Registers

Artworks include a camera that opens its eye once a day, a text work which is activated by rain, as well as images showing how everyday street infrastructure can be used as improvised sensors which can help us to gauge climatic changes. 

Thinking about light data received from the sun, guided research toward Gnomon V1, a low power device with a miniature camera, which wakes up once a day to capture an image of a shadow which over time creates a long-term visual trace.

In the artwork "Rain V1", an outdoor tipping bucket (rain gauge), is triggered by falling rain, activating an indoor display of human collected and collated words about water and rain taken from a variety of perspectives. The work is a response to the term  “modern water” coined by geographer Jamie Linton who in his book “What is Water?” argues that modern western scientific conceptions of water have, at times, led to a homogenised reading of water as a singular resource to be engineered and controlled, but have sometimes left out a plurality of cultural readings: encompassing people, locations and entities which have a lived relationship to it. Linton proposes altering the way that we see water, reframing this vital substance as plural, being constituted of many waters each coming into confluence, having compositions and connections to locality differentiated via social conditions, uses, customs, rites, local climates, seasonal knowledges and adaptations which are registered and changed via a plurality of tacit knowledges, uses and personal experiences.

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): Cailean Finn

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