Aoibheann Greenan—The Ninth Muse

3 Nov-18 Nov 2023

Overview

Pallas Projects/Studios are pleased to present Aoibheann Greenan—The Ninth Muse, the final exhibition of our 2023 Artist-Initiated Projects programme.

The Ninth Muse speculates the creative and social implications of brain-machine interfacing. Referencing the Nine Muses of ancient Greek mythology, the exhibition explores the parallels between AI and the muse, a friendly analogy that masks corporate involvement in our product interactions. The work features a 'Muse' headband, a consumer-level brain-machine interface that employs EEG neurofeedback for meditation enhancement. Greenan envisions the technology’s potential to uncover unconscious contents, along with associated risks around brain data privacy.

The artist locates 20th century surrealism and its techniques for hacking the unconscious as a precursor to this moment in which neurotechnologies are pervading the consumer market. The installation updates Dalí's hypnagogic sleep method by placing the Muse headband above an automated office chair, which drops keys to prompt imaginative material.* Using a process akin to Dalí’s Paranoiac-critical method Greenan has created a series of collage drawings which provide the raw material for an animation.* Greenscreen sections integrate a video invocation to the ninth muse, Calliope, that draws on a number of feminist texts. The libretto prompts the AI to augment the poet's image as she recites, generating a series of creaturely becomings. Glitches, created by the artist's Muse-driven brainwave fluctuations, intermittently disrupt the image, thus repurposing the headband as a tool for both artistic augmentation and countering corporate capture. 

* Dalí would nap in an armchair, holding a set of keys above a metal plate,
whereupon the sound of them falling would awaken him with imaginative material
for his work.

* Dalí would combine multiple disparate images into one, to stimulate in himself
and the viewer ‘a delirium of interpretation’.

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Biography

Aoibheann Greenan is an Irish artist working across moving image, performance, installation, sculpture, costume and drawing. Her theatrical stagings pull at the seams of our commodified experiences, allowing aberrant or repressed material to bleed out. Works have explored neuromarketing, psychedelic tourism and unboxing videos, warping their delivery through darkly humorous rituals and narratives. These 'counter spells' deliberately amplify coercive mechanisms to confront viewers with their mediated attention. Videos morph into live performances, costumes into sets, drawings into sculptures. Strange loops emerge across digital culture, mythology, neuroscience and esotericism, eliciting patterns of thought and behavior that persist throughout time.

@rodeo.oracle | aoibheanngreenan.com