Digital Art in Ireland: New Media & Irish Artistic Practice ed. by James O'Sullivan (review)

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• Digital Art in Ireland: New Media & Irish Artistic Practice ed. by James O’Sullivan
• Elyse Graham (bio)

DIGITAL ART IN IRELAND: NEW MEDIA & IRISH ARTISTIC PRACTICE, edited by James O’Sullivan. London: Anthem Press, 2021. xv + 147 pp. $125.00 cloth, $40.00 ebook.

Ireland is a place for poetry. A love of words pervades the culture of the Green Isle, from the literary firmament of W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney down to such celebrated features of everyday life as pub banter, the inspired insult, the storytelling session. After spending a happy spell in Ireland a few years ago, I ended the trip with a cab ride to Dublin Airport in the early hours of the morning. I did my best to keep up a friendly chat with the cabdriver despite being half-comatose. When he asked about the weather, I said, “I haven’t seen the face of the sun in five days.” “Oh, there you are,” he said, as if I could not be confirmed as alive until I used a metaphor.

A new book edited by James O’Sullivan, Digital Art in Ireland: New Media & Irish Artistic Practice, asks about the place of new media in the [End Page 645] future of Irish poetry—and Irish art more broadly. The nine essays in the collection each offer a different vantage on the emerging realm of digital art in a country that both takes tradition seriously and understands tradition as (to quote Joyce) a nightmare from which we are trying to awake. The digital present is a buzzing, blooming, beeping abundance, with no less will than the analog past to find ways to transform talk into song.

In the introduction, O’Sullivan explores the quiddity of digital art, which he defines as art that could not exist without computational intervention. The scholarly land rush to explore and theorize this new art form has resulted in a proliferation of names: “new media art, electronic art, computational art, net art, or screen-based art.” But the impulse to establish a name and a canon has often led to the neglect of digital art in areas that were once treated as merely regional, including Ireland. “If Ireland does have a thriving community of digital artists,” O’Sullivan says, by way of motivating the chapters that follow, “they are generally being ignored by scholars and critics” (3).

EL Putnam examines a group of artists who use digital art to interrogate Irish constructions of the maternal body. Irish motherhood has never lacked ideological icons, as O’Sullivan notes, from Kathleen Ní Houlihan to the Virgin Mary to “Mother Ireland” herself. The digital artists in Putnam’s chapter remake the maternal body using twenty-first-century materials. For example, Aideen Barry uses stop-motion video to merge herself—an extended organism—with the apparatuses of housework and caregiving; she uses vacuum hoses to remake herself as Medusa, who, in classical mythology, “serves as a warning against women seeking too much power” (11), but who is also a symbol of feminine strength and defiance created by modern women, as Putnam notes.

Anne Karhio considers the emerging literature of electronic poetry in Ireland. What does it mean to create innovative art in a political and economic context that judges “innovation” in terms of the industries it might disrupt and the dollars it might add to the economy? Supposing, as Karhio does, that much of the most interesting electronic poetry in Ireland has been neither published nor exhibited— that it can be read, but not inside traditional institutional frameworks for selling literature, awarding it funding, and awarding it prizes— how does this poetry challenge those frameworks and the literary aesthetics they enshrine?

Kenneth Keating explores adaptations of James Joyce’s works in new media. In 2012, many of Joyce’s texts lost their copyright, which made it possible for other artists to adapt and remix them in new forms, and enough time has now passed to assess the first generation of page-to-screen adaptations. The Joyce estate did not plan for the world to see works like “‘The Dead’: The App,” but, as T. S. Eliot [End Page 646] says, the creation...