Working from a blueprint of the latest alterations to LCGA, the artist invested voids and transitional spaces with new and recast dropped ceiling structures. Buildings and their architecture offer a way to find one’s bearing, and having been trained as a civil engineer McNulty has an ongoing relationship with constructed spaces and their materials. But as our own propensity to find significance combines with the artist’s multiple propositions, meanings start to proliferate: this is perhaps what the artist is referring to when he speaks of a cumulative effect ‘that makes sense on an extended timeline’, in a conversation with John Gayer (‘On Density, Flow, and Destabilising the Visual’ ).
Italo calvino cybernetics and ghosts series#
PROTOTYPES, McNulty’s overall exhibition, presents itself as a series of discrete elements whose connections are left to the visitor to make. Although fully aware of the rules directing the exhibition, we are not long in associating themes, colour and shapes to spin meanings from these assembled works. Dennis McNulty and curator Mary Conlon applied a set of rules as guiding principles: they chose ‘untitled’ artworks from the gallery’s collection list – that is, works either deliberately called ‘untitled’, or simply never given a name – and presented them by date over three walls.
In this essay Calvino speculates on the possibility of a machine for writing literature based on the reader’s capacity to produce meaning from a random series of discrete elements: “The true literature machine will be one that itself feels the need to produce disorder.” This capacity of the reader/viewer to produce meaning from arbitrarily assembled elements is further tested in Untitled, algorithmic selection from the Permanent Collection. From the random jumble of letters new meanings sometimes merge with that of the original text we are attempting to decipher. The letters of the words are permutated in successive sequences, altering different parts of the text. In this sense, even though entrusted to machines, literature will continue to be a “place” of privilege within the human consciousness, a way of exercising the potentialities contained in the system of signs belonging to all societies at all times.Īn Entirely Lyrical Instrument is a wall mounted flat screen in the Atrium of the Limerick City Gallery of Art: it shows an algorithmically generated page from Italo Calvino’s essay ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’. Once we have dismantled and reassembled the process of literary composition, the decisive moment of literary life will be that of reading.
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