3D animated play gets Leeside premiere
An immersive 3D animated play will get its premiere in Cork this week.
The 3D theatre play, ‘Conversations on a Crosstown Algorithm’, is the first iteration of Irish artist Doireann O’Malley’s new work.
It shows today, tomorrow and Saturday at the Granary Theatre on Dyke Parade at 6pm and 8pm each day, with a 3pm matinee on Saturday.
The animation, which adopts the narrative structure of 3 act plays, centres around a conversation between 2 characters, Samantha and Olda Wiser, performed by Mathea Hoffmann and Juan Carlos Cuadrado.
The 2, complete strangers when the play starts, slowly but surely dive into each other’s life stories, traumata, dreams, and nightmares, sometimes mirrored, others counteracted by changing dream-like surroundings. Drawing on psycho-analytical motives derived from collaborative character development workshops, the dialogue soon reveals itself as one part of a larger systemic virus.
At a time of overlapping crises, ‘Conversations on a Crosstown Algorithm’ invites the audience to reconsider the relationship between nature and technology by looking into new forms of queer subjectivity and their entanglements with data economy, artificial intelligence, and identity politics.
With references to surveillance architectures and computational networks, the scene is predominantly set in a virtual chatroom, reminiscent of an abandoned data centre, or an empty casino, in which the queer protagonists seem to find themselves trapped.
Limerick-born Doireann O’Malley is a multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. Their research-led practice unites collaborative methodologies, healing and reparative movement, writing, and theory, with a strong technological emphasis on new media, virtual reality, 3D and film installation.
O’Malley holds an MFA from University of Ulster in Belfast. From 2021-2022, they held the position of Professor of Gender Space at Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien. They were a research fellow at the Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung (2020-2021) and a participant of the BPA//Berlin programme for artists (2019-2020). They acted as a guest mentor on The Live Arts MA/AdBK Nuremberg (2001).
‘Conversations on a Crosstown Algorithm’ was co-commissioned by Cork’s National Sculpture Factory and based on a long-term artistic research project commissioned by Berliner Förderprogramm Künstlerische Forschung in 2020/21.
Tickets for the play are available from Eventbrite.com.