The Meta-Perception Club 6 January – 20 February 2015 Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris

A co-curated series of Presented by exhibitions, happenings, Cleary Connolly and the a residency and talks Centre Culturel Irlandais ‘Cleary Connolly’s meta-perceptual Introduction helmets ingeniously invite us to set aside our preconceptions and to experience things in ways quite If we have two eyes, they why is These are questions explored by different from the norm.’ our vision so limited? Why do we Cleary Connolly through their Aidan Dunne, Irish Times, 2 Dec 2014 have so little depth perception? series of ‘Meta-Perceptual’ Why don’t our two eyes offer us helmets, sculptural works focused two different views of the world? on the mysteries of visual Why don’t they allow us to look perception, which they present in behind and in front at the same the Centre Culturel Irlandais as time, or sideways in both part of a three month residency. directions? Looking through Taking the theme of perception as Michael Land’s defining work a starting point, the two artists Animal Eyes , we see that nature and director of CCI have invited has explored all of these visual and sound artists, possibilities: the Hammerhead performance poets, jazz, Shark has hyper-stereo vision; the electronic and experimental horse sees 357° around itself; the musicians and creative chameleon has separately practitioners, as well as scientists, rotatable eyes… researchers and a philosopher cum cheese-monger to present their work on perception at the CCI. This will take the format of three short exhibitions and three multi-disciplinary evenings, as well as talks and workshops.

3 Cleary Connolly 6 January – 20 February 2015 Open studio: Tuesdays to Fridays, 14:00 - 17:00 and by appointment

Opposite: Cleary Connolly, Experience Cleary Connolly’s Cleary Connolly are Ireland’s Meta-Perceptual Helmet, Paris, July 2014 ‘Meta-Perceptual’ helmets, six foremost new-media artists, © Cleary Connolly optical devices that challenge regularly incorporating the way we use our two eyes to innovative new technologies look at the world, during an into their work to produce art open studio visit. The project is that is both engaging and inspired by early 20th century significant. Cleary Connolly’s experiments in perceptual work is always participative, adaptation. The complex optics both in its creative process and were developed over eighteen in its final engagement with the months by Cleary Connolly in spectator. They have exhibited consultation with research worldwide, including Yokohama institutes in Paris and Montreal. Triennial, Japan (2005), the And the collection was hand- Pompidou Centre (2009), The crafted in aluminium by Neil Barbican, London (2010) and McKenzie. During their Dublin Contemporary (2012). residency Cleary Connolly will also present existing work from their back catalogue for the three ‘happenings’ and host a number of talks by researchers in the field of perceptive psychology in their studio in CCI.

THE META PERCEPTION CLUB 5 Happenings Happening I 22 January, 5 & 19 February Thursday 22 January

The Meta-Perception Club will 18:30 Traditional Music: play host to three happenings Caoimhín O’Raghallaigh and Dan Trueman which will consist of 19:00 Poetry Performance: Billy Ramsell performances, talks and 19:30 Experimental Performance: Être par Six - scientific demonstrations (Carmela Uranga, Lucy Dixon, exploring the science and the Eric Rehl, Pierre Grosbois) poetry of perception. Coinciding with the openings of 20:00 Experimental Music: Concorde (Elaine Clark the three exhibitions, these and Martin Johnson) plays music by Jane O’Leary, evenings will bring together Dave Fennessy and Rhona Clarke Irish visual artists, performance 20:30 Experimental Music: Chasing Sound through poets, jazz, electronic and Space and Time with Caballeros Simpáticos experimental musicians and creative practitioners, with Ongoing Visual Arts: Cleary Connolly - performance artists’ from the Meta-perceptual helmets Paris underground art scene and Dutch Wax installation researchers in the field of Exhibition: Jenny Brady - perceptive psychology. Technology Autonomous , Wow and Flutter

For more details of artists and Perceptual Experience: performers, see pages 16-19 Patrick Cavanagh - Monster Flash Sound Installation: DinahBird and Jean Philippe Renoult - Little Voice Visual Art: Roseanne Lynch - Photographic installation Gustatory Experience: Hervé Binet

THE META PERCEPTION CLUB 7 Happening II Happening III Thursday 5 February Thursday 19 February

18:30 Jazz: Ronan Guilfoyle 18:30 Talk: Guillaume Dumas 19:00 Poetry Performance: 19:00 Contemporary Music: Dave Lordan Roger Doyle 19:30 Experimental Music: 19:45 Poetry Performance: Fabrice Naud on the Theremin Maighread Medbh 20:00 Theatrical Performance: Janet Moran in character Ongoing Visual Arts: Cleary Connolly - Meta-perceptual helmets, Ongoing Visual Arts: Cleary Connolly - Time is a Dimension Like Any Other Meta-Perceptual Helmets, On Sight installation Moving Still ; On Sight installation Exhibition: Dan Shipsides - Mortar I Device , Crossoverstar Exhibition: Grace Weir - Perceptual Experience: Dust Defying Gravity , A Deep Field for the Time Deaf Patrick Cavanagh - Monster Flash Perceptual Experience: Sound Installation: Patrick Cavanagh - Monster Flash DinahBird and Jean Philippe Renoult - Little Voice Sound Installation: Gustatory Experience: DinahBird and Jean Philippe Renoult - Little Voice Hervé Binet Gustatory Experience: Hervé Binet

For more details of artists and performers, see pages 16-19

THE META PERCEPTION CLUB 9 Jenny Brady works with the moving image to explore ideas around translation, Jenny Brady perception and language. (Closed 24 -25 January) Recent presentations of her 22 January – 4 February work include EVA International 2014, Limerick, Images Festival 2014, Toronto (2014) curated by Chris Clarke, Futures ’13 RHA, Dublin, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh curated by Modern Edinburgh Film School. Future exhibitions include Primal Architecture, IMMA (2015). She has undertaken commissions for Dublin City Council (2013) and Mayo County Council (2012).

Technology Autonomous Wow and Flutter 2011, HD Video, 5 min 45 sec 2013, HD Video with stereo sound, 13 min

Shot in the Dublin Institute of Wow and Flutter presents the viewer Technology’s optics research with a fractured and experimental laboratory, the video work Technology portrait of a bird, formed over the Autonomous documents the course of three acts. The artist employs construction of a holographic image, strategies of translation, performance while a voice off screen recites extracts and rhetoric to ‘give voice’ to its from Dennis Gabor’s 1972 book The central protagonist, only to reveal a Mature Society: a Vision of the Future . troubling anthropocentric bind within In the text, Gabor, the inventor of these representative tactics. Drawing holography, describes his vision of on research into the thirty year future technology from a societal scientific collaboration between animal perspective. The work considers cognition scientist Irene Pepperberg notions of illusion in relation to filmic and an African Grey she trained in construction, financial speculation and elements of human language, this work sustainability. The electronic score by considers the various forms of Andrew Fogarty was produced from a displacement often at play in our Opposite: collection of sound recordings of depiction and understanding of Technology Autonomous, 2011 - © Jenny Brady various machines and synthesizers. animals. It features a score made in

This page: Directed by Jennifer Brady, collaboration with musician Andrew (L) Technology Autonomous, 2011 - © Jenny Brady Cinematography by Piers McGrail, Fogarty, employing a mixture of field

(R) Wow and Flutter, narration by Fiona Sheil, sound by recordings, electronics and found 2013 - © Jenny Brady Andrew Fogarty. material to conjure a unique sound world.

THE META PERCEPTION CLUB 11 Working primarily in the moving image, She is concerned with aligning a Grace Weir lived experience of the (Closed 12 February) world with knowledge and 5 – 18 February theory. Grace Weir takes a trans-disciplinary approach, crossing many disciplinary boundaries, researching facts not as self-evident objects in the world but as processes, examining the complicated mediations by which facts acquire their immediacy. Working primarily in the moving image, She will show ‘Dust defying gravity’ and ‘A deep field for the time deaf’, both of which deal with the limitations of our ability to see and the instruments we use to enhance them. Grace Weir represented Ireland at Dust Defying Gravity A Deep Field For The Time Deaf the 49th International 2004, 16mm film converted to DVD, 4 min 2007, Animation, 20 min Venice Biennale and has exhibited widely nationally Dust defying gravity consists of a single A deep field for the time deaf consists and internationally. Grace is currently Artist-in-Residence 4 minute tracking shot that traces of an animation made from a in the School Of Physics, through the rooms at Dunsink photograph taken by the Hubble Deep Trinity College Dublin. Observatory, documenting the aging Field team. The animation comprises a telescopes and measuring instruments long shot of a section of the night sky arrayed throughout the building. As developing over twenty minutes, set the camera passes over a mechanical deep within a black box space. It is model of the solar system, the dust in derived from the length of time it the air of the room becomes visible, takes the light from distant stars to floating and scintillating like a field of reach us. Initially blackness is dominant stars. The work was commissioned by and one or two twinkling stars appear, Kathy Rae Huffman, for A Fine Line, gradually more stars emerge from the Cornerhouse Manchester UK. darkness and dot the field of view. Finally tiny galaxies and pulsars start to appear and a vivid coloured palette of stellar activity fills the screen. Opposite: Powerfully contemplative, the A Deep Field For The Time Deaf, 2007 animation is a reminder that the only - © NASA, ESA, STScI, HUDF time we can directly experience the

This page: past is when we look at the night sky. (L) Dust Defying Gravity, 2004 - © NASA, ESA, STScI, HUDF

(R) A Deep Field For The Time Deaf, 2007 - © NASA, ESA, STScI, HUDF

THE META PERCEPTION CLUB 13 Perception is a key starting point for visual artist Dan Shipsides, whose work Dan Shipsides deals with the pursuit of (Closed 26 February) landscape – embracing a 19 February – 4 March concept of landscape as the living experience of the world around us here and now as much as the cultured and framed perspective of landscape as a genre within culture. Dan Shipsides is former co-director at Catalyst Arts, Belfast and is now an artist based in Orchid Studios and also a lecturer at the Belfast School of Art.

Mortar | Device Crossoverstar 2011, HD video: 2min 2014, HD video with animation, 6.20min

Over 70 six pointed stars photographed Crossoverstar is a short video with text and on Loyalist murals and other vernacular animation shot mainly through a Unionist forms in Belfast, edited to kaleidoscope. It’s of a night ascent of remove the red hand and then animated. Slemish mountain on the eve of Saint Mortar: Weapon used in trench warface. Patrick’s day with the successful mission of retrieving a star. Cement used in brickwork. Device: Constructed functional thing. A designed (visual, text or audio) form. Whilst not so noticed the six pointed star appears often amongst the visual icons of Northern Ireland, especially associated somewhat mysteriously with many loyalist paramilitary and heritage groups. It also appears on the Ulster Banner – the state flag for Northern Ireland from 1952 to 1973. The military style iconography cements the notion of current violence Opposite: Crossoverstar, 2014 being persecuted under a war mentality. - © Dan Shipsides The Star of David is an obvious link to the grand narratives of religion originating This page: (L) Mortar | Device, 2014 from the Holy Lands, to which much - © Dan Shipsides fundamental religious belief in Northern (R) Crossoverstar, 2014 - © Dan Shipsides Ireland is wedded.

THE META PERCEPTION CLUB 15 Être Par Six is a performance art Chasing Sound through Space and Biographies group comprising Carmela Uranga, Time with Caballeros Simpáticos will Lucy Dixon, Erik Rehl and Pierre be an instantaneous composition that Grosbois. Combining their individual asks the questions: What was that disciplines (art, theatre, dance, noise? Where did it come from? Roted in tradition, fiddlers Caoimhín cinema), the group creates pieces (Knock, knock) Who's there? Ó Raghallaigh and Dan Trueman are arising from a cyclical, figurative Caballeros Simpáticos (David Haddad, true innovators and challenge our process. Real space is recomposed, Automne Lajeat, Perry Leopard and perception of the traditional fiddle. assembling an event that is previously Glenn Marzin) play, among other Caoimhín O Raghallaigh, known for his staged and recorded, and then re- things, keyboards, found sounds, cello, drone-based fiddle style, makes the played directly before an audience. theremin, xylophone, guitar, instrument echo the uilleann pipes. What do you see? What do you saxophone and percussion. With his proclivity for tuning the fiddle imagine? Do you see what you below concert pitch and a tendency to imagine? Être Par Six will address such Dutch Wax (2011) is the result of play on two strings simultaneously, he questions through a combination of collaboration between Cleary Connolly has already developed a unique and actions relating to the space of the and the Laboratoire Psychologie de la distinctive sound. Now, both Caoimhín CCI that will be documented and Perception at Université Paris and Dan perform on an instrument reenacted, creating a visual Descartes exploring the retinal made first for Dan by Norwegian multilayered sense of time and place. phenomenon known as negative luthier Salve Hakedal, a fiddle with five afterimage. Premiered at Dublin bowed strings and five sympathetic Concorde was founded in 1976 to Contemporary 2011, the installation strings, a cross between a harganger promote new music. Under the was made with a group of asylum fiddle and a five string violin. directorship of composer Jane seekers - lodged in an unused hotel in O’Leary, Concorde regularly South County Dublin - who formed a Cork poet Billy Ramsell ‘s most recent commissions new work from Irish sewing club as a way of passing the collection, The Architect’s Dream of composers and frequently works with time during their extended waiting Winter , set out to glimpse what can international guest soloists. The period. The artists brought them good only be considered a new life-force on programme consists of: Jane O’Leary’s quality African cloth from Paris, a batik the planet, an intelligence whose No. 19; Dave Fennessy’s Five Hofer known as Dutch Wax.. nature we have scarcely begun to Photographs; Rhona Clarke’s Con comprehend constituted from the Coro , which includes recorded sounds Video and photographic unstinting digital signals that crisscross made with the composer’s voice, documentation treating the people, continent and ocean. The book creating a haunting choral sound their immediate environment, and the posited a world where we increasingly world. The audience is asked to listen fabric that is a symbol of their culture is ‘see’ reality through a medley of to the piece blind-folded. treated in ways that recall scientific devices: medical and point-of-sale experiments in visual perception, appliances, smart phones and Rhona Clarke, Con coro (2011) for allowing the visitor to experience wearables, GPS and database systems. violin, cello and tape, 10 mins negative afterimage, and to carry out Our perceptions – even of the people The idea of blindfolding the offers a their own perceptive adaptation and places we hold most dear - are means by which the listener might experiments while viewing the ever more mediated by this machine- perceive a work, only to discover later installation. Using scientific methods to world we construct around ourselves, that the reality is somewhat different. view the work focuses the viewers’ ever more enabled and conditioned by The title indicates that the piece is attention on the act of looking. Dutch the myriad screens without which performed “with choir” or “with vocal Wax can be explored on a series of living seems increasingly impossible. ensemble”. In this case what seems levels, as an exploration of scientific like a choir is provided by sampling visual phenomena, or a reflection on the composer’s voice singing extracts identity, culture and migration, or as a of the plainchant Ubi Caritas. deliciously indulgent exploration of

Opposite: Negating the visual environment is a pure colour. Cleary Connolly, Meta-Perceptual means of asking the listener to Helmet, National Museum of Ireland, November 2014 - © Cleary Connolly ‘perceive’ through the ears.

THE META PERCEPTION CLUB 17 Patrick Cavanagh is the head of the DinahBird is a sound and radio artist Ronan Guilfoyle is a major figure on Janet Moran will perform extracts Guillaume Dumas graduated as an Máighréad Medbh is a dramatic poet Centre Attention & Vision and living and working in Paris. She makes the Irish jazz scene and has developed from Irish plays focusing on ideas of engineer from l’école Centrale Paris who composes with a sense of the Professor at the Université Paris radio programmes, audio publications, an international reputation as a transformation in performance. and obtained his doctorate in organic. Structure and rhythm are Descartes. Current projects study the installations, and soundtracks. Recent performer, teacher and composer. Currently in residence in CCI, Janet cognitive neurosciences from crucial, often representing inner roles of visual attention in selecting commissions include Topographies Performing on the acoustic bass guitar Moran is an actor based in Dublin. She Université Paris 6. Recently returned to happenings and perceptions. The logic and creating visual representations, Nocturnes , a radio art project for which since the early 1980s, Ronan is now has performed at all the major theatres France from the US where he had a in her poems is that of the image- and the properties and strategies of she won the prestigious Prix Luc Ferrari. one of the instrument’s leading in Ireland. She has worked extensively research post at Florida Atlantic making mind, which sees its own visual attention in normal and brain She is presently employed by the exponents. Perception is hugely with Corn Exchange Theatre Company University, he has joined the reseach reflection in everything outside. damaged subjects. He has explored Museum of Modern Art, Paris to important to him as a jazz musician, in in Dublin, touring to the UK, Germany, team in human genetics and cognitive Whether it is her own voice or those of the contribution of various features develop a programme of sound a myriad of ways - not so much visually, Australia and Mexico. Swing, the play functions at l’Institut Pasteur. In constructed characters, the position is such as shadow, color, motion, and workshops in correlation to their - but definitely aurally. There are things that she co-wrote, played in CCI in parallel, through associative activities always subjective, because facts can texture to representations of visual permanent and temporary collections. that go on sonically, particularly in the May 2014, as well as at the Irish Arts and scientific mediation, he has been only be established one by one, and form and these experiments led to his areas of rhythm, where combinations Center in New York, where it received implicated in issues relating science, often melt as soon as they occur. Her interest in art as a source of data for Roseanne Lynch The camera is a of rhythms can create new rhythms the New York Times critics pick, a art, ethics and society. He was an poems at the Meta-Perception Club neuroscience. mechanism of vision; both a tool of that only exist in the composite sounds national tour of Ireland and the invited expert at the UN on questions will speak of disorder, obsession and attention and an instrument of of the other rhythms. It’s a bit like Edinburgh Fringe Festival. of cultural liberty and he co-founded re-imaginings. A pioneer of In Monster Flash , a brief flash of light transformation. The installation allows those visual things where you can look HackYourPhD, an association of over performance poetry in Ireland in the will expose the observer to an encounters for the human eye, as well at a picture three different ways and On Sight (2012) On Sight is a 1500 people across the world 1990s, Máighréad Medbh states: afterimage that maintains the scene as the human eye through the camera. see three different things, all of which stereoscopic video installation, present dedicated to “open science”. He will ‘What I want my poetry to do is to frozen in front of us long after the light Roseanne Lynch is a visual artist who exist within the one picture. in the courtyard of the CCI for the present some of the most recent draw meaning from and to the body’. has turned off. This requires a long employs strategies of photography duration of Cleary Connolly's advances in cognitive sciences – period of total darkness so our eyes and installation. A recent artist-in- Dave Lordan is a writer based in residence, exploring binocular vision. particularly relating to our social Time is a Dimension Like Any Other will become exquisitely sensitive. The residence at Centre Culturel Irlandais Dublin who has been shaking up the The stereoscope juxtaposes two HD environment – and illustrate them with (2013) Time is a dimension like any flash creates a persisting image in our during September 2014, Lynch is also Irish writing scene with his passionate, films for the left and the right eye, demonstrations which draw as much other is an experimental video rods, the receptors in our eyes that a lecturer at CIT Crawford College of risk-taking writing since the early integrating some contradictory from art as from science. installation by Cleary Connolly with respond best in dim light. The light Art and Design, Cork, and Cork School noughties. Alongside creative information which the brain will sound by Jean Philippe Renoult and creates a backlog of activated of Architecture. collaborator Karl Parkinson, he makes nevertheless try to converge into a Irish composer Roger Doyle has Dinahbird. Using video footage of rhodopsin (photosensitive pigment in up the popular performance poetry stereo picture. The stereo film has worked extensively in theatre, film and tramways pulling in and out of the the rod receptors) that take a while to A former archeologist, Hervé Binet duo Droppin The Act and he is a been shot in situ at CCI with Être par dance. Babel, his magnum opus, was Luas Green Line Terminus on be read out, creating a long lasting began publishing art books in the 90s renownedly passionate performer of Six who collaborated with Cleary released on a five-CD set in 1999 and Stephen's Green, the work explores frozen image. But rather than a dim and sees this work with artists as his own work. Connolly on the conception and is a celebration of the multiplicity of the dimension of time. Video may be a image, it will be bright, 3-dimensional, continuous with his previous execution of the piece. musical language and evolving two dimensional medium - a flat and clear, and interestingly, without profession – creating traces of works Fabrice Naud – AKA Docteur Naud - technologies. It took Doyle ten years screen - but it does have a third color variation; reds will become black that will be important for our future is an experimental musician who will Moving Still (2008) to compose. He worked with 48 dimension: not depth, but time. We for example. comprehension of them. After this, his perform on the electronic instrument A video/computer installation first collaborators and produced 103 are well used to looking at video experience as an art dealer allowed him the theremin for the Meta-perceptual shown in the Pompidou Centre in individual pieces of music for Babel. In where this dimension is expanded Little Voice is a new sound piece by to discover a taste for luxury – and so Club. He is also the inventor of the 2008-2009, works with live video. On 2007 he won the Magisterium Award (slowed down) or compressed sound artists Dinahbird and Jean for cheese. He discovered – in the not-yet-famous Braguettophone – a one side of the projected image, at the Bourges International Electro- (speeded up). This work is about Philippe Renoult, specially world of cheese just as in the world of trouser zip that plays music, as well as everything that is still is erased, leaving acoustic Music Competition in France, slicing through it with a digital knife. commissioned for The Meta- art – the I like, I don’t like, it’s good, it’s specializing in composition; only the bodies of spectators/ for his composition The Ninth Set – perceptual Club which allows you to not good, knowing of course that one installation; mixing; engineering; observers to emerge from a grey part of a three album electronic music And with the participation of: listen without using your ears... This is can always like what is not good. Now a playing traditional instruments; playing emptiness when they move. On the set called Passades. He has just Laboratoire Psychologie de la a one to one listening experience and cheese consultant, he will offer here a electronic instruments; inventing other side, it is what moves that is completed two cinema for the ear Perception, Université Paris Descartes so numbers will be limited during the series of experiences to examine this electronic instruments. erased, and only those who stay still projects - live soundtracks for et CNRS; Institut des Systèmes evening. peculiarity of judgement, but also to will appear in the image, along with imaginary films, performed by the Intelligents et de Robotique, CNRS - discover some new cheeses which may the unmoving architecture of the National Symphony Orchestra and The Université Pierre et Marie Curie. Jean-Philippe Renoult is a writer, radio perhaps allow us to escape from our space. At the centre of the installation Crash Ensemble respectively - both producer and sound artist based in preconceptions through the application is an early electronic instrument called released on CD. He is constantly Paris. His work focuses on field of perception. a Theremin, which is played without amazed that he is a composer. recordings and eletro-acoustical physical contact. transformation of environmental sounds.

THE META PERCEPTION CLUB 19 D T t

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i for The Meta-Perceptual Club

m Exhibitions: Tuesday – Saturday, 14:00 – 18:00 Wednesday, 14:00 – 20:00 Sunday, 12:30 – 14:30 Happenings: Thursdays 22 January, 5 & 19 February, 18:30 – 20:30 Open studio: Tuesdays – Fridays, 14:00 – 17:00 and by appointment RER B: Luxembourg (sortie Rue Gay-Lussac) Metro: Place Monge (M7) Cardinal Lemoine (M10) Bus : 21, 27, 84, 89 Parking: 22, Rue Soufflot Address: Centre Culturel Irlandais 5 Rue des Irlandais 75005 Paris Tel: 01 58521030