GAME UP

2 June - 26 June 2022

Green On Red Gallery is proud to announce its first international art exhibition GAME UP, which is currently being held at Transmediale Studio, in Berlin, Germany.

GAME UP seeks to get under the skin of our increasingly digital planet as a springboard to new thinking and new action through the work of  artists, Alan Butler, Elaine Hoey, Conor McGarrigle, Rosa Menkman,  David OReilly and Paper Rad/Cory Arcangel. GAME UP is a reckoning, a rear mirror view and a look at the future of our hyper-connected world.   

What are the rules of engagement in this electronic superhighway and who is policing them?  What of our digital shadow and its instantaneous monetisation? How are race and gender played out in the digital space? By turning the technology on itself, the artists in GAME UP create ways to consider and expose this hidden world. The viewer is brought deep into virtuality by means of narratives and experiences that question and confront the digital contract.

Exhibition Curator: Jerome O’Drisceoil

THE ARTISTS

CONOR MCGARRIGLE ROSA MENKMAN

ALAN BUTLER DAVID OREILLY

ELAINE HOEY PAPER RAD / CORY ARCANGEL

CONOR MCGARRIGLE

Conor McGarrigle’s Electronic Superhighway ( 2022 ) reminds us of the richness of historical material, even in the short decades since the internet was founded and early ‘70s ‘ telemental ‘ art.  The phrase, perhaps predicting the internet,  was first coined by Nam June Paik who, along with Charlotte Moorman and others in Fluxus, embraced and anthropomorphised television sets as part of his pioneering practice in works like TV Buddha ( 1974 ) and More Log in Less Logging ( 1993 ), for example.   See : ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9lnbIGHzUM )

Undersea (2019) begins with a photograph of the site of landfall. This scene was digitally captured and stored as a data file, a representation encoded as data. This digital file was then repeatedly transferred around the world via email with its specific routing traced so that it was, in all probability, transmitted at the speed of light via the same fibre optic cable that the image represents….The code of the digital file was then altered to insert additional information on the materiality of the cable: its undersea route and physical properties, its engineering and location, and its process of transferring data

ALAN BUTLER

Alan Butler represented Ireland at the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2021, as a founding member of the collective of artists and architects, Annex. GAME UP presents Alan Butler’s 20 minute video Mondo Cane (2018), a journey through a sumptuous John Berger-like sequence of images and sounds mined from Grand Theft Auto. 

Just as Sturtevant as a down-and-out without any function and value in the game is the very key to the authenticity of this hyper-capitalist, post-human world – another example of definition by what she is not - so the reproduction and adaptation of her 9 second video of a panting, galloping dog into half human, half canine hybrid blurs the boundaries further between what’s real and what’s imagined, what’s human and what’s animal, what’s digital and what’s analogue “ like the nightmare of running as fast as you can and getting nowhere “.  

ELAINE HOEY

Elaine Hoey’s walk-in VR installation/performance brings the viewer awkwardly face to face with an Oracle far removed from its Delphic forebearer and one who might predict a different kind of future. In Prophetic Oculua ( 2022 ), “ transitioning from the common world to the technological supernatural “ Hoey has trained AI to see the world as a feminist, particularly since the violent death of another young innocent female jogger on a canal bank in Co. Offaly, Ireland, in late 2021.

Repeatedly in Classical mythology, like in the tales of Europa, Danaë and Daphne, womens’ bodies are the subject of the gods’ infatuation.    The Rape of Europa, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is, in fact, the foundation myth of Europe.   As legend has it, Minos, born of the innocent, abducted Europa and the jealous Apollo, founded the first European civilization, the Minoan, on the island of Crete in the millennia BC.  The sea in Prophetic Oculua is blood red and writhing with floating bodies.   

The oracle’s face markings are more primitive, perhaps Celtic and battle-ready.   Her face is an AI composite of hundreds of womens’ faces and the female voice was created by combining and training an AI neural network with four women's voices, friends of the artist, from Spain, Brazil, Ireland and Japan.   And she is staring directly at and virtually inches in front of you.  

This work wins back agency for women and, similar to her previous work in Imaginary State(s), The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin ( 2019 ), confronts the participating viewer with some hard moral choices like War, Violence, Truth, Future, Power to progress in the virtual narrative.    

Prophetic Oculua is part of a larger project, Prosthetic Knowledge, commissioned by The Glucksman Gallery, for 2022, Cork city.

ROSA MENKMAN

Rosa Menkman is a pioneer of glitch art. Her manifesto is a passionate expression of why glitch is a significant phenomenon whose potential lies within every byte of data. Her visual work features glitch but her manifesto defines its place in culture. Glitch Studies Manifesto goes beyond a definition of glitch, however. It promises hope for what glitch might offer by suggesting disintegration might democratize society.

As she argues in her manifesto, there is no knowledge without nonsense, there is no familiarity without the uncanny and there is no order without chaos.

( http://www.digiart21.org/art/glitch-studies-manifesto )

DAVID OREILLY

LA-based David OReilly has helped redefine gaming. He is fully immersed and at home in the digital space and, since his early days in Cartoon Saloon as a 14yr old he has moved to reimagine and to reinvent gaming. He works with animation, Augmented Reality and gaming. O Reilly’s earlier foray into animation shorts won him the top prize in 2009 Berlin International Film Festival for his short Please Say Something. For GAME UP, the artist presents 4004 (2021), a free-standing resin monolith in which an Intel microchip - The Intel 4004 originally released by Intel Corporation in 1971 – has been preserved, resembling a factice out-of-place. The sculpture also exists as an NFT. 

PAPER RAD / CORY ARCANGEL

Chiptuner Paper Rad and video and game artist Cory Arcangel’s work, Super Mario Movie (2005), is a 15-minute movie programmed onto a Mario Brothers cartridge, in which we see the plumber evolving in a chaotic, corrupt and glitchy world. Super Mario Movie, which Green On Red Gallery exhibited at the NADA art fair,Ice Palace Studios, Miami, in 2005 and in The Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane in 2006, foretold the centrality of the game in 21st century art and entertainment. Artists have used the increasingly sophisticated technologies at their disposal, sometimes clumsily and with jarring results, sometimes with irony or incisiveness to show the role and importance of the screen in our lives, for good or for ill.

This exhibition is generously supported by Culture Ireland and curated by Green On Red Gallery, Dublin, with assistance from transmediale Festival of Art and Digital Culture, Berlin.

For more information contact: jerome@greenonredgallery.com www.greenonredgallery.com