The Question Concerning Technology in Ireland?: Art, Decoloniality and Speculations of an Irish Cosmotechnics

Abstract

In this article, the process of speculating an Irish cosmotechnics is instigated by taking a decolonial approach to technics and technology in Ireland with a focus on three artworks: Assembly by Shane Finan, Interlooping by EL Putnam, and Entanglement by Annex. Each work relates to a different aspect of Irish technological history, from its national beginnings to its current role in global cloud computing networks, engaging with the materialities of technologies with a focus on technologies of communication, agriculture, and digital infrastructures. Countering a colonial narrative of modernist progression, where the implementation of technologies through the cultivation of land and society is put in the service of economic “development,” these three artworks treat technologies with ambivalence, placing emphasis on their material qualities and impacts. This ambivalence, where it is implemented critically yet also functions as the means of producing artistic works, enables what Catherine Walsh refers to as decolonial cracks, introducing a means of working and thinking otherwise with technology in ways that diverge from current practices of coloniality.

On (not) becoming machine: countering algorithmic thinking through digital performance art

“…Data coloniality, like coloniality more generally speaking, involves power relations between regimes of privilege and disadvantage, including the economic, geographic, and racial divides between the global north and global south. The discussed performances speak to this darker side (Mignolo, 2011) of the technology industries (Putnam, 2023). For instance, the hidden labor used to develop AI, increasingly being performed in the global south, is contrasted with my situated experiences in the global north, evident in my presence in the work as medium, as I benefit from the privileges that data colonialism perpetuates.…”