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

Drinking Blindfolded in Hull

Independent Art School, Hull UK, 2004

Me on BBC Look North talking about Drinking blindfolded in Hull

In mid 2004 I was invited by The Independent Art Schoolto come and participate in one of their events in Hull. I had been aware of the independent art school for some time and had already become involved in their activity by becoming and honorary lecturer in Applied Warfare. I liked their practical ethos and the sense of humour, but also the dedication with which they went about their objectives.

I decided for my part in the exhibition to go Drinking blindfolded in Hull. Drinking blindfolded in… is a series of works in which I go drinking blindfolded in different cities so as to try and get a sense of their culture and people without invoking the discrimination that comes with vision. So far the work has taken place in Oxford, Exeter, Hull, Brighton, Zagreb and Sofia. In each of these cities I would disseminate flyers telling people that I was an artist and I was coming to their city to go blindfolded drinking and that I’d like to meet them. the flyers provided a conversation menu for the shy and a list of bars for those who weren’t sure where we should meet. Each day I’d go drinking in the city meeting people who had phoned my ‘hot-line’ to arrange a meeting. I’d get drunk over the course of the evening with these different individuals and when I returned to where I was staying in the evening I would record my experiences through writing

I ended the drinking Blindfolded series in 2005 with Drinking Blindfolded in Brighton and Hove (I shit you not).

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?

Read Full text on Scribd

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.

Get the full article on Scribd

Dysfunctional Labour, Oui, Bar lane Studios, York

13th Sept, 2010

As Part of OUI #1 (organised by OUI, York) I worked with curator/archivist/writer Judit Bodor to create a live multimedia artwork chronicling the experience of working as part of a group of artists performing a simultaneous live action. This was no easy task.

Our plan was to produce photographs, short video clips and Flash animations created from photographs we were taking of the other artists and to upload these to a web site built for the event. The site would also be projected in the space as a response to the actions of the other artists involved so that they in turn could respond to the material we were generating. We planned to combine this with a live twitter aggregator used in conjunction with location based software that would enable us to find people tweeting in the vicinity and begin dialogues with them. Our aim with this latter act was to encourage those nearby to enter into the performance situation either through coming to the space or else simply by tweeting a message into our projected live feed.

Unfortunately our efforts were dogged by a host of problems, not least the lack of internet access in Barlane. As such the resultant site has decidedly less material on it than we were intending and the work isn’t really of the quality we would originally have aimed for, mainly because – and I can only speak for myself – I lost the will to produce the more I encountered problems which were beyond my remit to solve.On the up side I did enjoy the process of working with Judit on the project, as she has some very interesting ideas about archives and about how artists organise and relate to their own history.

As this web site (the one you’re reading now) is an archive, I offer comment on this not so successful project because I think it’s sometimes interesting to think about things that are problematic as well as things that ran like clockwork. Further, it is often in the things that fail that I find the most enlightening reflections.

Bored Housewife: Songs of Belfast

An issue I have always been very interested in is the lack of representation of the Northern Irish conception of the Troubles. This may sound odd to some but if you give a little thought to it you will realise that while several films and many news casts have been devoted to representing the social experience of the Northern Irish conflict, very little of that output has actually been made by Northern Irish people. As such, it has something of an anthropological feel to it. So my question remains, outside of the work of Willie Doherty and a few other Northern Irish artists, where is the representation of the confusing and often paradoxical social and political relations that constituted your average Northern Irish persons life during the Troubles? In reflecting on this matter further several things became apparent. Most significantly, in the absence of visual and textual narratives embodying the Northern Irish experience, it is speech – not images and text – that becomes significant as the carrier of social experience. Perhaps this has something to do with the persistence of multiple versions of the ‘truth’ surrounding the events of the Troubles.

With this in mind in 2009 my partner Meabh and I began working on a collaborative music project. The aim of which was not to record and represent the events of the passed, but rather to embody the harsh humour and anarchic world view that is the resultant of growing up experiencing Northern Ireland’s difficult past. We didn’t want to be overtly political, rather we wanted to embody the politics that were the result of our childhood experiences.

It was from this perspective that we formed Bored Housewife and began gigging our way round the pubs and clubs of Belfast in Northern Ireland. The songs we wrote and sang were of council estate love, violence, TV and crappy dreams of celebrity. We mixed love, violence and self-abuse in equal measure and all with a sense of humour and a vauge optimism. The songs seemed to work well and sprung us up quite a following very quickly. We got to number 4 in the northern Irish download charts and recorded an album and released it on 1st January 2010. Sadly, owing to family matters, we had to take a break from gigging for a large part of 2010, a break we remain on still. However our album is in the public domain and is available for listening and download on our bandcamp site at: http://boredhousewife.bandcamp.com/

Have a listen and don’t forget to tell us what you think.

(With)in(the)visible, GT Gallery, Belfast Oct 2010

7th – 20th October, 2010

(with)in(the)visible is a two person show featuring the work of myself and Una Walker, curated by Sarah McAvera. The following blurb is from the gallery press release for the exhibition:

(with)in(the)visible presents the work of two artists dealing with similar concepts but from very different perspectives, one occult the other scientific. Common to both artists work is a dedicated attempt to explore and materialise the space between the world as phenomena and the world as it is interpreted.

Justin McKeown
On the 7th August 2007 Justin McKeown declared himself a magus and began to experiment with using various forms of occult magick to affect events in his everyday life. McKeown does not believe in magick. Rather, his experiments originate from an attempt to understand and utilise the human propensity for belief as a psychological tool for altering ones own lived sense of reality.

Una Walker
Hyperspace is a logical extension of Euclidian three-dimensional space into other dimensions described as n-space. N-spaces can be expressed in mathematical terms, but are difficult to visualise. Una Walker’s work in (with)in(the)visible will explore the nature and contradictions of representing four dimensions using drawings, models and projections of three-dimensional models onto two-dimensional surfaces.

Reduplication Of The Real, Cardiff, Wales, UK

The above photographs from my 1999 work Man the Urban Animal were exhibited as part of the exhibition reduplication of the real. The following information about the work is from the Tactile Bosch website:

21st January till 6th Febuary @ The Old Library in Cardiff City Centre

One of the main shortfalls in the critical understanding of Performance Art is the lack of awareness among contemporary curators of how to successfully curate the medium into the context of a traditional white walled gallery space. The primary reason for this is likely to be the additional layer of complexity involved in curating Performance Art as the curator is unable to see the work prior to its creation and so is unable to fully visualise how it will relate to, and be framed by, its context. A difficulty that is increased further by the fact many performances transform throughout their duration, deviating from the artists original aesthetic and even thematic intentions. This makes it particularly difficult to integrate the medium into an exhibition space alongside other less transient Art forms and has led to performance regularly residing in the more unkempt venues of more experimentally minded artist run organisations and co-ops.

However, interest in Performance Art has increased rapidly over the last decade as artists and writers embrace the themes of anti-commoditisation and anti-commercialism that the Art form inherently embodies, which in turn has led to an increased level of attention from those running the more established venues. This has led to a number of successful attempts to incorporate performance within the programme of established venues such as Merina Abramovic presents… at the Whitworth Art Gallery Manchester and the Performa biennale in New York as well as notable local events such as Common ground at Plan 9 Gallery in Bristol.

This increased acceptance then helps facilitate a broader range of new initiatives on how to exhibit the medium. One of these curatorial approaches is the collection and preservation of the mediums physical by-products with a view to exhibiting them. One of the main exponents of this both locally and nationally is the Trace Gallery & Collection that retains and exhibits a selection of the soiled, embellished and battered objects left at the end of a performance. The inspiration for Reduplication of the Real is a similar premise, just instead of props it focuses on the photographs taken to document the performances.

The photographic documentation of Performance Art events is seen often as just a prosaic method of recording the act for future reference, which means its strengths as a stand-alone Art form are rarely tested. Yet, many of these images are fascinating, poignant and even humorous in their own right. They are a montage of esoterically linked everyday objects juxtaposed with a performer, focused in their entirety on a single action; all frozen in a single frame. The photographs, with their distorted everyday actions and objects, can come across as something anywhere between an uncanny distortion of the everyday and a gross and disturbing dream-like sequence.

However, beyond their aesthetic impact, like performance Art itself, the exhibition of these images asks questions about the nature of Art itself. The images capture a single instance from a performance and isolate it from the context of both the space outside the frame and the other actions carried out in the performance. By doing so they distort, sometimes beyond recognition, both the imagery and thematic of the source performance. This alteration of original intentions in conjunction with the little or no co-ordination between the photographer and artist and the way the images are uploaded and distributed among peers, truly tests the notion of authorship and artistic intention and their relation to both artistic quality and monetary value.

Reduplication of the Real is an attempt to highlight the strengths many of these images possess and poses the idea of them as artworks in themselves with there own unique qualities.

Curator: Neil Jefferies

Artists:
Andréanne Abbondanza-Bergeron, Phil Babot, Bean, Benjamin Bellas, Anna Berndtson, Adina Bier, Angus Braithwaite, Rose Camastro-Pritchett, Kate Clark, Leighton Collier Roux, Florian Feigl, Linda Franke, Werther Germondari, Ian Giles, Brian Hastings, Faith Johnson, David Kefford, Robert Ladislas Derr, Kate and Paul Lindholm, Justin McKeown, Jeff Thompson, Paul Wiersbinski

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.

Art Rebels, Catalyst Arts, 21 May – 12 June 2010

Brown Julius in the Fountain of Modernism was a video work I made in collaboration with London based writer Stewart Home. The video work was originally commissioned on behalf of Dartington Gallery, by curator Judit Bodor. It was screened at Catalyst Arts Art Rebels exhibition, which celebrated the work of the organisations exdirectors. As an exdirector who had during my term commissioned a show of artwork by Stewart Home, I thought this was a fitting work to contribute to the exhibition, as it not only represented my own work, but that of an artist I had programmed during my time at Catalyst.