This text was written by Sadbh O' Brien in response to Luke van Gelderen's — Romeo Save Me, the penultimate exhibition of our 2024 Artist-Initiated Projects programme. You can read more about the exhibition here.

Please find a print format version here.

The Master of Noise

Every Monday at around 9:15am my phone buzzes with my weekly Screen Time Report offering me insights into my phone usage. Yesterday, I spent 4 hours 17 minutes on my phone and picked it up a total of 158 times. I trick myself into thinking I am doing well—the average daily screen time for an adult is now 6 hours 5 minutes—but then I’m not considering that I spend the majority of my working week at a desktop computer of which my phone’s report has no knowledge, pushing me well above the daily average. The prognosis for excessive screen time is unsurprisingly not good; reading an online article on the subject is like reading the large print of the common side effects in the warning section of a drug pamphlet telling me I’m at risk of mental health disorders, digital eye strain and obesity. But there are no guidelines, no caution label, no advice to only use as directed. No label stating risk of overdose and addiction. The article is scientific in tone, and vaguely focussed on the physical wellbeing of the individual user. It doesn’t tell me much about screen time’s effect on the soul, society and the shared cycles of communication we engage in on a daily basis.

Watching Luke van Gelderen’s HARDCORE FENCING (2023) for the first time, I was transfixed to the spot. Like a house fly caught in one of those pheromone-spiked sticky traps, I was unable to break away, its mechanisms of variable reward holding me in place.  As I went on the journey down its dark algorithmic path, I felt the familiar sensation of being locked in a doom scroll, automated and addicted, I was left with an uncanny yet familiar sense of seeing the world through someone else’s eyes. The film distilled and presented back compounded fears and anxieties I have had about life in the post digital era and the conflicted feelings I have about the power of online platforms as spaces of social discourse and socialisation.

<A man sits at his computer, cigarette clasped in hand, and begins to cry. He clicks his mouse three times. He can’t help it. A torrent of messages of both hate and support scroll endlessly across the screen. Behind him sits a black box which reads the words ‘YouTube Gaming’. A silent observer.>

In a conversation with a friend, I animatedly shared my experience of the potent affect produced by the film; the dizzying whirlpool of self-help rhetoric, male aggression and hyper-individualistic sentiments. We discussed the video’s deft collating and editing and the emotional qualities it exposed and forced us to analyse. So many of the face-to-camera clips felt like the creators were grasping at their “true self” in the dark. On top of the clear inner-uncertainty expressed, I questioned the validity of some of the more heightened emotions shared on screen, noting the theatricality of some of the reveals of the soul, and querying the authenticity of the more acute distress signals. ‘Some of it is just so fake!’ my friend exclaims, his expression contorts viscerally as he gets the words out, physically recoiling. It’s hard not to note the heightened sense of ‘performativity’ throughout. I agreed noting some of the performances often went too far in their bid to convince and be certified as ‘authentic’, straying into the territory of ‘cringe’. In this unsympathetic questioning of the truth and validity of the emotional content, we quickly digressed into language that creates competition among individuals; online spaces have becomes arenas in which ‘authenticity’ is judged by a network of unknown users, and depending on how the sincerity or irony of the performance lands, the audience casts judgement on whether this is ‘based’ or ‘cringe’,1 first class or second rate, authentic or disingenuous. The problem is, despite cruel dismissal, weaved through the rotation of performances to camera and emerging from behind the masks are very real sensations of alienation and fragility, discontent, and extreme anguish.

Authenticity is performed, it requires an audience. The idea of it is embedded in how identity is played out through digital technologies, and digital technologies have affected both the nature of identity and its socio-cultural function. Barbara Cueto and Bas Hendrikx observe how online spaces have encouraged a division of ‘self’ into multiple online identities and avatars which exist apart from the corporeal experience in the physical world.2  Badges of authenticity or verification populate the pages of celebrities and brands, ultimately granted to them by their followers. This embedding of self into an online proxy persona acts much like a shield or a mask, from which we can curate the aspects of ourselves which will please our audience the most.

In the physical world, masks have long been objects in anthropological history. They reify the desire to outwardly perform an alternate, and often more powerful, identity—first used in ancient rituals and practices. But a social profile on hegemonic platforms is often created in the desired image of our “true selves”, and this changes the dynamics of its socio-political power. The recurrence of the masked figure in van Gelderen’s film exposes a contemporary discomfort and malleability within our identities, the mask acting as both an impermeable barrier to the external world and a blank surface from which we can project a new identity. Social media has offered a digital extension of this which allows us to reach a larger audience. The removal of immediate physical presence means the image projected can be carefully controlled, but is subject to a greater volume of intense public scrutiny, where there is less culpability for malicious actors. It offers a channel of transmutation, allowing us to embody and reflect back the perceived ‘desires’ of society, in a bid to solicit a response from the external world.

<The figure of a woman walks towards the camera, her face obscured by a motorcycle helmet with cat ears, a chimeric cyborg with a reflective screen-like visor, she suspended in silence.>

But what happens when these masked figures emerge from the symbolic realm? ‘Reality’ artist Signe Pierce’s film American Reflexxx (2015) demonstrates this transition of avatar back into corporeal body in a shocking piece of performance and intervention by way of social experiment, and it leads to a violent end. Pierce, accompanied by videographer Alli Coates, exposes the paradox of this untenable figure being accepted in society. Dressed in a silver mirrored mask, high heels and a short blue dress, she walks the party strip of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina as a cyborg, silently and provocatively. The resulting crowd quickly turn from curious to abusive to violent, the angry mob questions her gender, displaying misogynistic, transphobic and xenophobic behaviours and ultimately is Pierce assaulted by a young woman.3 It is reflective of a violent hive-mind cruelty that exists in online spaces, a strike of a fist to keep one in check, a barbed comment to spark a frenzy of outrage, a blow to the mirrored mask.

<Three consecutive 9:16 frames spin reels marked with ‘self-improvement’ and ‘self-help’ hashtags. Masculine Speech accounts, Jordan Peterson memes, and scenes of hyper masculine bodies encouraging gym culture come to the surface. In the centre is a high-pitched and accelerated monologue from Andrew Tate, his helium warbled voice encouraging ‘losers’ to get up off the couch, reminding us in ascending scales that we’re ‘in competition with the entire world!’>

Social media has become a multifaceted system—one of social labour, public theatre and an infrastructure of surveillance. It has also become the arbiter of power.4 It exists in a world with an ever increasingly sharp wealth disparity, an increased demand for unmediated authenticity, a pressure to ‘be oneself’ capitalised on by corporate advertising; it is a system which forces you to express yourself ‘and then holds you accountable for whatever you say for years.’5 Hooked to the slot-machine like cascading videos, the source of a growing discontent within ourselves, we seek within the very space of our addiction for a way out through the self-help accounts. Perhaps it is here that we’ll find some of the answers that should have been on that warning label, maybe even a recommendation for a different drug. The red pill, you say? I sometimes struggle to understand how figures like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson have come to fame, but when we look to how they use online platforms to tap into (and monetise) this uncertainty and disenchantment, specifically in the male ego, offering themselves as authentic trailblazers against the systems of power which have led to this deep discontent, perhaps it’s not all that surprising.

The pendulum of hate and support on social media platforms, the creation of an ‘us’ and a ‘them’, is valued through a points hierarchy which encourages outrage, deepens social divides, and like all addictions, encourages self-destructive behaviour. Identity is something we construct from the tools of communication we have to hand, the screen has become the site from which flows variably reward system, standardising and ordering the
interactions of its users in tiered system of likes, comments and shares to keep them hooked.6 ‘In the digital age, power is no longer the holder of reason and law, but the Master of Noise. The exercise of power is based on media simulation and nervous stimulation.’7 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi identifies this slippage of our grasp on ‘truth’ and rational determination as a symptom of being subject to the accelerated flow of information. The intensification of nervous stimuli through the language of advertising creates barriers for rational decision making which previously was a slow conscious act based on examination of a limited number of sources. He describes the impact as a decomposition of the social brain, the death of social critique. For Berardi, advertising has become the defining language of the mediascape, and the cause of a cultural regression.8 For Big Tech and Big Business, it doesn’t matter as long as users keep producing data which can be harvested to keep them spending,
and so the cycle continues. However, we can’t expect to exist in this endless feedback loop unchanged.

<A group of young men stand in a sparse concrete yard, muscular and shirtless. One boy tenderly kisses his friend—who holds a fold-up chair—on the cheek, before downing what’s left in a bottle of booze and taking the last drag from his cigarette. The sound of the bottle smashing on the ground  is audible just as he leans forward waiting for the chair to come crashing down.>

HARDCORE FENCING is punctured throughout with words and acts of self-violence, these moments are always staged, and where some feel like explorations, others feel enforced. For Berardi, these concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘authenticity’ that seem to preoccupy us, do not even really exist. Instead he recognises that it is a nostalgia for authenticity, and a culture which idolises it, which is very real. He writes ‘identification may be viewed as an attempt to stabilise the self in its relation to the outside reality.’ However this attempt to self-stabilise  denies the nature of identification as something that is in flux, he claims, any attempts to stabilise identity turn into acts of self-violence, and ultimately aggression. He goes on ‘fascism is the obsessive and aggressive enforcement of that provisional stabilisation.’9 The implication of this sentence when applied to the potential of the hive-mind as system of control haunts me. It’s hard to know what the way out of this is, or what the counterculture should look like. Perhaps it is to be found in ‘the dark forest’ region of the web, these smaller networks made up of platforms like Discord, Substack, Reddit and Telegram are arguably free from the homogenisation of mainstream social media, although these are not without their problems. Or maybe its offline entirely.

As the insurmountable and unrelenting pings, vibrations, alerts, and notifications on my phone increase in frequency, I want to be online less and less. As someone who often craves the space of social critique that Berardi laments, I find exhibitions some of the few places left that allow for the distractions of everyday life to melt away, my last vestibules of uninterrupted focus. A few months into Trump’s Rupert-Murdoch-backed presidency, and in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I walked the airy white exhibition halls of the often controversial Whitney Biennale and came across the work of Frances Stark for the first time. Eight giant canvases transcribed in paint the words of punk musician Ian F. Svenonius’s eponymous polemic text Censorship Now! It felt timely then, it only feels more so now. The text argues that art has become impotent and irrelevant under an American militarised state, lost meaning at the hands of the super privileged and has become oppressed and disarmed by capitalism. Svenonius—since responsible for his own cancellation10—laments the time where people recognised the power of art, and proposes artists should take control of censorship and eliminate everything from the press, to mass-produced pop, technology, and expressions of fascist ideology. He marks art and media as dangerous substances that must be regulated, as well as placing their use as a beacon of hope in the hands of artists. It’s punk. It’s idealistic and extremist. It’s ironic and absurd. Stark paints the words large so the pages of the book fill the gallery walls, the biting and snippy prose tower above, some sentences underlined in dripping red paint referencing wars which have taken place at the hands of the state whilst it patronised the arts. Alarming double exclamation marks fill the borders where there are calls for mass censorship. For all the text’s possible shortcomings, it demonstrates and recognises the true political power of media and calls for a sense of responsibility in linguistic and creative expression. Stark simply enlarges key pages, calling our attention. The uninterrupted moment with the work lets us consider the polemic deeply, moments of outrage are followed by moments of rational and the critical brain kicks in.

Much like Stark, van Gelderen calls our attention to some extreme content, magnifying key moments that together tell a more complex story. The compilation allows the moments of outrage–which often emerge from watching a short form clip–wash over so the bigger picture starts to emerge. And it’s dystopian. Embedded within its content is a very current mood of social alienation, entrapment in a false economy of ‘authenticity’, and the seeds of a rise in extreme right-wing politics. But it also lays out some useful ways to think about our increased dependence on media technology, how processes of identification and authentication are becoming increasingly political, how methods of communication have become embedded in a language of advertising and capitalism, and how this is negating space for rational decision making. Lifting reactionary content from the very platforms which Berardi believes to have led to the decomposition of the social brain, and positioning it in a context which makes space for social critique, allows us time to see what’s really at stake.

Sadbh O’Brien is an artist and writer based in Dublin.

Notes

1  Nate Sloan, ‘Beyond Based and Cringe’, Do Not Research. 21 June 2021. https://legacy.donotresearch.net/posts/beyond-based-and-cringe
2 Barbara Cueto and Bas Hendrikx, eds., AUTHENTICITY? Observations and Artistic Strategies in the Post-Digital Age (Valiz, 2017).
3 Alli Coates and Signe Pierce, ‘AMERICAN REFLEXXX’. 7 April 2015, Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXn1xavynj8&ab_channel=AlliCoates%2BSignePierce
4 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, ‘Trap of Identity and Delusion of Truth’ in AUTHENTICITY? Observations and Artistic Strategies in the Post-Digital Age, eds. Barbara Cueto and Bas Hendrikx (Valiz, 2017). p138.
5 Caroline Busta, ‘The internet didn’t kill counterculture—you just won’t find it on Instagram’ Document Journal. 14 January 2021. https://www.documentjournal.com/2021/01/the-internet-didnt-kill-counterculture-you-just-wont-find-it-on-instagram/
6 Brad Troemel, ‘The Culture War Report’ 30 January 2022. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DIJXeIov5Y&t=1s
7 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, ‘Trap of Identity and Delusion of Truth’ in AUTHENTICITY? Observations and Artistic Strategies in the Post-Digital Age, eds. Barbara Cueto and Bas Hendrikx (Valiz, 2017). p138–40
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Evan Minsker, ‘Ian Svenonius Publishes and Deletes Post About Being “Completely Inappropriate to Women”’, Pitchfork. 27 July 2020. https://pitchfork.com/news/ian-svenonius-publishes-and-deletes-post-about-being-completely-inappropriate-to-women/

Image credits: (all)

Luke van Gelderen, HARDCORE FENCING, 2023. Film still. Courtesy of the artist.

Pallas are delighted to partner with Dublin Fringe Festival to host artist and curator Clodagh Assata Boyce at The Coombe studios as part of Artist at Work residencies.

Artist at Work are paid idea development residencies taking place with host venues across Ireland over our festival dates, shining a light on artistic process.

Clodagh Assata Boyce is a Trini-Irish curator and visual artist whose work explores ideas of memory, race, nationhood and legacy. During their Artist at Work week Clodagh will be experimenting with various methods of printing and audio installation.
Clodagh is Curator-in-residence at Paragon Studios 2023-2025

bio.site/Clodagha.boyce | fringefest.com

A public performance action and meeting of stakeholders supporting the development of a quality interdisciplinary Art Space in Dublin 8 as part of a campaign for artist-led spaces took place this morning.

by Outlandish Theatre, Pallas Projects/Studios and the wider Dublin 8 arts community.

Maud Hendricks, co-director of Outlandish Theatre, made the following statement, followed by a performance action at the Rupert Guinness Theatre:

"This city is constantly changing.

Dublin 8 is morphing.

New structures are being erected to accommodate tourists and students first, and people who need homes second.

Dublin 8 has the highest population density in the city and this will increase dramatically over the next ten to twenty years.

Community contains the word unity.

We desire to unite all people with their different ways of being, thinking and feeling.

We need quality arts, cultural and community spaces to express these differences.

Dublin city's master plan promises green and cultural spaces for old and new communities.

However, arts and cultural spaces are disappearing throughout the city. They are usurped by the economic model of profit and change purpose to commercial use.

The securing of the basic need for homes, green, cultural and arts spaces needs priority over direct economic gain.

Artists will always find a way to exist, to create work, here or somewhere else.

The residents of Dublin 8, however, are dependent on visibility, accessibility and affordability of local spaces.

The elements are there to solve the current discrepancy:
The 5% for arts, cultural and community spaces per new development
Empty existing community and cultural spaces
Redundant factories and churches
International funding
The expertise of artists to run arts and cultural spaces.
But these alone are not enough.

We need an integrated approach to deliver high quality purpose built spaces for a thriving balanced and humanistic society.

We need a commitment.

Artists are natural entrepreneurs, and we propose that all the stakeholders, the developers, the city council, the government and the artists work together towards this goal:

The Rupert Guinness Theatre is one of the last structures of the workers' theatres in Dublin.

The site carries over 300 years of people's histories.

It is a landmark.

The building is not fit for its original purpose and needs a reimagining for a new cultural space.

To collectively develop this site into an interdisciplinary arts centre would be an act of love to the people who once worked in this area, the current residents and the future generations.

Dublin 8 is a destination, it is also a home for over 9500 children.

Great things don't just happen, it takes integrated actions, a government committed to delivering a state of the art facility, and all parties to invest in the long term development of this site for the growth and wellbeing of all people in Dublin 8 and beyond.

Why do people visit Paris, Istanbul or Dublin? It’s to experience people’s expressions and ways of being, not to visit business districts.

Artists are merchants of care and we are ready to manifest for the basic need of expression."

Art Space Now D8 is a collaborative campaign led by Outlandish Theatre and Pallas Projects/Studios.  At the public gathering a statement performance was made to an audience of local residents, artists, local large-scale developers, council and government attendees sharing the outcome of workshops held by diverse artists and community activists to which the thematics of public space and who it is for has been a driving aspect of their practice. In the workshops we conceptually considered (public) space and the role and responsibility the artists can carry in the manifestation of an arts centre in Dublin 8.   

“We are manifesting a state of the art interdisciplinary arts centre in Dublin 8 and we are looking to express the artistic value of this future space through collective interdisciplinary art expression, building on the history of five workers’ theatres in Dublin 8, the fact that Dublin 8 is one of the most densely populated and the least serviced areas in relation to green space and cultural arts spaces, as well as housing, whilst an eclipse of commercial developments are taking over public land.”

Workshop artists
Tara Bredemeier, Joan Somers Donnelly, Anthony Freeman, Marianne Marcotte, Aoife Ward and Eve Woods of Con: temporary Quarters, Mark Cullen and Eve Woods (Pallas Projects/Studios) and Maud Hendricks and Bernie O'Reilly (Outlandish Theatre).

Maud Hendricks and Bernie O’Reilly, co-directors of Outlandish Theatre, shared passionately: “Since our invitation as first theatre company in residence at The Coombe Hospital, the importance of Art Spaces and the lack thereof has been integral to our work. In conversation with local and central stakeholders we continue to make a strong appeal for the basic need of cultural and art venues. Since our foundation in 2010, the situation has deteriorated with semi-arts spaces like community centres closing down, the demolition of key venues and the ineffective application of new spaces in semi-private and commercial settings. The solution is clear, the future venues exist and the visionary arts’ organisations and artists are ready to manage, curate and use the venues. The missing link is the investment and decision of the government to appoint the structures, invest in quality fit outs and by financially backing a long term vision.”

Gavin Murphy and Mark Cullen, Joint artistic directors, Pallas Projects/Studios say: Pallas Projects/Studios have been at the forefront of community-based artist-run culture since 1996. We strongly believe in a vibrant, creative, liveable city, and that artists greatly add to the cohesion and vibrancy of the community in which they are situated. All over the city, artists and artist-run spaces have been at the forefront of revitalisation of neglected city centre areas, but have borne the brunt when these areas are developed. It is difficult to think of another sector where access to a workspace is so precarious: Between 2012 and 2022 over 27 studio buildings each comprising multiple artists studios have closed in Dublin city. Of these, 9 (or 1/3) were located in Dublin 8, and there has been no major Capital funding for new cultural provision in Dublin 8 since 2000. Now is the moment when the community can insist that arts and culture cannot be taken for granted but must be supported and protected where they are most relevant, in the communities where people live.

Photos by Serhii Shapoval

On the day that Ireland and other European countries officially acknowledge the statehood of Palestine we are delighted to report that we raised €12,332 in sales and donations for our recent Pallas for Palestine Exhibition, proceeds of which will be donated to UNRWA and MSF.

Sincere thanks to all who contributed to the Pallas for Palestine Fundraising exhibition, to all the studio artists who generously offered their works for sale, to our sponsors Galway Bay Brewery and Sheridans Cheesemongers, to the Digital Hub who hosted and provided the event location and the public who came and purchased works and gave donations, and of course UNRWA and MSF for their tireless work in Palestine.

We also want to express our gratitude to Jonathan Fowler, Deputy Director of Communications for UNRWA, for his address during the opening and for kindly answering the audience's questions.

We'd like to especially thank Pallas Studios artists who participated in the exhibition. More information on the artists is available here:

Marian Balfe, Susan Buttner, Robyn Carey, Dominique Crowley, Mark Cullen, Karen Ebbs, Andrej Getman, Léann Herlihy, Garreth Joyce, Steffi Kelly, Barbara Knezevic, Gillian Lawler, Dave Madigan, Alan Magee, Lana May Fleming, Paul McCarthy, Ronan McCrea, Emma Mckeagney, Sean Molloy, Gavin Murphy, Blaine O'Donnell, Irene O'Neill, Jennifer Rylands, Eileen O'Sullivan, Leda Scully, Kym Tracey, Harry Walsh Foreman, Catherine Ward, Eve Woods.

A breakdown of the funds raised is below:

Sales: €11,640

Donations: €692

Total raised: €12,332

25% of sales will be distributed to artists to cover production and framing costs, and transaction fees amounted to €200

About the recipients:

Médecins Sans Frontières, the Nobel Prize winning organisation, was founded in 1971, to speak out, to overcome borders to offer medical aid, and to deliver independent neutral and impartial aid internationally while going ‘where the patients are’. They are currently working around the clock providing life saving vital medical care in Gaza in the face of immense challenges.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) began operation on 1st May 1950 and is unique in its commitment to one group of refugees and has contributed to the welfare of four generations of Palestinians. Its remit was to prevent conditions of starvation and distress, and encompasses many humanitarian services including primary health care, camp improvement and emergency response.

ID 1,2,4,5: Multiple visitors during the opening of Pallas for Palestine in The bank venue.
ID 3:  Details of the fundrasing exhibition above, image in the centre: Qras Farash/Butterfly Discs traditional embroidery in black, red, green and white colours. Design from Gaza, Tirazain.com.

Audio description: soundbite.speechify

Our friends and collaborators at Paper Visual Arts have published Sara Damaris M.’s wonderful text, ‘Maslow’s Hammer’, produced as part of our annual PPS/PVA Visual Art Writing Commission, a collaboration between @pva_journal and @pallas.projects.studios. The text is now online - read here.

This is the third year we have worked together on this award, which aims to encourage, develop, and support new and ambitious critical writing in the context of contemporary visual art in Ireland, and to afford the recipient the opportunity to reflect on and publish work on their specific area of interest.

The commission happens in relation to Pallas Projects’ ongoing curatorial project Periodical Review (2011–ongoing) and together with the selected works is intended to further discourse on the contemporary moment in visual art in Ireland, while also building a record of art practice, projects, and concepts over time.

Sara is the Curatorial Fellow at the Irish Museum of Modern Art and a visiting lecturer in Fine Art at TU Dublin, previously teaching in the department of Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. Alongside artist Tamsin Snow, Sara co-curates Montpelier House, an experimental domestic exhibition programme. She is also the Curator of Visual Art at Brown Mountain Diamond, an artist-run art residency space in deep rural Ireland.

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Image: Katherine Waugh and Fergus Daly

I See a Darkness, 2023
Film still, from the exhibition at Photo Museum Ireland
Image courtesy of the artists

ID: Film still depicting a desolate rocky landscape on a sunny day with mountains visible in the background. A coyote stands facing the camera in the centre foreground.

Audio description: soundbite.speechify