At Some Distance in the Direction Indicated
Butler Gallery
10 March – 29 April 2018
The abstract future of climate and meteorological technologies, were the central themes in O’Brien’s body of work At Some Distance in the Direction Indicated.
The exhibition explored the advancements in climate change research that enable society to navigate with ever increasing accuracy through time and space. The artworks also examined ideas surrounding the visibility and invisibility of climate data infrastructures, along with the accessibility to data collection and storage centres.
In an essay entitled I am nothing other than the other things written in response to this exhibition, artist, writer and organiser Rowan Lear writes:
‘At Some Distance in the Direction Indicated gathers myriad threads of Martina O’Brien’s fascination with the science and sorcery of climate prediction. It is perhaps unsurprising that weather conditions themselves, in their corporeal disorder, rarely feature. Instead, climate is extracted and rationalised through data, material complexity reduced to computational models. If a kind of ethics is at play here, it calls attention to the stasis and deadening effect of these kinds of abstraction, highlighted by Brian Massumi when he writes: “Measurement stops the movement in thought, as it empties the air of weather, yielding space understood as a grid of determinate positions.'‘
Amongst other artworks, At Some Distance in the Direction Indicated included a series of stitched drawings informed by Lady Ada Lovelace's contribution to computer science, an evocative video installation spotlighting the meteorological instruments and computational forecasts that predict Ireland’s extreme weather, and live CCTV footage from one of Ireland’s weather monitoring stations.
This exhibition stemmed from research gained by O’Brien through her time as Artist-in-Residence at The Irish Centre for High End Computing, Dublin and Cow House Studios, Co. Wexford.