Bedeguar

Bedeguar completes Signal Ecologies, a three-year investigation that uses insects as models for thinking about technological power. The series moved from parasitism (Ormyrus nitidulus, 2024), the one-sided taking that mirrors how platforms extract value from the people who supply it, through mutualism (Osmia caerulescens, 2025), an exchange that benefits both sides, to this generative case: the encounter between a gall wasp, Diplolepis rosae, and a branch of wild rose.

The work is a six-minute video and an augmented reality sculpture, shown together. In the video, the camera circles a rose branch with the slow attention of a researcher at a bench. The wasp arrives, settles, and begins an exchange with the plant whose chemistry neither organism controls alone. Out of it grows the bedeguar gall, a mossy, improbable structure that is part wound and part architecture, a habitat in its own right. Throughout, the image carries environmental and observation data, magnification and specimen identifiers among them: the instruments through which living things are turned into knowledge.

When the gall completes, the screen offers a code. Scanning it lifts the gall into the room at the scale of a monument, animated and walkable, so that the visitor has to move around it to see it. The act of looking changes hands: the visitor takes up the scientist's posture, but to wonder rather than to verify. Against a technological culture organised around extraction and control, Bedeguar holds up a relation that produces something new precisely because no single party commands it.

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): István László

Featured Artists