Discussions from Digital Humanities
Digital works at Carlow Arts Festival
In 2020 and 2021, Carlow Arts Festival, faced with the lemons provided by COVID-19, produced a lot of lemonade. With the restrictions on in-person and indoor events, they focused on providing a diverse programme with hybrid, in-person, outdoor, digital and remote experiences.
We are stretching the boundaries of what a festival can be, leaning into tech that expands our audience experience, and I believe the festival will emerge stronger than ever from the learnings of this time.”
Jo Mangan, Carlow Arts Festival director (Falvey, 2020)
In Swan Lake- The Game by Dutch producers Club Guy and Roni, the traditionally coy Tchaikovsky ballet was transformed into a raucous, 3D immersive and interactive event based in the NITE hotel, a virtual theatre space. Without the pandemic restrictions this sort of work may not have made it to regional Irish art festivals, and it may not have reached new audiences.
Swan Lake The Game by Club Guy & Roni from Club Guy & Roni on Vimeo.
The festival also showcased digital art as part of the on-site exhibitions, mixing it with more traditional sculpture, painting and drawing. The Merkel Machine by Caroline Campbell of Loitering Theatre was on display as part of the Women in the Machine display VISUAL Arts centre. A satirical, absurd and very entertaining installation.
A twitter scraper catches patriarchal and right-wing terms and idioms as they go up on the live feed and initiates an eye-roll for the robot papier-mache Merkel eyes in the gallery space, and simultaneously for the online animated eyes.
The work is inspired by Merkels’ famously meme-ified eye roll at Vladimir Putin that came to symbolise the collective exhaustion with the antics of the patriarchy.
References
Falvey, Deirdre (Jul 29, 2020) ‘Online culture: What’s on in a time of Covid-19?’ The Irish Times [online] Available at: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/online-culture-what-s-on-in-a-time-of-covid-19-1.4314824. Accessed Dec 13 2021
