Media contributions
1Media contributions
Title https://districtmagazine.ie/news/meet-the-irish-artist-using-vine-to-show-the-chaos-of-the-internet/ Degree of recognition International Media name/outlet District Magazine Media type Web Country/Territory Ireland Date 13/07/20 Description PhotoIreland has long been a highlight of Dublin’s cultural calendar. The 2020 iteration has adapted to the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic and has migrated into the digital world. This year’s programme highlights the work of The Photographers’ Gallery and Fotomuseum Winterthur that have collaborated to deliver a series of online streams called Screen Walks. These are a combination of studio visit and live performance that look at artists using the screen as their medium.
We caught up with Irish artist Conor McGarrigle to discuss his art and the crazy world of the internet ahead of his Screen Walk on 16 July.
Screen Walk will look at the relationships between algorithms, data and images through the lens of two of his internet projects separated by a decade, the BitTorrent Trilogy and 24hour Social. BitTorrent at its peak around 2009 consumed 60-80% of the bandwidth of the internet globally. It was the largest decentralised network of image circulation the world has ever seen dwarfing even Netflix, and most of it was illegal. McGarrigle will expose how internet protocols and video codecs came together in the BitTorrent Trilogy to visualise the hidden sociality of file sharing swarms with aleatory images of often striking beauty. Ten years later, for 24hour Social, the artist downloaded a full day of videos, with one video for every second, from the now defunct Vine video sharing social platform. At one level a celebration of individual creativity, shared memes and the weird internet, the project shows how data underpins everything, as social media platforms use the generation and circulation of images to surveil and track their users.Persons Conor McGarrigle