Collaboration facilitation project and online exhibition, screen service, January - June 2023.
In January 2023, screen service invited interested practitioners to submit to a virtual participation pool. Three pairs were created, based on thoughtful commonalities and exciting divergences amongst the artists. The pairs pursued a three-month remote collaboration.
The culminating online exhibition displayed open-ended narratives and the playful, process-driven experimentation of artists working in tandem. The online works housed magnificent cross-pollinations on people and place, intuitive foraging for connective tissue and fictional excursions into processing exchange and finding common ground
Pair 1: Cóilín O'Connell and Mel Galley
Time Capsules and Nervous Systems
An archive, a time capsule, a frame story. Sections each in turn wonder - what happens in the moment a place becomes unfamiliar? The answers exist as both contradictions and proposals - perhaps it's time, or distance, or us.
Over a three-month residency, through conversations and the sharing of references Mel and Cóilín developed a series of works in unison. Responses include writing, CGI imagery, video and collage.
Pair 2: Cara Farnan and Teresa Collins
A single starting gate and a thousand finish lines
While messages are being carried, there are interruptions, miscommunications, translations and lag amongst other unintended disruptions. Fragments of the message fall to the floor, and slowly accumulate. Digital technologies for transferring information are full of this scrappinesss, sometimes, it’s all you can hear.
Out on the street a pigeon picks at the ground. In two separate cities we have been scavenging. In place of physical objects; photos, voice memos and 3D scanned environments fly back and forth between us. Over time these fragments build on one another; like ad-hoc architecture, like a nest.
A single starting gate and a thousand finish lines is a patchwork of a city made from collected fragments, taken from footpaths and rooftops. Working with text as a sculptural, tactile and audible material, the piece weaves together overheard conversations, automated captions, transcriptions, field recordings, idioms, colloquialisms – referencing regional subcultures surrounding birds, waste, everyday alchemy, and intimate urban connections. This text is meant to be held; open it on your phone and start scrolling.
Pair 3: Aisling Phelan and Elinor O’Donovan
Gods in the Machines
Gods in the Machines is a non-linear narrative-based web piece composed by Elinor O’Donovan and Aisling Phelan, a result of their collaboration for Screen Service’s ‘Collision Project’.
Taking as its starting point the decision by Screen Service to pair the two artists as collaborators, Gods in the Machines explores conversation as a creative act. Inherent in online long-distance collaborations, each artist is, to the other, a god in the machine: each housed in a computer screen, their likenesses and voices captured in pixels and radio frequencies and physically channelled through thin glass wires, connecting the two in their workplaces.
Gods in the Machines finds the duo locating common ground through conversation, then as gods, terra-forming this ground, endowing it with many things; trees and birds, planets and people, liquid crystal displays and fantasy role-playing games. Each text exchanged is a crystal lattice, a neuron, a breezeblock, that is over time assembled to form a world of fiction.
The inhabitants of this fictional world, much like its gods, experience logistical setbacks in communicating: Wi-Fi cuts out, calls drop, a voice is too distant to be heard. Despite these obstacles they persist in their efforts to communicate, determined to be heard and known.
“Can you hear me now?”
a meeting of the minds
an exhibition response by Ellen O’Connor
When The Collision Project was born, the moon was chosen as the project’s emblem. We decided that this project was our space programme (!) and that by connecting artists across space and time, to inhabit a virtual universe, we were managing some form of space facilitation.
There is something universal and explorative about connecting artists virtually. Stone ruins, aerial views, way-finding, transmission, flight, earth, topography, planets and even terraforming spring up across these three collaborations. A literal grounding took place across all three collaborations, and much was built!
Pair 1, Cóilín O'Connell and Mel Galley, unearthed fascinating parallels between their practices. They discovered an ability to construct a collaborative investigation by piecing together recent and new individual works, carefully assembled into a new narrative, titled Time Capsules and Nervous Systems. They have paired images, video and textual works into a connective stream of exploration into memory, significant landscapes and revisitation.
“When we look on a landscape, we want to believe that this is how it always was and therefore, by extension, this is how it always will be”
One of Mel’s featured works is a CGI image work titled Grasslands (Landscape). It's a reimagined scene of sand dunes in Cumbria, that in reality have eroded over time. Mel responded to feelings of betrayal towards the natural landscape after discovering the disappearance of the dunes. This work is paired with a recent video by Cóilín, You’ve changed, featuring a historic stone burial site in Ireland. The words “You’ve changed” are repeated through narration. The voice could be passers-by or the monument itself. Cóilín and Mel dig into similar ideas here, that our relationship with and understanding of place evolves. Their navigation of exchange is strikingly effective. There is something cyclical at work here, the artists are finding patterns and recurrent themes and granting them a new function in dialogue with each other. This feels literary and timeless!
For pair 2, Cara Farnan and Teresa Collins, their outcome has taken the form of a text, A single starting gate and a thousand finish lines. Cara and Teresa have found a voice that speaks fluently to their exchange. Moving through a ‘play’ or script of their collaboration, we read their foraged source material, hear their voices and perceive the POV of a pigeon, a character and messenger in their process. The physical action of the ‘scroll’ is important in this work, with punctuation interrupting space and holding our interest. Slippages in digitized sound and video communications have been considered sculpturally and incorporated into their final distillation through sentence structure. They found real physicality in A single starting gate and a thousand finish lines, which radiates moments of their connection. This text makes me smile, and feel little surges of emotion. Cara and Teresa demonstrate an intuitive approach to teasing out ideas in tandem, playfully, poetically and vigorously. Their collaboration findings are intimately and secretively transmitted to us. This text exudes a sense of calm, as effective distillations of complex things can do, beautifully.
“sounds moving through air, notes rising, bells in the distance, the general hum and buzz of people chatting on the street below, rooftops, nest building, observing at a distance; This is also called aerial work”
For pair 3, Aisling Phelan and Elinor O’Donovan, in order to initially exchange, they voice-noted their dreams to each other, a quick way to connect and reach a ‘higher plane’ together. Their non-linear web piece, Gods in the Machines, generates a physicality to ethereal communication and explores the narrative of their collaboration. It holds a clickable story, structured by icons in a non-linear format. Speculative fiction, geography, online games, pixels and long-distance conversations (mediated by technology) are all conjured!
Despite their story-website having an ‘ending’ page, they created the pages so they can be viewed in any order, affording their collaboration an endlessness. Gods in the Machines reveals the pair finding common ground and then terraforming fictions. This work builds a shared landscape, reflecting spirited and speculative imaginations, and the ease with which the pair found an immediate personal connection. The artificial environment on view provides a new way to experience a virtual exchange, a cosmic speculation on rethinking communication and the body in relation to technology. It both mimics and rephrases how reality can be shown in a digital world. Humanity, technology, nature and some form of spirituality are smashed together in a generous and whimsical portrayal of the spark ignited by Aisling and Elinor.
The Collision Project was curated by Ellen O’Connor with co-curation from Bronagh Gallagher, Olivia Normile and Alex Keatinge.
Image from Grasslands (Landscape), Mel Galley, 2023, included in Time Capsules and Nervous Systems, Cóilín O'Connell and Mel Galley, The Collision Project, 2023
Quote and images from A single starting gate and a thousand finish lines, Cara Farnan and Teresa Collins, The Collision Project, 2023.
Stills from Gods in the Machines, Aisling Phelan and Elinor O’Donovan, non-linear narrative-based web piece, The Collision Project, 2023.
Quote from Epitaphs (Writing), Mel Galley, 2023, included in Time Capsules and Nervous Systems, Cóilín O'Connell and Mel Galley, The Collision Project, 2023
Still from You’ve Changed, Cóilín O'Connell, video, 2:03, included in Time Capsules and Nervous Systems, Cóilín O'Connell and Mel Galley, The Collision Project, 2023
Courtesy of the artists.