About
About Us
Our mission as Concept Null is to establish new media art as a recognised artform in Ireland and help grow and nurture a community of artists, technicians, enthusiasts and facilitators that embody a voice of Irish new media art. Concept Null is currently run by Róisín Berg, Cailean Finn, Walter Nied and Scott Robinson and is funded currently by our volunteered time and community donations.
We currently write a newsletter which is published 1st and 15th of every month which highlights events, exhibitions, workshops, open calls, studio vacancies and any other tidbits of interest for the Irish new media art community.
We are underway with running meetups around the island of Ireland every three months to hold space for artists to share the work and process with other artists in their area and open a space where they can share ideas and meet others to further their network. This process doubles as a pilot in investigating the need for a regular space that should be held in each city and what benefit this has for the community.
We actively talk to people in the Arts Council, academia and working artists to be able to get a picture of what is happening in the field of art and technology in Ireland and be able to relay this to the people who need to know, the artists.
Each of us individually are active members of the Digital Arts Ireland Discord and as an organisation we help out in hosting ‘Monday Meetups’ happening virtually on the first Monday of every month. We also stream and connect our physical meetups to the Discord so people can remote present and tune in if they can’t make it physically.
For more info on each of our activities, see our constitution.
Disclaimer
As Concept Null, we refer to any artwork that uses contemporary technological devices to make art or critiques these devices or the cultures surrounding as ‘New Media Art’. This term can be seen (to some extent) as interchangeable with the terms ‘Digital Art’ ‘Interdisciplinary Art’ ‘Multidisciplinary Art’ or ‘Art and Technology’. This association applies to the term ‘New Media Artist’ too. We find this term to be most descriptive in contrast to the others mentioned but are, for the most part, indifferent to the actual linguistic terms as they all refer to much the same thing.
Brief history of Concept Null
Concept Null started in 2019 as an audio visual event bringing together nightlife and art exhibitions focusing on new media art. Its original members and the artist they commissioned began to explore the possibilities of projection mapping, live performance, installation art, light art, lasers, sound art, video art. After the second event taking over the Shannon Rowing Club, the hurdles of producing events that could commission and host the many interesting artists who wanted to delve into this space became clear. Difficulty securing funding, difficulty of finding suitable venues which could accommodate for the intense installation time and needs (and hard to achieve approval for ideas), high venue rental cost, insurance costs, lack of prototyping spaces suited for the needs of the artist. The list went on. The only thing that wasn’t lacking was the artists around who wanted to exhibit and explore the potential of working with newer technologies.
After a long hiatus, and some guidance, we decided to refocus our energy towards community organisation. From each of us individually working with so many different artists, technicians and enthusiasts around the island, we felt there was a need to make an attempt at pulling the different groups together to find strength in numbers. That’s when we decided that a newsletter was the best place to start. This later expanded into a physical meetup space which goes to different cities each time. Later, the Digital Artist Ireland Discord was started which now has over 170 members and we also do our best to be an active part of. As of now, we have produced almost thirty newsletters and ran four artists meetups spread out over the island and produced one interview with D.A.T.A who are a big inspiration to our organisation.