The Secret of Seven
Sean Lynch
Since autumn 2021, artist Martina O’Brien has placed and maintained seven small video surveillance cameras in locations around County Kildare. The sites of her choosing can all be described as off the beaten track: a field on a farm, a peat bog, a forest plantation, what appears to be an overgrown brownfield site, a garden, a carpark, and by a riverbank. When I asked her why she had chosen each location and what was so special about each one, she coolly dismissed my dreamy enquiry that wondered of hidden lore and the genius loci. None of these places are of any particular notoriety, she told me, and were typical everyday spaces to be found anywhere on the island of Ireland, or the Western world today. There seemed to be an arbitrary process at play in selecting the sites. I thought to myself that maybe O’Brien could have even thrown some darts at a map to identify each location.
The fact that the kind of cameras O’Brien has been using reminded me of CCTV, made me think there was something going on here that was hidden, and I persisted in a line of questioning when talking to her on the phone. In a Google Drive link she sent, several dozen images collected from each camera showed the seasons subtly changing in each location. There must be a particularly alluring aspect to these places, I said. O’Brien continued to gently yet nonchalantly deflect my excitement. As we chat away, I’m beginning to realise that her project, titled of ephemeral measure, is moving far beyond these conventions that I’m repeatedly proposing to her (1).
I’ve followed O’Brien’s work for over a decade, and met her regularly throughout 2012 when she utilised a diagram from a flood risk management report as a motif in her Knitted Flood Wall, a participatory artwork made collaboratively in the Dublin neighbourhood where she then lived. Created in the aftermath of substantial flooding caused by the River Dodder, the project saw a large fabric work placed in situ where a wall should have been to protect hundreds of homes from what was becoming a recurring phenomenon. Self-initiated, the project received much publicity and activated her local community to come together and campaign for a solution. She involved residents who remembered multiple examples of flooding in the area in lived memory. An actual floodwall was subsequently instated by the OPW beside the riverbank.
O’Brien’s practice has since followed a trajectory of investigation into climate awareness, with noteworthy and accomplished artistic research and exhibition presentations made in Ireland and abroad. She has undertaken fruitful dialogue with experts in the analysis of climate change, and carefully considered the methods and scientific processes involved. She has explored the data infrastructures involved in weather forecasting and modelling, such as notably gaining access to the Torre Girona, a nineteenth century church on the campus of Catalonia’s Polytechnic University that houses one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers, MareNostrum (2). In her 2018 artwork Portal for Watching, a television monitor sits in a gallery space, receiving a live feed transmitted from a camera in a Met Éireann weather station in Wexford. O’Brien’s transposition of the footage, typically used to collect meteorological information at precisely timed intervals, seemed to perform a ‘hack’ into institutional networks of complex scientific and technological processes, isolating it for further contemplation.
In O’Brien’s recent installations and in the quality of the lenses currently used in the seven cameras in Kildare, there is little definition between foreground and background, and everything in view appears within a similar depth of field. The images dismantle any distinction between proximity and depth, rendering a dense naturalistic image. In this sense, they recall the early days of cinematic experimentation and prototypes for representation, such as Sergei Ei- senstein’s 1929 film on agriculture, The Old and the New. The Soviet director used a 28mm lens, creating a novel situation with a small aperture to let in light that placed everything in uniform focus to strikingly integrate foreground and background on-screen. This was a notable innovation, but didn’t perform well in the dimly lit film studios of the time – soon Eisenstein, akin to O’Brien, was making images en plein air, chasing sunny weather across the Caucasus region in order to get the bright light he needed to render his objects visible on film. At a screening in Hollywood in 1930, a viewer noted to him that, “in this film it looks like you’ve taken the basic action of the drama away from the characters themselves, and transposed it onto the milieu, onto the environment around the characters” (3).
In this sense, the assumption that place could not be ‘purely’ experienced, but that it itself is a discursive and complex entity, is apparent. Art made in Ireland has often debated this idea, especially given the fondness that the national mindset has for the romanticism of its landscape. A polemic was prominently argued by critic Tom Duddy in his seminal 1987 essay Irish Art Criticism: A Provincialism of the Right? Published in CIRCA art magazine, Duddy discussed the critical reception of Irish modernist painting that took landscape as subject matter and motif, and gave numerous examples of Irish artists being understood as working in “an atmospheric mode”, thinking of long twilights, dancing skies, morning haze and cotton clouds. Duddy argued that romantic concepts of place, atmosphere, native genius and the imagination were often given priority by curators and critics over more “dirty” materialistic concepts such as economy, commodity and visual ideology. He suggested that a careful balance of both strands of thought is paramount in understanding the work of many artists of that time.
Duddy’s paradigm of a Marxist-orientated Irish art world, when updated with O’Brien’s entanglements with the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) sector, can further nuance understandings of art’s potential as a real and actual necessity in light of climate change. In this context, many art commission briefs in the country today invite appli- cations from artists for various forms of socially orientated art, as if art was there solely for the creation of civic virtue and placemaking. In this way, art assembles communities and affirms what we know is a need for collective change, and contemporary cultural politics is a place for it to function with gusto, as an echo chamber or arena where climate change issues are promoted (4). O’Brien’s new work problematises all of this - the images of of ephemeral measure seem so mundane, so removed from a definition of a busy, engaged art that they give us no form of assurance in the old world order. It is as if we have to start again, to begin a new relation- ship with nature, a new form of looking that dissolves the evolution of social hierarchies that underpin the ecological crisis. These structures have built up over millennia to dominate over the natural world, from the long transition from the societies of the Neolithic period to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean basin, disrupting the interdependent equilibrium of human and non-human ecosystems. These hierarchies manifest themselves at both a material level (the creation of agricultural technologies and surplus, the growth of cities) and at a subjective/ psychological level (the stead internalisation of command structures, the acceptance that authoritarian behaviour is natural), all setting up and creating the globalised platforms that ultimately control the world today.
None of this is hyperbole or exaggeration. The Keeling Curve, a system used to measure the presence of carbon dioxide tells us that, “In 2015, and for the first time in at least 800,000 years, atmospheric carbon dioxide passed 400ppm [parts per million]. At its current rate, which shows no sign of abating, and we show no sign of stopping, atmospheric CO2 will pass 1,000ppm by the end of the century... At 1000 ppm human cognitive ability drops by 21 percent. At higher atmospheric concentrations, CO2 stops us from thinking clearly... in poorly ventilated homes, schools and workplaces, it can regularly exceed 1,000ppm – substantial numbers of schools in California and Texas measured in 2012 breached 2,000ppm... The crisis of global warming is a crisis of the mind, a crisis of thought, a crisis in our ability to think another way to be. Soon, we shall not be able to think at all” (5).
In her own pathway, O’Brien’s short-circuiting begins in initially adopting the precision of contemporary phenological monitoring, used in weather forecasting and climate analysis, and comprehensively described in this publication by Dr. Alison Donnelly. Yet, instead of involving networked technologies and linking up each of the cameras to a central data collecting point to collate and assess the data, O’Brien, somewhat literally, cuts up the cable – she herself travels around to each location to gather the recorded footage, as a conduit embodied. By breaking down any possibility of a technologised network through the making of these images, she disrupts the future implication of digital connectivity and its logic – she refutes the system, and makes a space for an alternative to the rhetoric of optimisation, efficiency and progress (6).
Why do this? Aren’t we all in this together? O’Brien’s approach is not hermetic, but rather of a critical impulse (7). Her and more of her contemporaries know that ecologies unfold and reveal themselves through unpredictable encounter. Design researcher Dr. Fiona McDermott, in her essay contribution to ANNEX, Ireland’s representation at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, notes, “...any data system that makes useful information available will be capitalised, and that the status of nature and environment as a financial asset will be brought to the fore”. She goes on to write that, “while the value of applying data technologies to extensive environments such as forestry is that they enable the ability to detect patterns beyond human capabilities, paradoxically, their application might lead to the discounting of information only perceptible to humans but not as sites that sustain cultural narratives or indigenous cosmologies”(8)
of ephemeral measure leaves us in this indeterminate position, one full of as yet unsynthesised and unprocessed knowledge, tradition and culture. In the austereness of its images and as they come to pass in the days, weeks and months in-between, it is clear that we’ve a long way to go for society to think of its life patterns anew. This is now the task, one I hope that O’Brien will continue to accept as her artistic challenge – to develop an awakening beyond our time, toward a future epoch.
Sean Lynch is an artist living in Askeaton, Limerick.
Endnotes
Rightly so, I later thought. Writers and essayists all too often bring their own experiences to the fore in framing and contextualizing the work of artists. The narrative character of the writer is all too embedded in what they write. Kirsten Ross’ questioning of poet Arthur Rimbaud’s relevance to the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871, writes that “In such critical narratives, the critic, adopting the point of view of some more advanced stage of capitalism’s development, inevitably reinstills or rereads into the event in question the values or “bitter wisdom” of his or her own critical vantage point. Oppositional voices or moments in this critical paradigm become the “always already co-opted” of the forward movement of capital”. See Ross, The Emergence of Social Space – Rimbaud and The Paris Commune (Minnesota, 1988), p 10. In its entirety, the critical comment industrial complex feeds itself on being networked, up-to-date and ‘on top of ’, rather than lost in discourse.
Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times, 18 April 2018, describes the evolution of the site in a review of O’Brien’s artwork, “The black computing stacks are impassively arrayed in the space once occupied by worshippers, sealed within a glass box... The Torre Girona is now a temple of big data”.
Devin Fore, ‘An Economy of Combined Trivials’ in Udo Kittelmann (ed.), The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied (Milan, 2017), p 48.
The presentation of climate data by contemporary artists usually involves a transformation into a more ‘palatable’ form. I’ve heard data changed by conceptual artists into musical scores for orchestras to play, for example. O’Brien’s earlier works, made before her debut in public galleries and art institutions, should be acknowledged in this genre. Yet, art can never ultimately represent catastrophe, and so it is always in danger of paradoxically lessening, in the act of representation, the impact that climate change could mean. This is a topic that art communities have found more awareness of in recent years, and one that O’Brien accepts as an ever-existing dialogue in her artistic stance. Perhaps a more pragmatic approach needs to occur to tackle the power relations that meander and ponder policy rather than urgently enact it. In April 2018 I attended an exhibition assembled by marine biologist and environmental campaigner Karin Dubsky in a prominent corridor of the European Union building in Brussels. Her presentation, created from fieldwork photographs, collected objects and data graphs, advocated for reform in maritime planning law. While distinctly assembled in a robust scientific manner without the finesse of artistic input, the positioning of the exhibition and Dubsky’s energetic networking made the exhibition unavoidable for several Irish EU parliamentarians. Down the hall on the same evening, Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg faced questioning from an EU committee for his firm’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal and for allowing fake news to proliferate on its platform.
James Bridle, New Dark Age (London, 2018), pp 74-5, cites the following sources: Joseph Allen et al., ‘Associations of Cognitive Function Scores with Carbon Dioxide, Ventilation, and Volatile Organic Compound Exposures in Office Workers: A Controlled Exposure Study of Green and Conventional Office Environments’ in Environmental Health Perspectives, June 2016; Usha Satish et al., ‘Is CO2 an Indoor Pollutant? Direct Effects of Low-to-Moderate CO2 Concentrations on Human Decision-Making Performance’ in Environmental Health Perspectives, December 2012.
Rowan Lear’s essay, I am nothing other than the other things, commissioned for O’Brien’s 2018 exhibition at the Butler Gallery, Kilkenny already evoked this aspect of the artist’s work, noting, “The danger of machinic immersement is what Hito Steyerl has called ‘bubble vision’, in which the human becomes a blind spot in the centre of their world, inviting domination by automated processes and algorithmic governance”.
Reference could be made here to eco-conceptual artist Peter Fend’s continuing efforts to experiment with and alter other artists’ unrealised Land Art projects as models of environmental sustainability. After signing contracts with artist Dennis Oppenheim in 1988, he proceeded to pitch variations of Oppenheim’s work – as devices to grow freshwater wallows in desert areas – to individuals and groups in the Middle East. Fend is also trying to see if some of Gordon Matta-Clark’s unrealised ideas around balloon suspension can be adopted to create mesh canopies, support vegetation and collect heat. Fend’s colloquialism that, “Art can save us, but the Artworld will kill us” suggests that many of the ideas inherent in Land Art were turned into aura-radiating and commodified objects by collectors, academics and dealers, rather than growing into truly emancipatory landscape projects. He notes of Walter De Maria’s famous The Lightning Field, realised in New Mexico in 1977, that, “scientists had approached him with questions about the eco-systemic function (e.g., increasing immunogenic-antigen polarity and, therefore, higher-species diversity). In 1994, when I proposed such to a major collector with a Harvard Art History degree, he stomped out and said, “God forbid anyone should ever build Lightning Field twice.” No one should ever build the Temple at Delphi twice?” See more of Fend’s provocative writing on the subject at http://inquest.us/art-can-save-us/ and for a description of a three inch-thick dossier held by Iraqi security forces on his activities, see https://bombmagazine.org/articles/ bomb-specific-6/, both accessed 4 October 2022.
Fiona McDermott, ‘Sensory States – Instrumentation and Automation in the Natural Landscape’ in Sven Anderson, Alan Butler, David Capener, Donal Lally, Clare Lyster and Fiona McDermott (eds.), States of Entanglement: Data in the Irish Landscape (Barcelona, 2021), p 255. McDermott references environmentalist Jennifer Gabrys in her writing.
