Newsletter 47
đ Welcome
Welcome to #47, we hope everyone is enjoying the sun đđ
To kick this one off, we want to mention that we recently spoke with the Arts Council's Head of Multidisciplinary Arts, Aideen McCole, who shared insights into the development of the council's newly introduced category in select funding streamsâsomething that may be particularly relevant to our New-Media and Digital Artist community.
In case you're unfamiliar, Multidisciplinary Arts is a category introduced to fill the gap for practices that span across traditional boundariesâincluding interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary work.
While itâs still early days, and a âone-size-fits-allâ solution for New-Media artists may not be ideal, the full strategy is still evolving, and how artists respond now will help shape where it goes next. Your activity and engagement matter.
For the first time, the Agility Award allows artists to apply under Multidisciplinary Arts (the second round of the Project Award will too, once open). If it aligns with your work, we encourage you to apply under this category. The more applications received from artists working in Multidisciplinary and Digital spaces, the more the Arts Council will have to expand support in this area.
On whether this category suits your practiceâwe didnât get a definitive breakdown from Aideen, as it can be hard to pinpoint where some visual arts practices expand into multidisciplinary realms. But broadly speaking, if your project integrates multiple disciplines (like visual arts + performance, or sound + installation), or you define your practice as taking an interdisciplinary approach, youâre likely in scope.
So weâre working with what weâve got, and thereâs still huge untapped potential for New-Media art in Ireland. That said, there are still significant barriers to overcomeâranging from the bureaucratic challenges of arts funding and policy understanding, to infrastructural issues like access to space and resources, to the ongoing struggle for capital and professional recognition across different artistic environments.
It was great to chat with Aideenâwe felt real sincerity in her support for our community, and weâre excited to see how this strategy unfolds.
Reminder: The Monthly Meetup is happening this evening at 7pm over on the Digital Artists Ireland Discord. Drop in and say hi!
đ Articles
What is Life?
Antikythera x MIT Press
In collaboration with the MIT Press, the Antikythera book series publishes unique titles by writers from diverse disciplines: computer science, philosophy, history, architecture, physics, science fiction, and more. These books investigate the creative and curious uses of our computational toolsâor what we might more precisely call artificial computation. With those tools it is revealed that otherwise imperceivable building blocks of our reality and of our own flesh are themselves computational. The planet discovers itself through computation, and computation discovers itself through us.
Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet
Brian Dillon
The article reviews the Tate Modern exhibition Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet, exploring how artists from the 1950s to the early 1990s engaged with emerging technologies both conceptually and materially; reflecting optimism, curiosity, and unease about the digital future.