possibilities for flourishing – but often at the risk of an ethical de-skilling. It is easy to tune out, even “defriend,” an online interlocutor whose communication demands patience, perseverance, empathy, perhaps even love to endure. This might be justified in some cases, though risks us practicing precisely the virtues that are necessary for building our most significant and rewarding human relationships. Worst-case: the less we practice such virtues, the more we resemble our machineries. These risks are all the more pernicious because they are not as obvious to being trolled or threatened by malware, mass surveillance, and so on. The upshot is that if we wish to sustain, if not expand these primary virtues and human capacities in a digital era, we must be all the more vigilante and accountable.

This heightened awareness of the risks and opportunities of our technological era is precisely integral to what Vallor characterizes as an existential project in response to the “crisis of meaning” as analyzed by the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset. In understanding technology as central to our existential project, the “the mission of technology,” he writes, “consists in releasing man for the task of being himself.”[viii]

The in-betweens of contemporary existence

Existentialism as a cultural phenomenon emerged in response to the horrors of World War II; further driven by Cold War threats of nuclear holocaust; growing awareness of environmental degradation; the atrocities of racism and the Vietnam conflict, and now the sixth Great Extinction of life on our planet. Questions as to whether digital technologies are, on balance, more beneficent or destructive are fiercely debated. While facilitating staggering new possibilities for communication and creativity, networked communication technologies have also catalyzed unprecedented privacy rows and dangers. The latest starkest examples include those exposed by The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal*, cyberterrorism, cyberwarfare, and ongoing mass surveillance by governments and tech giant corporations that own our data – and thereby our digital lives and communities.

Beyond such threats and risks of ethical deskilling, perhaps the greatest danger is our primary uses of the internet itself. Aptly described as a “weapon of mass distraction,” internet life offers a near-infinite array of entertainments that, largely by corporate design, far more facilitate convenience and consumption than the contemplative, sometimes anguishing, work of existential reflection, natality, and creativity. The extraordinary opportunities to pursue our existential projects – and their facilities for natality and aesthetic creativity – are thus in tension with the thousand ways in which these technologies rather incline us towards entertainment as diversion and distraction.

Without question enthusiastic digital natives will continue to take up new forms of digital technologies and so remain central to our contemporary existence. At the same time people are turning away from an exclusively digital existence. Researchers are now characterizing our age as a post-digital or post internet era. One in which “the digital” is increasingly balanced with greater engagement and desire for analogue technologies and physical embodied experiences.[ix] In all of this, compelling works of art – online, offline and all mixtures in between remain central as primary sites for our experiences of vulnerability, risk, and thereby open new possibilities of meaning-making and creation. Either way, living in between a digital / post digital existence, we confront unparalleled risks and promising new possibilities.

Acknowledgements

Adapted from the original essay published in [In Lærke Rydal Jørgensen (ed.), Being There [exhibition catalog], 166-173. Copenhagen: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

Notes                                                                                          

[i] Historically, philosophical, religious frameworks sought to define a universal concept of the essence of “the human.” Key existential themes of mortality, felt responsibility to others, and gratitude for human joys of loving relationships and (moderate) pleasures are as old as The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 B.C.E.) and extend through ancient Greek and sacred texts for Jews and Christians. These texts all invoke the emotive and the aesthetic and are as much narratives as they are arguments.

[ii] William Gibson, Neuromancer, New York: Ace, 1984, p 6.

[iii] A prime example in modernity is Cartesian rationalism defined our human essence as disembodied reason. For example, Google announced a project in 2012 to “solve death”: and Google’s chief technologist, Ray Kurzweil, is known for developing a “transhumanism” that aims to realize digital immortality through sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic technologies.

[iv] Martin Buber, I and Thou, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937.

[v] Amanda Lagerkvist, Existential media: Toward a theorization of digital thrownness, in: new media and society 19 (1): 96–110, p. 102.

[vi] Hannah Arendt introduces “natality” as a conceptual moment when one is born into the political as the sphere where acting together can create the truly unexpected and where we are born again. See Hannah Arendt, Active Life: The Human Condition, 1958.

[vii] Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

[viii] José Ortega y Gasset, Toward a Philosophy of History, trans. Helene Weyl, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press., 2002, p. 118, cited in Vallor 2016, p. 247.

[ix] Simon Lindgren, Digital Media and Society, London: Sage, 2017.

About Author

Charles Melvin Ess is Professor in Department of Media and Communication at UiO University of Oslo, Norway. He researches, publishes, and teaches at the intersections of philosophy, computational technologies, applied ethics, comparative philosophy and religion, and media studies, with particular focus on: research ethics, Digital Religion, and virtue ethics in media and communication, specifically social robots. A recent publication – “What’s Love Got to Do with It? Robots, sexuality, and the arts of being human,” (in M. Nørskov (ed.), Social Robots: Boundaries, Potential, Challenges, 57-79, Ashgate, 2016) – summarizes some 30 years of work on enduring distinctions between what human beings and AI/robots are capable of, highlighting the role of real emotions and virtues as defining human friendship, love, and being human in digital and post-digital democratic societies.

This essay is part of the  IMMA The Edit #002:  post digital e/Affect edited by Sophie Byrne. Read Editors Welcome – here. Also see the other articles featured by Rebecca O’ Dwyer and Jessica Foley. 

Further reading and other material suggested by the Editor to accompany this piece: To read more about existential dimensions of grief, death and mortality experience on and offline can be found in Astrid Linnea Løland Hovde (2016), Grief 2.0: Grieving in an Online World. MA thesis, Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, and: Ylva Hård af Segerstad, Dick Kasperowski (2015), Opportunities and Challenges of Studying Closed Communities Online: Digital Methods and Ethical Considerations. University of Gøteborg, Sweden.

 

Also see Claire Bishop’s text Digital Divides that outlines renewed interest in analogue technologies in main stream art systems.

Listen to a talk on transhumanism by Mark O’ Connell on IMMA’s soundcloud channel.

Reflections on an EPIC conversation with artist Michelle Doyle

She took me to EPIC, The Irish Emigration Museum in Georges Dock, on the North Side of Dublin City. We said we were researching to start a language school called Language Connect and we got a courtesy pass, down into the brick arched basement of the 19^th century Custom House Quay building. At the entrance we were given passports. We stamped them in each themed room we passed through. The museum was filled with audio and screens and projections. We counted 88 screens and 44 projections. It felt like we were inside the internet inside a city pretending to be a computer.

Afterwards, we had lunch upstairs amongst the galleries of shops and restaurants. We ate vegetarian burritos and buddha bowls. I drank San Pellegrino and she called me a “Lad”. I asked her to tell me about the Obedient City. The Obedient City, she said, is a Visitor Centre, where neighbours tell on each other and new museums spring up to sell experiences and data. It’s motto is splashed across the skin of the city, like pebble-dash. She pronounced the Latin with mock seriousness, as if introducing a royal, or a pope: ‘Obedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas,’ telling me it translates as: ‘The obedience of the citizens produces a happy city‘. I thought of our recent obedience in EPIC museum; stamping our passports, working to take in all the information, though it was at times overwhelming, intriguing and tiring. It’s like walking through a computer, she said, going through these “Museums of the Future” . (The words of poet Paula Meehan came to mind then, who says that a Museum is place where you put things to please the Muses. Amongst all the screens and passport terminals, I wondered what Muse we were appealing to.) Then she spoke about the idea of obedience, espoused by the architectural theorist John Ruskin in his book ‘The Seven Lamps of Architecture‘. He considered obedience to be “the crowning grace of all the rest”; the one “to which Polity owes its stability, life its happiness, faith its acceptance, creation its continuance.” According to Ruskin, this principle was the foundation of the City itself. As a delicate balance of freedom and restraint, obedience was a recipe for civic wellbeing: Freedom + Restraint = Happiness. As I chewed my lunch, I ruminated on how this equation plays out in the city, wondering how architecture could claim to do so much with apparently so little…

Over lunch, I learned that the politics of obedience has been emblazoned on the skin of Dublin city for four hundred years, on its Coat-of-Arms. She told me, “There’s really well painted ones outside St. Patricks Cathedral. And then there’s ones that are acid-rainy-melted everywhere else… It has the crown on it as well. Which is so insane. It’s definitely pre-state, and it has a sword as well. It was so strange and colonial. Just the fact that it was obviously a motto that was chosen by the English for Dublin.” She began to really notice these Coat-of-Arms while she was on a residency with A4 Sounds, a participative socially engaged arts and education centre in the North Inner City. This was late summer, autumn time and there were growing movements advocating the right to housing, with activists calling people to ‘take back the city’ by occupying vacant properties on Summerhill and Frederick street: “All the stuff to do with Frederick street was happening all around, all the occupations, it just felt like everyone was being very disobedient. And everyone was really happy. So it’s clearly not true,” she said. It’s clearly not true that the Obedient City is a happy city.

“A museum is just as algorithmic,” she said, “as Netflix. And the way that you make a museum is based on the information people want to hear. They’re like User Persona’s. I wouldn’t be surprised if that [the EPIC Museum] was designed in the same way that you would design an app. You would sit down and you would say, ‘John. Age: 49. Canadian. His likes and dislikes. Things he finds easy or difficult. And then, his User Journey and his Character Traits.’” As she spoke, I marvelled at the idea that the city was becoming just as algorithmic as Netflix. I began to see Dublin enmeshed in a global historical trend to produce well connected, agile and obedient citizens with the appetites of tourists. As I listened to her speak, images of pebble-dashed visitor centres and museums of the future merged with online entertainment distributors into a composite model of the ‘Smart City,’ and Dublin was marked to be the most obedient, most smart of them all. Now the city is full of networked openings; digital pores and eyes and ears sensing and computing all the goings on of every moving body. The obedient city is glitching between the wildest dreams of imperialism, capitalism and democracy, crystallizing a new datafied kind of tourist trade. Calling me back from my daydream she asked me; “So how would they have gotten that information in the first place? How would they have known? Would they have had to buy that off someone else to figure out where all the tourists are coming from?” I don’t know, I thought, the internet is just everywhere now isn’t it? Not long after this awakening, she told me that she was learning to code in JAVA so that she could build her own dashboard, equipping herself with the tools and literacy to navigate the ‘Obedient City‘ in her own way. Then she left me with my recording devices, heading off to buy a gel-pack to soothe her eyes, sore from the screen-time teaching english to children in faraway cities.

Michelle Doyle’s generous and performative narration of the themes and materials at play in her ongoing work as an artist and teacher of EFL, during our EPIC adventure, tells of the complex ways that artists are negotiating a ‘post-internet’ world and a globalized Ireland. In her recent exhibition Obedient City, Doyle makes a trope of the Visitor Centre and in so doing casts a strange light on Dublin City. Her off-register mimetic approach calls into question larger realities of civic life, but with a buoyancy that does not leave one feeling depleted or despondent. Instead, her work piques critical attention towards the unfolding realities of city life in Dublin by estranging the powerful, implicit metaphor of obedience inscribed in it’s motto. To my mind, Doyle sets up a tension between the old logic of Dublin’s gatekeepers and the contemporary ambitions of Dublin City Council to establish the ‘Smartness’ of the City.  Reflecting on Michelle Doyle’s Obedient City as a foil to the Smart City, I wonder if the living, breathing City’s unsung motto might better be written as: Inobedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas.

About the Author/Artist

Jessica Foley writes prose and poetry, and works as a trandsdisciplinary researcher and teacher. Her artistic practice involves transdisciplinary collaborations exploring fiction, technology and the human condition through writing and multi-media. She is currently an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social Sciences Institute, Maynooth University, (2018-20) where she is exploring the function of fiction in parsing the worlds of ‘smart’ technologies. She is a co-founding member of the Orthogonal Methods Group and writer-at-large with CONNECT, Trinity College Dublin.

Michelle Doyle  lives and works in Dublin. She attended the National College of Art and Design where she received a Bachelor of Fine Art Media in 2013 and completed her Masters in Art and Research Collaboration in Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dublin in 2016. She was recently awarded the A4 Sounds Artist in Residence Award (2018) and the Sirius Residency Award (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Athrá Titim Gach Rud, Repeater, Galway (2018); Yoga ForThe Eyes I, Open Ear (2018) and Yoga For The Eyes II, Dublin (2018). Michelle’s solo exhibition, entitled Obedient City (2018) was shown in A4 Sounds and relaunched for Culture Night. She also plays in punk band Sissy and solo as Rising Damp.

This text was commissioned by IMMA for The Edit #002, post digital e/Affect Edited by Sophie Byrne. Read Editors Welcome – here.  Also see the other articles featured by Rebecca O’ Dwyer and Charles Melvin Ess.

Further reading suggested by the Editor to accompany this piece:
To read more about Irish artists working in Dublin city, see Johanna Walsh’s article digital desire lines.