Wednesday 1 July, 1pm at The Bureau of Radical Accessibility

Current artist-in-residence, Amanda Ralph invites you to a research conversation about her work on musician Turlough O’Carolan, a blind, illiterate, Irish Catholic living within the social and political landscape of eighteenth century Ireland. Her project is motivated by a desire to excavate some of the complexities underpinning the upcoming centenary of the War of Independence.

Reflecting on the conditions, for a blind man setting out in 1690 on an itinerant music career, has focused a key part of the project on the use of new technologies. The discussion will touch on using the Xbox Kinect to visualise a person’s body in space and in-progress, work on an inertial motion system being developed with Thom Conaty, Founder/CEO of Maker.ie

As part of the residency, Amanda has invited a dialogue with dancer, choreographer and Aosdána artist, Cindy Cummings who will give a performative slide talk discussing the different ways of collaborating with interactive technologies through dance and choreography.

So come and join us and help form this early stage research – there’s plenty to talk over from Irish history to new technologies and performance and dance.

Amanda Ralph is an artist whose practice is based on ideas generated through consideration of material in the public realm. Amanda currently lectures in sculpture, previously completing seven years as Program Director of the MA in Visual Arts Practices for critics, curators and artists at Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. She holds an M.Sc. from Trinity College Dublin, an MFA from the University of Arizona, Tucson and a BA from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. Awards include a Fulbright Scholarship and residency at the International Studio Programme at PS1, New York. Amanda has had solo exhibitions at the Orchard Gallery, Derry, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin and the Irish Arts Center, New York.

Cindy Cummings is a dance artist (performer/choreographer/tutor) based in Dublin. Cindy has evolved a mult-layered practice which regularly crosses boundaries between dance, theatre and live art. Since 1986 she has created collaborative works with artists around the world for live performance, installation and film. This fertile landscape has been richly developed in her 15 years of work utilising interactive technology with US composer & media artist Todd Winkler (Brown University), Paris based artists Connolly/Cleary, half/angel dance company (Jools Gilson & Richard Povall, Irl/UK), Neill O’Dwyer (Dublin) and most recently with MIDASpaces (Dublin). In 2014, Cindy was artist in residence in the UCD College of Science. While there she performed with sound artists Strange Attractor (Dublin/Cork), created a performative lecture called ‘A Brief History of Contemporary Dance’ and a trilogy of video works focused on the physics of dance (‘Spin/Span/Spine’) with Professor Padraig Dunne. Since 2007, Cindy has been a member of Aosdána.