Detail from ‘A Degree of Darkness’, shown as part of 'Intelligent Machinery’ at Farmleigh Gallery

Sofie Loscher | Jonathan Mayhew | Niamh O'Doherty

April 3rd - May 31st 2015

The exhibition ‘Intelligent Machinery’ explores ideas that inform artificial intelligence, pattern recognition (in neural networks), complex networks, coding, and how these factors have been used in seminal moments in our history. The classical grid of Art History has given way to the ‘system’, and modern forms of invention have to deal with a norm composed of complex inputs often concerned with redaction, obfuscation and reflection. “To understand art as software is to understand it in terms of codes and information rather than in material or medium-specific terms.” A contemporary art-tech revolution now sees a new form of mechanical perception within the confusion of digital avatars.