Operational Aesthetics

This platform marks Lucy Orta’s twenty years of practice as a contemporary artist covering the evolution of her career from leaving the Paris fashion industry to the inception of Studio Orta in 1991 with her husband, artist Jorge Orta, tracking its expansion into a large studio complex of interdisciplinary artists and theorists committed to creating and communicating with an artistic format that is both “representational” and “operational”; Operational Aesthetics (Aesthetic en Fonctionement), as coined by art theorist, Nicolas Bourriaud. Her work is multidisciplinary utilising a range of techniques and media from drawing and printing to architectural carpentry, couture and embroidery, performance pieces and large installations. She has exhibited widely in galleries and museums across the world striving to create artistic formats that ‘speak’ different visual languages for different contexts and audiences, whether within the confines of the white cube, the wider community, the intimacy of the home, or the playground of the public space. This Professorial Platform will address key issues regarding how art practice can play a new critical role in light of the growing problems in the world, how contradictions can be erased between aesthetics and social function, and the contributions that artists can make to environmental sustainability

Tolkien, Cline, and the Quest for a Silmaril

J. R. R. Tolkien has had a significant influence on American writer Ernest Cline. In Ready Player One (2011), the character Ogden Morrow invites Wade and his friends to his mansion, which is modelled after Rivendell from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films (2001- 03). Cline goes further in his sequel Ready Player Two (2021) by staging a part of Wade’s virtual quest on Arda I, the First Age of Middle Earth. In this paper, we focus on this episode and, in so doing, argue for Cline’s insights into how we approach fantasy. First, we attend to the ways in which Cline, through Wade and Samantha, replicates Beren’s and Luthien’s quest for a Silmaril. This parallel enables Cline to acknowledge his debt to his predecessor, while mocking Jackson’s overlong The Hobbit trilogy (2012-14). Secondly, and more importantly, we reveal how Cline offers new and more radical ways for reading fantasy. Success in the quests on Arda I requires “an encyclopedic knowledge of Tolkien’s entire Legendarium,” not just “the published version of The Silmarillion. You need to memorize details of a bunch of different, conflicting, unpublished early drafts! And all thirteen volumes of The History of Middle-earth!” If familiarity with the sheer volume of materials separates the expert from the novice, then Cline reveals the inadequacies of book knowledge. This paper contributes to scholarship by illuminating Cline’s allusive practice, by arguing for the value of a more imaginative engagement with texts, and by contextualizing the influence of Tolkien’s posthumously published works

More&More: A Guide to a Harmonized System

More&More is an art and research project that explores the language and mechanics of global trade, container shipping, and the exchange of goods. It questions a mercantile structure that by necessity disallows the presence of ocean as a real space in order to flatten the world into a Pangaea of capital. The project is presented in two volumes, released in conjunction with an exhibition of Marina Zurkow’s work (with collaborators Sarah Rothberg, Surya Mattu, and others) at bitforms gallery in New York City in February 2016. This book, More&More (A Guide to the Harmonized System), is an experimental “brick” of a book that intervenes in the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (also known as the HS Code). The HS Code is the internationally accepted standard of product classification, which codifies the way nations conduct import/export. All legal trade products (and illegal ones that find loopholes) are shipped using this system. More&More (A Guide to the Harmonized System) lists the astonishing variety of items that are shipped around the world, and includes instructions for using the code to ship items (both legally and illegally). It also includes poetic, personal, and scholarly annotations by Stacy Alaimo, Heather Davis, Kathleen Forde, Dylan Gauthier, Elena Glasberg, Calliope Mathios, Steve Mentz, Astrida Neimanis, Chris Piuma, Elspeth Probyn, Sarah Rothberg, Phil Steinberg, Rita Wong, and Marina Zurkow. Its companion book, More&More (The Invisible Oceans), is a catalog of the exhibition, featuring many full-color images of the art on display (including video stills, bespoke bathing suits, and fungal sculptures), as well as an introduction by Marina Zurkow and a conversation between Zurkow and international curator Kathleen Forde

Vanishing Point: An examination of some consequences of globalization for contemporary Irish film

In the following article, some films produced with the support of Bord Scannán na hÉireann (The Irish Film Board) since its reconstitution in 1993 are examined in light of the work of global anthropologist Arjun Appadurai and his theory of global cultural flows. I suggest that cinema, primarily of Hollywood origin, has had a notable influence on the development of Irish society and Irish film. Contemporary Irish film itself also reflects the failure of Irish history to excite the imagination of Ireland’s youth as effectively as the seductive depictions of America’s past as mediated through the Western and gangster films. Indeed, films made in Ireland today reflect the influence of both these genres. However, as the key to the Hollywood continuity style of film-making is its own self-effacement, this has sometimes been reflected in the effacement of people, politics and place in contemporary Irish film as film-makers endeavor to attract a global audience for their work