The workshop "Difference Engines", comprised of three sessions, will use performance (and its documentation), printed textile and composition to create a collective work. The "Difference Engine" is the name of the first computer, a calculating machine engineered by Charles Babbage and programmed by Ada Lovelace. Its development was directly connected to innovations in mechanical weaving. By weaving together fabric as a material, and its production as a metaphor, workshop participants are invited to work with and share experiences that touch on opacity, bodily autonomy, gaining or losing control, inter-dependence on machines, community through technology, representation and marginalisation.
Richard John Jones: I work primarily with textiles and performance and where these intersect, for example when a textile work becomes a costume, or the body becomes a sculptural form. I like how both of these are in a dance of revealing and obscuring at the same time. In general, my work is concerned with the interaction between visual forms of representation/abstraction and political forms of recognition and margin-alisation. I am interested in how technological developments, particularly in manufacturing, affect the body and how bodies, in turn, become part of a machine. I am a graduate of Central Saint Martins, London and the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam and until 2012 was a Co-Director of Auto Italia South East, London. My work has been shown at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin, The Museum of Modern Art, Medellin (MAMM), EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam, Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris and the Gwangju Biennial in collaboration with AA Bronson. I was recently a recipient of the IMMA Freud Project Residency, Dublin.
Image: National Idiom, 2018. Courtesy of the Artist.
Image: National Idiom, 2018. Courtesy of the Artist.