justin mckeown

The Internet of Things

The drive towards the Internet of Things and the recent UK government attempt to launch the concept to industry and academia heralds a time where not only the means by which we relate may change drastically but also the very definition of what it means to be human will also be challenged. While in many ways we may imagine the advent of the Internet of Things not only as the first major evolutionary step in the existence of the internet, we also may conceive of it as a step in the evolution of our species; for as research has shown the brain already treats tools including computers as temporary parts of the body and thus, phenomenologically speaking we are more amalgams of man and machine that we may realise.

The full paper is published on The Internet of Things Council web site:

http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/justin-mckeown-human-beings-and-being-human-ethics-and-internet-things

The Northern Irish Imagination

Suppression & Realisation of The Northern Irish Imagination
first published in Circa Magazine, Eire, issue 130, Winter Edition, 2009, ISSN 0263-9475

A man who considers himself a realist is a man who wrongly assumes that his efforts are not the stuff of dreams. Those who claim that they are in revolt against realism, rather than being explorers and agents of the imagination are only prey to the same fallacy.

When considering the political conditions of Northern Ireland and the labours of its artistic community I often find myself thinking about the above quote. What strikes me most about it is the way in which it implicitly points to the imagination as the terrain upon which our most serious dilemmas and our most creative outpourings come to ground. In doing this it also highlights the significance of the imagination in perceiving the parameters and thus potential of the most serious and frivolous situations we encounter in our daily lives. In short, our ability to imagine is what holds the potential to move us beyond the events of the past and to shape the form our society takes in the future: imagination is the active part of both memory and thought. Considered in this way the imagination is an incredibly significant political tool.

Depending on ones knowledge of history as well as cultural background one may imagine the conditions of Northern Irish society in a number of ways. From a personal perspective I am well aware that as far back as the 12th century Ulster was regarded as ‘by far the most warlike and impenetrable of the Irish Kingdoms’ . As such, I cannot help but wonder if the violent tendency in Northern Irish society expressed through the Troubles, far from being a recent problem, is not in fact something very old indeed. This is not to suggest that we are uncivilised or somehow uncouth; such a suggestion about any people from a land that produced the Brehon laws and who also produced the first body of written literature in her own tongue north of the Alps would lack rigour. Uncivilised is not the right term. But what are we dealing with in the Northern Irish psyche? Perhaps a suppressed imagination that has never quite had the cultural and historic space to get to grips with its own cohesion?

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Northern Ireland & the 2012 Olympics

Ready, Steady Gone
Originally published in Circa Magazine, Eire, issue 125, Autumn Edition, 2008,
ISSN 0263-9475

In 2001 I had the epiphany that just as the twentieth century demanded new forms of art, so too does the twenty-first century demand new forms of leisure. To this end I proposed SPART: the ultimate hybridisation of sport and art and therefore the most evolved form of leisure on the planet. My neo-avant-gardist rhetoric aside, what interests me as an artist is exploring radical approaches to creating and structuring social relationships. Within this I am very interested in the latent potential of expanded forms of game-play as strategies for configuring / exploring social relationships. What fascinates me about both sport and art is their latent potential to configure social dynamics in ways in which even the most adept exponents of statecraft might struggle to achieve.

While hard-nosed Westminster government bureaucrats may not be too enthused by my concept of SPART, they are definitely beginning to seize upon the potential of sport and art as a tool to shape UK society. Nowhere is this better personified than in their desire to host the 2012 Olympic Games in London. In this regard, it is with deep dismay that I note Westminster’s decision to fund this event with Lottery money that should have been destined for art, sport, community and heritage organisations around Great Britain and Northern Ireland. The actual projected loss to these organisations is £1.085 billion, although some sources have estimated the cost to be much higher, at around £2.034 billion.

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Amazing Letters: The life and Art of David Zack

I am happy to announce the publication of the above book, which I was more than pleased to contribute a chapter to. The book deals with the life and art of mail artist David Zack. Zack was a well known figure within international mail art circles, though almost unknown to the conventional art world. It is therefore both exciting and fitting that this new book has been published giving insight into his ideas and activities.

Sadly Zack passed away in the 1990′s. This book is a tribute to his life and activities. It will be of interest to anyone who wishing to learn about mail art and neoism. Aside from myself, contributing authors include: Al Ackerman, Mark Bloch, An Eye Witness, Peter Haining, Istvan Kantor, Niels Lomholt and Gunter Ruch. The book is available to order through The New Gallery Press, see: www.thenewgallery.org for further details.

N.I. Performance Art publication:

My Time on the Merry Roving Caravan of Performance Art

Published by Bbeyond, Belfast

From the books promotional Blurb:

Performance art places the human in the centre of the creative act; the artist as laboratory where culture is deconstructed and transformed. This publication serves, in its own way, to extend these processes and makes it available to others outside of the visual art channels. The publication is divided into two related aspects, ‘I Am/Jestem’ and ‘contingent activities’:

I Am/Jestem is contextualised by the writers, Dr. Justin McKeown, Dr Slavka Sverakova and Dr Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes. It also contains an essay by Brian McAvera on the History of Performance and Theatre and an interview with Wladyslaw Kazmierczak, by Brian Connolly and Brian Patterson. The section on ‘contingent activities’ is represented mainly through visual documentation but also contains an essay by Colin Darke on the Dublin Collective solo performaces and their collaboration with Bbeyond in 2009.

Andre Stitt

Everybody Knows this is Nowhere

Just published is the catalogue marking Andre Stitt’s 1st major solo exhibition in  Northern Ireland since 1993.  The publication features a text by myself as well as writing by Andre Stitt and the shows Curator Megan Johnston. For anyone interested in Andre’s work this publication provides valuable insight into his working processes and his relationship to his native Northern Ireland. The catalogue is available through Millennium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, Northern Ireland

A review of Laura Graham’s Soul Murder

Image: Still from Soul Murder, image courtesy of the artist.

The following text was originally published in Circa Magazine, Eire, issue 129, Autumn Edition, 2009, ISSN 0263-9475

I’m in a room on the top floor of the old building of the University of Ulster. It’s a bad space but something about the work within it is holding me. I’m confronted by a large video projection. The projected footage is of a male and female judge, shown alternately, reading charges against an unidentified malefactor. Some of the charges are quite absurd ‘that you have a dog and speak kindly to it’, others are more sinister ‘that you told an ill woman that she would die in three days’.

The charges are old worldly. I’m reminded of the Pendle witch trials, which I am aware of as I used to live near Pendle hill in Lancashire. This sensation is added to by a life size iron and chicken wire sculpture of a woman, standing to my right in the room. It looks like something out of the Wicker Man, but more industrial. In examining it I can see ashes and the marks of burning. In its centre, around the location of the heart, there is a small video screen showing the sculpture on fire.

Curious to find out more I sit down at the back of the room. I pick up a small booklet and begin to read. The work is dedicated to the Witches of Islandmagee. The booklet details a series of performance works that the artist made exploring the history of these witch trials. The booklet also details the artist’s reflections on this history in prose form.

Most striking about this work is the way in which the artist has managed to use her historical explorations as a way of tabling questions that have a resonance in our current social climate. Through dealing with the history of the witch trials the work questions the violence of puritanical masculinity as embodied in the institutions of church and law. This work is a Janus, it has prescience; through looking back at our past from its position in the present it looks toward the future embodying a warning of the bloody-minded nature of mankind that these state institutions mask.

I am Review for Circa

Circa Review, Eire, issue 127, Spring Edition, 2009, ISSN 0263-9475

The following abstract is from the review I wrote of the Polish, Irish Performance art Show:

I find myself standing at the gates of Stranmillis teaching college awaiting a friend. We’re both going to I AM, a performance art event organised by Bbeyond. The event runs from 20^th – 27^th October 2008 and includes workshops and performances by visiting Polish, UK and local artists. Participating artists are: Birgit Salling Hansen, Leo Devlin, Christoff Gillen, Sinead Bhreathnach Cashell, Ula Darjeling, Colm Clarke, Paul King, Gordian Piec and Stanislaw Gajda, Anna Syczewska, Mark Greenwood, Dariusz Fodczuk, Stephen Dorothy and Chrissie Cadman, Magosia Butterwick, Wladyslaw Kazmierczak and Ewa Rybska, Artur Tajber, Bartosz Lukasiewicz, Arti Grabowski, Rainer Pagel, Hugh O’Donnell, and last but not least, Przemyslaw Kwiek. The event is split between two venues, Stranmillis College for the first half of the week and the Black Box for the final few days. On paper this is a mammoth event, and the problems of trying to squeeze it all into a thousand or so words for this article are not lost on me as I await my friend.

As we walk up the drive of Stranmillis college in search of the performance venue, which I know is somewhere on the campus, I can’t help but think that this is an odd venue for an art event, given how far away it is from Belfast’s normal centres of creative consumption. But perhaps it is a case of needs must as the devil drives; for while performance seems to be readily accepted as an artistic medium beyond these shores, in Belfast performance art still feels like the poor relation: the smack-head cousin that people still feel uncomfortable talking about. As such, finding a home for it in the heart of the city is, I’m sure, not always an easy task…

A full copy of this review is available in this edition of Circa

Art, Architecture and warfare

In 2004 I participated in the Urban Festival, Zagreb Croatia. Here I presented the work Drinking Blindfolded in Zagreb (I shit you not). After discussions with the curators about the nature of the work, they became interested in my ideas on urban space, much of which were at this point influenced by Situationist Practices and the writings of Paul Virilio. I produced the text Art Architecture and Warfare as a means of explaining how I view many of these ideas. It’s written as a polemic manifesto and so lacks references to Virilio and Situationist texts, although the informed reader will recognise many of the references. The text can be downloaded from the Urban Festival Web site by clicking here and then clicking the pdf. down load link on the site.

Arkive City

Abstract from Speaking from the Void by Justin McKeown, Published in 2008 by Interface (Belfast) and Locus+ (Newcastle) in the book Arkive City, Julie Bacon (ed)

Any society is a society in conflict, and any anthology of a society’s poetry that does not reflect this, is a lie.  But poetry has been so defined in the public mind as usually to exclude the possibility of social conflicts appearing.

(Tom Leonard, Radical Renfrew)

The present status of power sharing in Northern Ireland is built upon an indefinite deferral. This takes the form of the postponement by all political and military parties concerned to formally acknowledge and publicly discuss the core issues of the cultural conflictions that led to the armed conflict of the past 40 years that is commonly referred to as the Troubles. In the absence of such public discussion of history, within a generation or so, such memories are destined for the void. Yet, in the absence of such a defined history, there is a definite clamber among Northern Ireland’s cultural entrepreneurs to write another history of that same conflicted period: that of the activities of Northern Ireland’s visual artists. In witnessing this archive fervour in some of my peers I cannot help but wonder to what extent their approach to creating archives will be – by hook or by crook – indexical of our societies’ wider attitude towards our collective history? Will we ignore the confliction in the history of our societies’ poetic cultural endeavours just as we try to ignore the confliction in our political history? For it is my contention that just as any exercise in history is an exercise in self-identity, any product of such an exercise is to some extent a critique of the value system that produced it…. (full text available in the book)

More information about this publication is available on the interface web site.