Speculative Objects

Speculative Objects is an ongoing series of art works that incorporate text and object. The unfinished nature of this series is integral to O’Riley’s ideas of the open-ended as being a key element of Fine Art research. These works feature associative inscriptions determined by an object’s function or purpose. For example, here is a bench that was used to seat viewers of a 2-hour animation of an orbit around the moon. This was inspired by Michael Collins’ Apollo 11 mission during which he orbited the moon alone, while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the lunar surface for the first time. An animation was made using data of the moon’s surface collected in 1994 by a spacecraft called Clementine, so named after the folk song, Oh My Darling Clementine! O’Riley’s bench features the first words of the song engraved onto its surface. As an ongoing project made up of a number of elements or instances, the works question the form an artwork can take. The language of art is speculated on, scrutinised and extended by being projected through and inscribed into, particular objects. A work from this series was included, together with a text by O’Riley, in a book dedicated to Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at University of Oxford: Assimina Kaniari & Marina Wallace (eds.), Acts of Seeing: Artists, Scientists and the History of the Visual, London: Zidane Press, 2009 ISBN 978-0-9554850-8-4. A selection from Speculative Objects was exhibited in Spring 2011 at the library of Chelsea College of Art & Design

Chance and Improbability

‘Chance and Improbability’ is an article featuring in a peer-reviewed online journal, Flusser Studies. It focuses on the role of the improbable or unexpected in relation to art practice and discusses the impact of these concepts, drawing on the work of philosopher Vilém Flusser. Digital code and the visual representations it enables are now ubiquitous and the article attempts to excavate some of Flusser’s thinking in this respect and relate it to current practices in the field of art. The article discusses Flusser’s notion of the ‘technical image’ and that one’s role as an artist or cultural producer is to work against the tendency of machines to standardise and homogenise, to strive for the improbable as opposed to the probable. Drawing on the developing interest in Flusser’s work, it provides a resource for artist/scholars and features quotations from an unpublished Flusser manuscript, ‘Between the probable and the impossible’, from the Flusser Archive at Universität der Künste in Berlin (previously at Kunsthochschule für Medien, Cologne). The article also includes reflections on O’Riley’s bookwork, Accidental Journey

(From) A to B (and back)

‘(From) A to B (and back)’ is an article published in Printed Project (issue 13, July 2010). The issue theme was ‘Virtual Fictional’ and O’Riley’s contribution is a reflection on narrative, reading, uncertainty and de-familiarization, and how these ideas have been explored in some of his art works. This article focuses on the notion of a 'distributed' work, a work that can be made up from a number of elements where the viewer is free to draw associations or connections. It explores writings by Sterne, Shklovsky, Flusser and Todorov and considers syntactical terms such as hypotaxis and parataxis as ways of generating, thinking about or looking at artworks. Hypotaxis is often used to establish a narrative sequence or the progression of an argument. Its forms can lead to determined meanings. In paratactical forms, on the contrary, connections are left open. These terms were seen as useful ways to reflect on the lateral, open-endedness of forms of art practice. The article features text and images of O’Riley’s work as well as images from Sterne’s novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1762), and from the NASA/Hubble Ultra Deep Field astronomical observation (2004). The latter shows a long-exposure view of the cosmos teeming with galaxies in what was previously considered a vacant or empty portion of space. The article’s significance can be seen in the way it brings together seemingly disparate images and ideas to reflect on the sense in which narrative and the construction of interpretation are active elements within one’s response to a work, and to lay bare some of the thinking behind a work’s making. These ideas were also explored in an artist's book published the following year. Conceived as a kind of calendar, the book - A Farmer’s Almanac - is structured around ancient/antique names for the full moon, often derived from Native American appellations. Each page has associated names for each month’s moon. The names have appeared in various North American farmers’ almanacs although there is some correspondence with British usage. The bookwork also features a constructed image of the full moon generated by Dr Tony Cook of Aberystwyth University from the database sent back from the moon by the Clementine spacecraft in 1994. (http://www.ponsonbypress.net; London: Ponsonby Press, October 2011; pp32; ISBN 9780956228697

A discrete continuity

'A discrete continuity: On the relation between research and art practice' was published by The Journal of Research Practice, a peer-reviewed journal at Athabasca University Press. This article reflects on the nature of research and art practice, which makes a case for the necessary intermingling of these activities. Research is seen as an operating structure for the process and production of, among other things, art; it is regarded as integral to the processes of thinking and making, as are curiosity, creative enquiry and critical reflection. O’Riley asserts that these processes are not necessarily discipline-specific – although particular disciplines have specific procedures and goals – and it is argued that provisionality is central to what art can offer other disciplines; it can make a virtue of incompleteness. Discussing Flusser, Deutsch and Varto among others, the article posits an expanded notion of the artwork that is essentially conditional and reliant on spectatorial involvement

Technological Claustrophobia

Tim O'Riley discusses the genesis of his project to examine how technology can be used to construct a speculative model of a physical and spatial experience

Flusser Studies (Chance and Improbability)

This text discusses Flusser’s thinking regarding the ‘technical image’ in relation to a recent artist’s book, Accidental Journey. The book is nominally about the moon and astronomy, and contains images, factual and fictional texts, documents of my own and others’ research, travels, illustrations, scientific diagrams, and so on. Also presented is an excerpt from the book together with a selected quotation from an unpublished work by Flusser, ‘Between the probable and the impossible’, (Vilém Flusser Archiv, number 2723). Often with art it is not clear what goes into formulating and making a work. The research that feeds into the development of the work remains crucial but is often undisclosed. Acting as a repository for the unexpected, the book in this sense was an attempt to enable these things to see the light of day. Flusser’s thinking is important not only towards developing a critical understanding and formulation of theory and a reflection on the practical processes at work, but also in terms of the nature of research itself: that is, the potentialities that proliferate through looking and searching, which hint at a realm of the possible as opposed to the probable. The text is not intended to situate Flusser’s writing other than in terms of my own thinking and the processes that lead to making work, in whatever form that may take

An Inaudible Dialogue

A peer-reviewed paper first presented at the Research into Practice conference 2006 and published in the journal, Working Papers in Art & Design. The paper reflects on the relationship between an artwork and its environment, and considers if the process and methods that are characterised as ‘research’ can be identified with art making. It explores the extents of an artwork, questioning where it begins and where it ends, and exploring the extent to which practice and research are entwined as relational objects of thinking. Texts enable different ways of seeing or framing practice and the approach to practice, thereby affecting the nature of practice. The directions of and motivations behind the practice may likewise affect the nature of the research (those activities that aren't characterised as practice). A dialogue takes place between them. This may never be audible but might remain internalised. Crucially, the work's internality is directed outwards to the external world. The paper posits the notion of a ‘distributed’ artwork, whereby the significance is not only in the form of the work but in the relation between it as a singular thing or event, the questions it poses, and the experience it engenders

From A to B and back

O’Riley’s essay ‘From A to B and back’ focuses on the notion of a distributed work comprising a number of elements from which the viewer is free to draw connections. It considers syntactical terms such as hypotaxis and parataxis as ways of generating, thinking about or looking at artworks. These terms provide useful ways to reflect on the lateral forms of art practice. The article’s significance rests in the way that it unites seemingly disparate images and ideas to reflect on how narrative, and the construction of interpretation, are active elements within one’s response to a work. This essay is an outcome of O’Riley’s research into Printed Matter, a project reflecting upon narrative, uncertainty and de-familiarisation in the reading of artworks. For example, O’Riley’s book Twenty-Seven Kilometres (2013) explores the notion of a distributed work in relation to his experience of looking at CERN in Geneva and is based on photographs taken by O’Riley during the final stages of work on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, before it was switched on for the first time. Conceived of as a kind of ‘speculative archaeology’, Twenty-Seven Kilometres broadly reflects on scientific endeavour and how the immensity of nature and human theories are squared with more everyday concerns. This book was the focus for ‘Exactitude and uncertainty’, a paper presented at ‘Impact 8’ Conference (2013). The related artist’s book, A Farmer’s Almanac (2011), draws on a distributed work conceived as an almanac. The book is structured around ancient names for the full moon, often derived from Native American appellations. The bookwork also features a constructed image of the full moon generated by Dr Tony Cook of Aberystwyth University from the database sent back by the Clementine spacecraft in 1994. It was accepted for distribution by Printed Matter (New York) in 2013

A Discrete Continuity: On the Relation Between Research and Art Practice

This short article discusses the nature of research and art practice and makes a case for the necessary intermingling of these activities. It does not attempt to define a space for art to operate as research, quite the opposite: research is an operating structure for the process and production of, among other things, art. It is regarded as integral to the processes of thinking, making, and reflecting, and it is important to note that curiosity, creative enquiry, and critical reflection underpin much that is considered research in various fields. The author asserts that these processes are not necessarily discipline-specific although particular disciplines have specific procedures and goals. It is argued that "provisionality" is central to what art can offer other disciplines; it can make a virtue of incompleteness. The author suggests that art open itself up to quizzical scrutiny and help others to recognise that research has long been, and will continue to be, a driving force within its makeup. The article posits an expanded notion of the artwork that is essentially provisional and reliant on spectatorial involvement

The Unassimilable Image

A paper that explores the extent to which images remain resistant to their assimilation by the linguistic and technical systems that society has developed. It uses Damisch´s theory of /cloud/ to comment upon and refract Flusser´s notion of the technical image, proposing a productive incompleteness that the image continually feeds into our relationship to the world. With the image, laterality is as significant as linearity. Its form does not presuppose how it should be approached or understood; the provisionality heralded by /cloud/ and by the nature of the (technical) image can problematise, confound, or even offer an antidote to a systematising drive in the mediated world we inhabit