Thursday 6 July
5.30 – 7.15pm
Short description
The Irish Museum of Modern Art partners with Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities, to host a discussion that explores digital art practice through an intersectional lens. Our guests, artists Yarli Allison, Lauren Kelly and Roibí O’Rua address the opportunities afforded by decentering traditional voices, practices and histories in digital art and humanities
The aim of the Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities project is to enact intersectional feminism across the ‘Full Stack’ of digital development: addressing how inequality is reproduced from the level of code to the level of representation
As part of the collaborative actions of the Full Stack Feminism project, this talk brings together artists to consider one of the project’s main research questions which concerns the opportunities and challenges of decentering traditional voices in digital art and humanities. We explore this critical question through the practices of our invited speakers: Yarli Allison (interdisciplinary artist), Lauren Kelly (performance-based artist with a socially engaged practice) and Roibí O’Rua (multimedia artist and self-proclaimed popstar) alongside discussion chair Laurence Hill (digital art curator and doctoral researcher on curatorial activism)
The event comprises artists’ presentations and a moderated panel discussion, which will open out to consider the wider ecology of the digital arts and humanities within and against which this event takes place
Jeneen Naji, Principal Investigator of the Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities research project, and associate Professor in Digital Media, Maynooth University will introduce this two-year collaborative project that brings together artists, communities, coders, archivists, and scholars, to develop digital objects, interfaces, archives, and tools that can work to amplify marginalised voices
Tickets
This event is free but ticketed to attend in person – the event will also be livestreamed
About the speakers
Yarli Allison
Yarli Allison (she/they) is a Canadian-born, Hong Kongese artist based in London with an interdisciplinary approach that traverses film, sculpture, installation, CGI modelling, drawings, poetry, tattooing, game, and performances.
Building upon Yarli’s experiences of displacements, they compose ‘what-ifs’ fictitious scenarios as methodological playgrounds that explore “how humans/things live” in utopia/dystopia systems. Current themes of digital humanities and datafication are explored, along with skinships and affect, driven by thought processes such as queering history and emotional geography studies.
Yarli’s recent virtual reality generated work(s), with elements of ‘digital gamification’, references an early age period of Yarli’s refuge-seeking in cyberspaces, where the familiar space is “much stabler” than the “tangible diasporic life”.
Yarli’s works recently were exhibited at Institute of Contemporary Arts: ICA (London), FACT (Liverpool), Barbican Centre (London), Linz FMR (Austria), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong), and V&A Museum (London). They are a working member of Asia-Art-Activism Network. More details here
Photo Credit: Richard Boll
Lauren Kelly
Lauren Kelly is an Irish neurodiverse conceptual visual artist who works solo and also within a socially engaged context. Her work is primarily within performance art and manifests into photography and film as an extension of performance, based around body politics and activism. Using the unlimited landscape of performance art to vocalise politics with rationality to the oppressed states of the body.
Lauren’s subject matters are intensely researched as it roots the work historically, politically, and personally.
Working closely with activists and other people is an important part of her practice as she believes socially engaged work is the most crucial work within the arts sector, that social and political issues are key subject art can tactile and give creative solutions to creating the means for real social change. More details here
Roibí O’Rua
Roibí O’Rua is a multimedia artist and self-proclaimed popstar based in Waterford City. A graduate of Limerick School of Art and Design, she has exhibited work in the 39th EVA International and the 2021 RDS Visual Arts Awards and has completed a digital commission as part of Project Arts Centre’s SHORT CUTS programme in collaboration with RTÉ Culture in 2022. She is currently the Irish Artist-In-Residence with the Full Stack Feminism Project.
Hailing from a background of Queer Club Culture, paired with a love for all things Cyber, she creates work that explores Queer Identity as it relates to and evolves with Cyberspace.
Her work takes the form of Music, 3D Modeling, Animation and Illustration, with an emphasis on digital and accessible methodologies.
Her current works centre on the concept of the Trans identity as a Cyborg, drawing from Donna Haraway’s ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, VNS Matrix’ ‘Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century,’ Legacy Russell’s ‘Glitch Feminism’, as well as her own Trans* Identity. More details here
Discussion Chair
Laurence Hill
Laurence Hill is a freelance curator and a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex. His research looks at digital art and the products and platforms, which continue to be critical to its existence. These are the work of global monopolies driven by neoliberal economics, the structures and cultures of which reproduce orthodoxies of cisgendered, white, ableist masculinity. This structural orthodoxy is often reflected in digital art curation and practice. Laurence is working towards producing a shareable ethical framework for curatorial activism which seeks to unsettle and undo these orthodoxies
Laurence is the project curator for Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities alongside a number of other research projects at the University of Sussex and was formerly Director of Brighton Digital Festival. More details here
Jeneen Naji
Dr Jeneen Naji, is the Principal Investigator of the Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities research project, and associate Professor in Digital Media, in Maynooth University where she lectures on the B.A. Media Studies, the M.A. in Critical and Creative Media and the BSc Multimedia, Mobile & Web Development run with the Department of Computer Science.
Dr. Naji’s research is in the area of digital culture specifically exploring the impact of the digital apparatus on poetic expression. She is also a convener and founding member of the Maynooth University Digital Arts & Humanities Research Cluster. She is also a member of the international editorial review board of the International Journal of Game-Based Learning (IJGBL) and a Fulbright Tech Impact Scholar. More details here
Acknowledgement of AHRC/Irish Research Council funding
This research/project was funded by UKRI-AHRC and the Irish Research Council under the ‘UK-Ireland Collaboration in the Digital Humanities Research Grants Call’ (grant numbers AH/W001667/1 and IRC/W001667/1).
