| Day | Time | Event | Person |
| Friday | 1800 | Last ferry in!!! | |
| 1900 | Welcome & Intro to Whiddy | Rob Collins & Paul O’Neill | |
| 1930 | Open Session | All | |
| 2030 | Middle Battery walk | All | |
| 2100 | Bank House Social Event | Optional | |
| Saturday | 1000 | What is Antidefuturing/Agonistic Design? | Rob Collins |
| 1100 | Unfitting: Art and Labour From Conceptualisation to AI | Micheál O’Connell | |
| 1200 | Don’t Recollect | Shane Finan & Loes Damhof | |
| 1300 | Lunch | All | |
| 1400 | Beyond Consumption: Building Local Networks and Reclaiming Material Culture | Richard Forrest | |
| 1500 | Temporary Infrastructures of Care | Aisling Phelan | |
| 1600 | Blind Spots & Illuminations | Cliona Harmey | |
| 1700 | Reaching beyond Platform DIY | Seán Finnan | |
| 1800 | Empire, Dependency, and Ireland’s Tech Economy | Pat Brodie | |
| 1900 | we are all going to make it [screening] | Paul O’ Neill | |
| 1915 | Communal Meal | All/Optional | |
| 2115 | Listening to Infrastructure | (TBC) | |
| Sunday | 1200 | Debrief | Paul O’Neill & Rob Collins |
| 1400 | Western Walk: Antidefuturing & Whiddy | All/Optional | |
| 1745 | Last Ferry Out!!! |
Talks
What Is Antidefuturing/Agonistic Design? – Robert Collins
An introduction to the theme of the weekend via my research into contesting with algorithmic systems and why we shouldn’t engage with them on their own terms.
Taking inspiration from Tony Fry’s defuturing concept, which highlights how we design ourselves out of our own futures through unsustainable practices, via a critical history of automation, we will explore how the intersection of AI and profit can and should be resisted.
Unfitting: Art and Labour From Conceptualisation to AI – Micheál O’Connell
Building on John Roberts’ argument that art can function as a form of free labour beyond the capitalist logic of value and time, ‘Survival of the Unfittest’ is a developing manifesto that embraces deskilling as a break from traditional mastery, but allowing then for conceptual and critical reskilling. Misuse, irony, and inefficiency are explored as tactics to unsettle techno-capitalist rationality. As technology blurs the boundary between art and labour, artists can become neoliberalism’s inadvertent, and sometimes willing, aides. Even practices with progressive or emancipatory aims risk being instrumentalised, and undermining of artists’ integrity. There are no easy formulas here, and the manifesto remains provisional, wary of what the Situationists termed recuperation.
Ref: Roberts, John. 2024. ‘Unfitting: Art and Labour From Conceptualisation to AI’. Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 33 (67): 26–42. https://doi.org/10.7146/nja.v33i67.148451
Don’t Recollect – Shane Finan & Loes Damhof
Shane Finan (in person) and Loes Damhof (remote) will open a conversation about how we can perceive infrastructure into the future. This will begin with a short lecture performance about subsea communications technologies, drawing from a research residency in Newfoundland in 2024 where Shane developed work about the first transatlantic cable laid between Valentia Island (Ireland) and Heart’s Content (Newfoundland) in the 1850s. Combining myth, history, territory, infrastructure and nonhuman life, this will lead on to a round-table and open conversation with tea, coffee, wire, card, pens and paper organised by Shane and Loes.
We will talk about existing communications and electronics infrastructure, how it developed, and what it could look like in future if we consider it from many different stakeholder voices. A series of prompts will be given to help the group consider what roles society, nonhuman critters, power, chaos or materiality might have on future development. In the end, we hope to thread out a vision for what communications and electrical infrastructure could look like, if led by human and nonhuman community.
Beyond Consumption: Building Local Networks and Reclaiming Material Culture – Richard Forrest
In this talk, I will introduce Redbarn Residency, an artist-led project in East Cork. I will expand on the material approach used during the building process, highlighting how a resistance to waste and obsolescence emerged as a shared value within the community. This talk invites us to think about our relationship with materials, waste, and community.
A Conversation Around Art Production & Materials Use – Frank Prendergast
Frank will be leading a conversation based on his experiences as both an artist and fabricator/producer of large and small-scale artworks and will focus on the use, reuse and waste involved in the international business of cultural production.
Blind Spots & Illuminations – Cliona Harmey
This talk will respond to defuturing by looking at a series of lighthouse technologies such as the fresnel lens and the helical screw pile. The ability to regulate and direct light as enabled by the fresnel lens enabled safer shipping which was linked to the acceleration of globalisation. The increased control of light could also be seen as leading to an increase in shadows and blindspots which are entangled with ideas of automation, logistics, machine vision and freedom of movement.
The talk will start by considering the “Spit Bank” Lighthouse at Cobh, designed using technology developed by the Irish engineer Alexander Mitchell, one of a number of lighthouses where his revolutionary design meant that the lighthouse could be built on unstable sand. The “Spit Bank” lighthouse will be put in constellation with other lighthouses elsewhere where optics, visibility and instability intersect.
Reaching beyond Platform DIY – Seán Finnan
This talk will look at the role that small scale DIY internet radio stations can play in archiving cultural memory. It will look at how these spaces are currently navigating platformisation, the precarity of their sound/radio archives, and how such spaces might become important sites of criticality for the current nexus of algorithmically driven cultural curation and production.
Empire, Dependency, and Ireland’s Tech Economy – Patrick Brodie
Drawing from research in collaboration with Patrick Bresnihan and Rory Rowan, this presentation will analyse the entrenchment of Irish economic dependency through big tech infrastructure (from data centres, to cables, to energy) and the effects that’s having on current discussions around neutrality and militarisation. Utilising the lens of dependency, developed by Third World Marxists in the mid-twentieth century and theorised in Ireland by political economists like Denis O’Hearn and Ray Crotty in the 1980s-1990s, this presentation shows that it is impossible to understand Ireland’s current ecological, geopolitical, and economic climate without confronting its history of Foreign Direct Investment-led industrialisation and subsequent positioning in the capitalist world system. We argue that the Irish state, amidst geopolitical uncertainty, energy transition, and digitalisation, is increasingly pitching Ireland and its extensive maritime territory as an “infrastructural frontier” for increasingly strategic “resource” development in the form of offshore wind, LNG, and fibre optic cables to support monopolistic tech infrastructures. Ireland’s biggest assets, as a strategic location and tax haven between the US and EU, also becomes its biggest vulnerability, requiring advancing security and defense to protect FDI and, more broadly, Ireland’s role as an economic and ecological facilitator in the capitalist world system.
we are all going to make it – Paul O’ Neill
we are all going to make it is an experimental short film that explores fragmented online narratives and technopolitical realities using archival sources with footage captured in Cyprus during the summer of 2023.
From aesthetic bodybuilding communities and toxic masculinity to military vloggers, crytpofads and the colonial legacies of communications infrastructure, we are all going to make it offers a playful critique of the technodelusionism underpinning contemporary algorithmic culture.
Listening To Infrastructure – TBC
Using a selection of small scale DIY hardware devices and amplification we will listen collectively to signals and sounds transmitted through water and air and ranging from the sea to the sky.
Bring any devices, bits and pieces that might be hacked to tune into the unheard world.
Antidefuturing & Whiddy
A walk across the back of the island to the Western shore looking out into Bantry Bay. This activity will be a chance to have a group picnic and to talk about how our appreciation of antidefuturing could apply to Whiddy or any of the other islands of Ireland.
Temporary Infrastructures of Care – Aisling Phelan
This talk reflects on BASE, a temporary public-facing art space in Dublin City Centre run by artists Aisling Phelan and Viva Dean during the winter of 2024. After being awarded the DCC Incubation Space, BASE platformed workshops, exhibitions, talks, and performances that centred creative uses of technology and creative tech education, acting as a temporary infrastructure of care. Aisling will share her experience of running this non-commercial, queer-fronted arts space as a form of ‘alternative infrastructure’ and as a temporary site that resisted extractive logic, prioritised access over capital/commercial gain, and functioned solely through collective labour.
She will then pose a series of questions to the group drawn from Emma Warren’s ‘Document Your Culture’, an influential text on the development and operation of BASE. These questions are intended to allow participants to reflect on the spaces they crave, the ones they have held, and the quiet systems of support that keep temporary worlds alive.