The Straylight Art Trail 2008

Straylight is the Darklight Festival's visual art strand; it aims to explore, develop and expand upon the notion of subverting public space; this year's Straylight programme curated by Niamh Murphy sees a number of acclaimed artists presenting their work in a series of diverse and unconventional locations across Dublin's city centre; participants include Chris Doyle, Tim Redfern, Amanda Coogan, Aine Phillips, Alan Butler, Donal Scannell, Anita Delaney, Lorena Cardona, and Paddy Jolley.

Straylight: The Participants

Irish artist Anita Delaney works primarily in animation and video and her work is fundamentally concerned with the assembly of meaning, particularly in relation to the limits of language, semiotics and narrative. Currently living and working in Dublin, she exhibits extensively nationally and internationally.

Anita will debut her new work Fluids 1, 2 &3 at The Lighthouse Cinema all weekend

www.anitadelaney.net

Amanda Coogan lives and works in Dublin. Performance is at the heart of Coogan’s art. Her powerful live events often form the basis for her videos and photographs. She has a real ability to condense an idea and to communicate it through her body. The performances are short, snappy and sassy, reflecting the metabolism of contemporary life. Coogan has recently been developing group performances releasing primeval human energies through a burst of exhilarating physical action.

Amanda Coogan’s humourous video work Rhapsody in B will be screened in the Philips Shop, from Thursday to Sunday through the night from 6pm until 9am.

www.amandacoogan.com

Áine Phillips makes multi-media performance and live art in Ireland and internationally since the late 80's. Her work is centered on autobiographical performance and explores ways to make the personal political. Áine will be performing in Filmbase on Friday the 27th between 9pm and 9am.

She will be debuting her new piece Into Me See which is a twelve hour durational live performance and video installation.

www.ainephillips.com

Paddy Jolley started working with film after he accidentally dropped a life size dummy of a human figure off the 59th Street Bridge in New York. The figure's fall was so sad and dramatic that he was moved from a long held belief that he could say all he wanted within the single frame of a photograph. Shortly afterwards he started a collaboration with American filmmaker Reynold Reynolds. Expanding on the images and methods of Jolley's photographs they made Seven Days' til Sunday (1998), Drowning Room (2000) and Burn (2001).All are characterised by dark humour and a forlorn beauty, The works have shown in gallery and museum context as film loop or installation and screened widely at film festivals, winning several awards.The collaboration ended with the completion of the feature length Sugar in 2004 This problematic work has been described variously as 'a harrowing dark night of the soul', and 'a post narrative head trip'. Also completed in 2004 was HereAfter. This short film and site specific installation, made with Inger Lise Hansen and Rebecca Trost, was comissioned as part of the Ballymun regeneration scheme. This involved the demolition and reconstruction of a large part of a North Dublin suburb. Jolley spent the next eighteen months between Delhi, Warsaw, and London developing the yet to be made narrative film project Lingling. In 2006 he moved back to Ireland and continued experiments with the articulation of a state of mind by means of the relocating of things familiar to places logical but wrong: Sog(2007) and Fall(2008). Current works in progress include a film made with performing monkeys in Delhi and a commissioned collaborative project for Sketch, London which will open in November 2008.

The world premiere of the new film from the acclaimed Irish artist, Fall will be presented on a loop (at five minute intervals) at Meeting House Square on Thursday at 10pm until midnight.

Alan Butler is an artist living and working in Dublin. His work has been exhibited internationally and he has curated exhibitions for the Dublin Fringe Festival, Monster Truck Gallery and Studios and Temple Bar Gallery & Studios.

Alan is showing his video piece Beyond Sex and Death in the window of Basic Instincts, throughout the weekend

www.newmediaart.co.uk

www.newmediaart.co.uk/blog/

Tim Redfern -A seismic observatory.

Darklight festival 2008 presents the premiere of Kosmoscope, an immersive audiovisual art installation by Tim Redfern. Using state of the art seismic monitoring techniques, Kosmoscope renders live scientific data impressionistically, making the worldwide network of ultra-sensitive seismic microphones audible and creating an imposing, visually fractured narrative evoking the frailty of humanity in the face of geological forces. Tim Redfern is a Dublin based artist who works primarily with technology, creating artefacts and experiences which connect people, devices and networks in novel ways. His work has been shown at many art& technology events internationally such as Art Futura (Barcelona), Lofi (UK), Garage Festival (Germany) and in venues such as Baltic (Gateshead, UK), and the ICA London. His video work has previously featured in Darklight and on the cover DVD of Creative Review (UK).

Tim will be unveiling Kosmoscope in The Sebastian Guinness Gallery at an opening on Thursday and the exhibition will run for the whole weekend

www.kosmoscope.eclectronics.org

Lorena Cardona lives and works in Rosario. Argentina. From  2004, Lorena has participated in the organization of the general Project El Levante Workshop and Exhibition Space as well as the Residencies and Exchange Programme, together with Graciela Carnevale, Mauro Machado and Luján Castellani. (www.ellevante.org.ar) Since 2007, she has produced www.thinkagain.com.ar a place where digital works are exhibited online. 

Lorena will show her multi screen video work over a 4 hour period in the internet café Chat-R-Net on Sunday the 29th from 3pm until 7pm

Renowned Australian-born cinematographer Chris Doyle has spent most of his professional career working at the heart of the Hong Kong film scene. Although he has worked with Barry Levinson, Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and M. Night Shyamalan amongst others, Doyle is a passionate advocate of Asian cinema and attributes to it a vibrancy and energy that long ago left Hollywood in its wake. Citing music and dance as hugely influential on his unique visual style, his approach to his own craft is famously irreverent. The renowned cinematographer is better known for his collaborations with Wong Kar-Wai on Chungking Express, Happy Together and In the Mood for Love but tonight we will be presenting his remarkable.....

Selected Video Works in Temple Bar Square late on Friday night from 10pm until midnight.

All of this and.....

Bitter Bytes and Hostile Bits Curated by Michael Keegan, Roger Kavanagh and Patrick Swan, is a joyous celebration of video game rivalry and platform loyalty; three rooms of playable retro gems running on playable software: Atari VCS, Colecovision, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, MSX, Sega Megadrive, Super Nintendo and more... Always original. Never faked. The exhibition runs at Film Base, Temple Bar all weekend at Filmbase is a unique opportunity to celebrate gaming in all its glory, this exhibition will bring together and tear apart the many differing sides of gaming.