Memoir 1: Trust We

Memoir 1: Trust We was conceived to live in people's homes rather than in the gallery. It is a distributed network of electro-fitted domestic vases, an infrastructure for community-collected temperature data that speaks to our post-truth landscape, climate change, and climate denial. In its intended form it is a DIY assembly kit: each participant builds their own vase, and each becomes one node in a wider network. This wider deployment remains speculative for now. Exhibited at Beta Festival, is a demonstration of this public telematic artwork.

Each kit includes an external radio-controlled  sensor that reads the outside temperature against historical records for that place and date. Only when all three vases independently confirm a daily heat record has been broken does the work activate: a scent is released, a sound marks the moment, and the participant is invited to respond, in writing, drawing, or another mark, to a single open-ended question.

Each broken record prompts one question word, how, why, when, what, where, which, who, and the work runs until the network has moved through them all. The responses gather into a new kind of Ordnance Survey Memoir. In the 1830s, as the Ordnance Survey mapped Ireland, surveyors were directed to compile written accounts of each parish, knowledge the map alone could not hold.

The SEED project is funded by a Research Ireland COALESCE Strand 2A grant. It is led by Dr. Trish Morgan from DCU’s School of Communications as Principal Investigator, along with Dr. Shirley Coyle from DCU’s School of Electronic Engineering as co-PI.

Location: The Tower, The Digital Hub
Exhibition Dates + Times: 6-22nd of November, Wednesday to Sundays, 12-6pm
Artist Name/s (Pronoun/s): Adam Gibney (He/Him)