Signatures of the Invisible

This project was based around a commissioned collaboration with scientists at CERN, Geneva, the world's largest particle physics laboratory. The curatorial team invited me to participate based on my previous work and research concerning space, representation and technology. My involvement stemmed from an ongoing preoccupation with the relation between physical reality and virtual/pictorial space, research centering around the seeming paradoxes and uncertainties associated with quantum mechanics.

The project was necessarily related to the pioneering work of John Latham and to recent work by, for example, London Fieldworks or Jem Finer, which is similarly engaged with relationships between science and art, but this is perhaps through proximity of context rather than process or intention.

Over two years, artworks were made using CG modelling processes in response to field trips, discussions and independent research. Rather than focus on specific methods or apparatus, my research generated associative responses to some of the conceptual/philosophical implications of scientific practices.

My studio practice is immersed in a medium whose industrial/technological development has been driven by a perceived need for modelling physical properties and ‘real world’ phenomena. This is a form of image-making informed by both scientific knowledge as artistic imperative and might be regarded as a contemporary manifestation of a representational ‘drive’ originating in the Renaissance.

A key question concerns the relationship between imagination and a programmed, encoded world and - reflecting an ambivalence about the rationalising tendencies of technological media - the works from the project are concerned with the absorption of chance elements, speculation and uncertainty into the technological ‘apparatus’.

Tim O'Riley
Current Research

I am interested in the complex and eclectic relationship between art, science and literature and between the still and the moving image. Work has been centred around computer technology - specifically modelling and animation - but is informed by an underlying interest in painting, photography and writing. Over the past few years, I have been visiting and documenting various scientific establishments in Europe and the USA, combining a reasoned approach to science and its history with one in which serendipity and speculation play an equally significant part. I am intrigued by the idea of parallel or alternative spaces, dialogue and the relation between observer and object. I am particularly interested in Vilém Flusser's philosophy and critique of the 'technical image' and his speculations on virtual worlds.

Recent projects have been spurred on by a chance encounter with a memento from the Apollo 11 lunar mission, a small Irish flag which had travelled aboard the historic spacecraft and which resides at an observatory in Dublin. This prompted research into various fictional journeys to the moon stretching back almost 2000 years, the more recent history of the space race and the lives and opinions of astronaut Michael Collins and Sir William Rowan Hamilton, Astronomer Royal of Ireland from 1827-1865, who lived for much of his life in the building where the flag eventually ended up. In the light of this serendipitous encounter, I have recently completed a 118-minute animation of a real-time orbit of the moon together with an artist's book bringing together some of the material I have found relating to the observatory, lunar exploration and fictional, imaginary journeys.