Flipside

A series of large-scale computer-generated photographic images, stereoscopic works and animations were developed for a solo exhibition in London. Simple scenarios, objects or spaces were modelled and rendered using a computer in a visual form approaching, but never quite attaining, a simple realism. The work is driven by the associative potential of modest things, images and spaces - and characterised by the use of represented photographs within the work – and so is predicated on the spectator’s engagement.

In differing ways, the works made for this exhibition are reminiscent of ‘vitrines’ and contribute to a discourse and practice surrounding the representation of space, photography and illusion, and the vulnerability and transience of the everyday. Elsewhere, in relation to its perceived ubiquity in contemporary art, Phyllida Barlow has observed that the vitrine ‘perfectly symbolises how we are forced to experience aspects of contemporary life.’

Flusser’s writings on photography and what he referred to as ‘a new imagination’- an imagination encoded and realised through the apparatuses of technological media - provide a context against which such images can be read. Elements of my research into particle and quantum physics - concerning the relationship between chance, order and uncertainty – which were explored in a concurrent project, 'Signatures of the Invisible', provide an additional subtext for the exhibition.

An aspect of the project relates to work by artists such as Thomas Demand or Craig Kalpakjian, in terms of process and a preoccupation with modelled scenarios and parallel, alternative spaces. It also signals an attempt to offset the isolating tendencies of an increasingly computerised, mediated environment by using these very tools to represent (albeit modest) signs of human activity within such spaces.

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.