West Cork Arts Centre

Ada Lovelace and the future of work... Nearly ten years ago, I collaborated with a group of women from the Oliver Bond Flats on an art project that explored the future of work. This project, titled "After the Future…of Work," was developed in partnership with the Robert Emmet Community Development Project. It was initiated in response to the closure of the last sewing factory in the area, Dot Binding, where many of these women had previously worked. While the project ultimately focused on the threat of artificial intelligence to jobs in working-class communities, it began as a history project looking at the role of women in technological development and unionisation. Using threads taken from the sewing factory, the women developed a series of Union Banners for the future of work in an automatic society. A key source of inspiration in this research process was the brilliant work of Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first algorithm to be processed by a machine. She eventually made it into one of the Union banners alongside a reference to the Jacquard Loom. This banner is one of two large Union Banners now on display at my solo show of collaborative work, Night Study, at Uillinn, West Cork Arts Centre. For more, see here: https://lnkd.in/eCnUTMhp https://lnkd.in/esPwCJfP #adalovelaceday

Night Study / Session 4. An Imaginary Study in Reading the Dead Prof. Mick Wilson / 16-10-25 / 5:00 - 6:30. After a thought-provoking Night Study session on "Studying in the Aftermath: Repair, Art Practice and Study in Broken World Thinking", with Dr. EL Putnam, PhD, the fourth Night Study session will engage participants around themes of death and the political imaginary with Prof. Mick Wilson, through "An Imaginary Study in Reading the Dead". This study session engages the themes of death and the imaginary through the work of the internationally renowned Brazilian artist and theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva, and her proposed reading practices. The study centres on two shorter texts by da Silva: (i) "On Difference Without Separability" (2016) in T.L. King, J. Navarro, and A. Smith (eds.) and “Reading the Dead” in Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness (2020). In reading these texts together and listening to da Silva’s call for “the end of the world as we know it”, we will try to open up an encounter with the textures and potentials of what she describes as a Black Feminist Poethical Reading practice. In this way, we seek to consider the way da Silva profoundly re-positions the question of the imaginary beyond what she describes as a modern grammar that divides the world through the logic of “separability, sequentiality, and determinacy”, producing a global distribution of violence. These texts are chosen because of the summary way in which they outline some of the most ambitious and challenging aspects of da Silva’s re-reading of the colonial-modern order and her radical call for the imagination beyond the colonial-modern order. Places still available here: https://lnkd.in/eW9GFttS About Mick Wilson Mick Wilson is Professor of Art, Director of Doctoral Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Art and Political Imaginary (CAPIm, 2024-2028), at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Current collaborative research projects include Mapping the Political Imaginary (2025-2027); The Museum of the Commons (EACEA 2023-2027); and The Foutain: An art-technological-social drama (FORMAS 2020-2025). Recent edited volumes include: with Gerrie van Noord & Paul O'Neill (eds.) Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life, Sternberg / MIT Press (2023); with Henk Slager (eds.) Expo-Facto: Into the Algorithm of Exhibition, EARN (2022), with Cătălin Gheorghe (eds.) Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination (Editura Artes/ArtMonitor, 2021); with Nick Aikens et al. (eds.) On the Question of Exhibition 1, 2, & 3 (PARSE, 2021) and with Paul O'Neill et al. (eds.) Curating After the Global (MIT, 2019). He is also the author of the forthcoming volume The Curatorial Incitement to Discourse (Berlin: Floating Opera Press, 2025). #artandeducation