On Friday 10 and Saturday 11 September, the galleries at VISUAL will host an exciting selection of live music performances, DJ sets, film screenings and artist-led workshops. Part of the Woman the Machine programme, these events celebrate and encourage the output of female artists in electronic music, putting female musicians centre stage, and sharing the legacies and achievements of an international community of artists. Encouraging the fostering of new talent, a series of workshops will pass on skills, experimenting with various sonic and tactile media.

This live weekend also provides another great opportunity to visit Woman in the Machine, closing on 19 September. An exhibition of over 35 artists, many working with moving image, sound and electronics, as well as painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture and installation, the exhibition is inspired by the creativity of female pioneers working in sound, electronics and engineering. With performances and workshops taking place in amongst artworks in the gallery itself, this is a unique moment in which contemporary art is activated by live performance, sound, film and participatory events.

Capacities are limited and advance booking is required.

Friday 10 September 3pm

Online Screening of two films by George Bolster followed by a Q&A

A screening of two film works exploring the importance of mentorship by New York-based artist George Bolster. Bolster's research has seen him interview a number of important astronomers, and in these two 20-minute films he talks to Margaret Race, the planetary protector for Earth at NASA, and Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at SETI. Both discuss their fascinating jobs and the guiding figures that helped them get there.

This online screening will be followed by a Q&A with George Bolster.

Free event, booking required

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Friday 10 September, 6pm – 9pm

Live Music: Michelle Doyle, Jenn Moore

Film: Underplayed

Michelle Doyle is a multidisciplinary artist based in Ireland. Her work critiques technology, politics and innovation primarily through installation, sound and performance including pirate radio, digital reproduction and staged musical performances. In Doyle’s sound practice, she mixes elements of musique concrète – sounds found in the environment as raw materials – along with archival works and the voice. Writing plays a large part in her compositions: she explores literary techniques, such as Kathy Acker’s rewriting texts in the first person, which allow her to explore new positions and narratives outside the field of music. Alongside this, Doyle is an active member of the independent music community in Ireland, playing solo under sound art project, Rising Damp; with noise band, The Healers; and with punk band Sissy. Doyle is involved in various DIY communities and is a member of the co-operative punk practice space, the Karate Klub in Dublin.

Jennifer Moore is a multi-disciplinary artist working with sound, performance, music and writing. She is interested in relationships between bodies – the way all bodies, human and non-human are inter-connected, situated within a constellation of ever-shifting global relations, past and present. Moore’s mini album Future Lights and Archetypes is included in Woman in the Machine, and for her live performance she’ll be performing songs from the album. Operating at the node between technological reality and speculative fiction, ethereal bedroom-pop and monolithic electronics, the album’s uncanny soundscapes explore a landscape of a future global economy. This body of music work melds intimacy with pulsating stimuli, Moore’s gaze oriented firmly towards the human cost of an omniscient technological future.

Electronic music was born from the ideals of diversity, community, and inclusivity, and yet in 2019 only 5 of the top 100 DJs were women. Filmed over the summer festival season, Underplayed presents a portrait of the current status of gender, ethnic, and sexual equality issues through the lens of the female pioneers, next-generation artists, and industry leaders who are championing the change and inspiring a more diverse pool of role models for future generations. Ultimately, the film explores how gender disparity happens, a theme that transcends music and finds relevance in many of today’s industries. (87 minutes/Directed by Stacey Lee)

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Saturday 11 September 12pm - 3pm

Artist-Led workshop: Chloe Brenan OR Amy Pickles Workshop

Film: Sisters with Transistors

Chloe Brenan Pinhole Photography Workshop

Better to tune in the hearing than force a faint signal to scream.

Using a line from poet Daniela Cascella as a starting point, this pinhole photography workshop will cover camera construction, shooting and darkroom processing. You will be guided through the process of tuning into fluctuating ambient light/weather conditions to determine exposure times for your hand-made cameras.

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OR

Amy Pickles - Tape Loops and Voice Soup Workshop

In this workshop we will learn how to make tape loops by opening up cassette tapes and cutting the magnetic tape that can record and transmit sound. With tape recording machines we will experiment with how our voice, and other sounds, are collected in the tape loop and played out to our ears again. We will think about where and how we speak.

Through different group exercises we will edit and transform our voice on the tape. We will use the voices in the machines to make strange stories, imaginary places and feelings. Workshop will be delivered by Clare Breen.

Both workshops not suitable for children. Over 16’s only.

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Followed by screening of

SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today. Theremins, synthesizers and feedback machines abound in this glorious ode to the women who helped shape, not just electronic music but the contemporary soundscape as we know it. Avant-garde composer Laurie Anderson narration accompanies fascinating archival footage to trace the history of the technological experimentation of sound, the deconstruction of its parts and the manipulation into something altogether other. While traversing a range of musical approaches and personalities, from academia to outsider art to television commercials, we meet Clara Rockmore, Bebe Barron, Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Spiegel and Eliane Radigue, among many other fascinating and enigmatic musical geniuses and their peculiar way of hearing the world. (86 minutes; Directed by Lisa Rovner)

Saturday 11 September, 3pm – 6pm

Artist-Led workshop: Chloe Brenan OR Amy Pickles Workshop

Film: Raw Chicks Berlin

Chloe Brenan Pinhole Photography Workshop

Better to tune in the hearing than force a faint signal to scream.

Using a line from poet Daniela Cascella as a starting point, this pinhole photography workshop will cover camera construction, shooting and darkroom processing. You will be guided through the process of tuning into fluctuating ambient light/weather conditions to determine exposure times for your hand-made cameras.

BOOK NOW

OR

Amy Pickles - Tape Loops and Voice Soup Workshop

In this workshop we will learn how to make tape loops by opening up cassette tapes and cutting the magnetic tape that can record and transmit sound. With tape recording machines we will experiment with how our voice, and other sounds, are collected in the tape loop and played out to our ears again. We will think about where and how we speak.

Through different group exercises we will edit and transform our voice on the tape. We will use the voices in the machines to make strange stories, imaginary places and feelings. Workshop will be delivered by Clare Breen.

Both workshops not suitable for children. Over 16’s only.

BOOK NOW

Followed by screening of

Raw Chicks Berlin shares eleven portraits of women from the wide-ranging Berlin electronic music scene made by director Beate Kunath with a strong focus on live acts; women who come on stage with their equipment and present their own songs and compositions. Split between studio and live performance shots, the film follows the live and work of Anna Bolena, electr°cute, Singing Kitchen, Ercklentz Neumann, Kritzkom, KSEN//Tomislav, Kyoka, Hithertoo, Mimicof / Midori Hirano, Rona Geffen, Silnaye, Ziúr. (105 minutes/Directed by Beate Kunath)

Saturday 11 September, 6pm – 9pm

Presentation: Art Prizes

DJ Set: Kate Butler

Film: Sisters with Transistors

As we come to the end of the Woman and the Machine exhibition, we announce the ARTWORKS 2021 Prizes. Selectors for VISUAL’s annual open submission were Kate Butler, Dublin Digital Radio; Rachel O’Dwyer, Lecturer in Digital Culture NCAD; Jo Mangan, Director Carlow Arts Festival and Emma Lucy O’Brien, Artistic Director, VISUAL.

1974, the year that the Braun building arrived on the Carlow landscape like a monolith, was the same year that Kraftwerk released Autobahn. Carrying a history of dance music in her record bag, Kate Butler’s sonic futurism responds to this vibrating German industrial setting. A DJ with Dublin Digital Radio (ddr), Kate is also a writer who is researching the poorly documented story of women dance music producers in the 1980s and 1990s. She plays music from this formative era – techno from Detroit, rave and jungle from the UK, classic cuts from Ireland – mixed with the global experimental dance music of today. Sweeping through this selection is music from the intense proliferation of women and gender minority producers in recent years. Remarkably free of sentimentality and nostalgia, this is music that uses aesthetic grandeur to banish cynicism. These are compositions that want to communicate with your bones, sending vibrations with the bass, with coded messages of freedom.

SISTERS WITH TRANSISTORS is the remarkable untold story of electronic music’s female pioneers, composers who embraced machines and their liberating technologies to utterly transform how we produce and listen to music today. Theremins, synthesizers and feedback machines abound in this glorious ode to the women who helped shape, not just electronic music but the contemporary soundscape as we know it. Avant-garde composer Laurie Anderson narration accompanies fascinating archival footage to trace the history of the technological experimentation of sound, the deconstruction of its parts and the manipulation into something altogether other. While traversing a range of musical approaches and personalities, from academia to outsider art to television commercials, we meet Clara Rockmore, Bebe Barron, Suzanne Ciani, Laurie Spiegel and Eliane Radigue, among many other fascinating and enigmatic musical geniuses and their peculiar way of hearing the world. (86 minutes; Directed by Lisa Rovner)

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About the Artists

Chloe Brenan is an Irish artist from rural County Carlow who divides her time between Carlow and Dublin. Through moving image, photography, sound, print and language she explores how we both apprehend and obscure the world through images, technology and language. The porosity of the body and its indivisibility from its environs is a recurring concern, especially against a backdrop of climate change. Works often involve close examinations of the poetic haptics of daily life and processes on the edge of perception that question boundaries between bodies, intimate spaces and the wider environment. She holds a Bachelor in Fine Art Print (distinctions) and a Masters from the Department of Fine Art Media both from the National College of Art and Design. Additionally, she holds a Postgraduate Diploma (distinctions) awarded from the Department of Philosophy at University College Cork. She has received support for her practice from The Arts Council of Ireland, Thomas Dammann Junior Memorial Trust, Culture Ireland, The NCAD Research Committee, Carlow County Council and ArtLinks. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally including VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow; Periphery Space, Wexford; Galway Arts Centre; The Library Project, Dublin; Catalyst Arts, Belfast; The Estonian Museum of Applied Arts and Design, Tallinn; as well as in print at Dublin Art Book Fair 2019; Tokyo Art Book Fair, Japan; and I Never Read Art Book Fair, Basel. She has had work published by REPLIKA Publishers, Berlin; and The Outside Press, Dublin. Her work is included in the collections of 100Archive, Ireland; Reminders Photography Stronghold, Tokyo, Japan; New Zealand Audio Foundation, Zine and Art Book Collection, Auckland, New Zealand; and MoMA Library Artist Publication Collection, New York.

Amy Pickles is an artist and loosely formed educator. In her work, she experiments with ways to hold onto, and consider, pervasive colonial infrastructures we are a part of. In our work, redistribution (of knowledge, tools, finances) and collaboration are methodologies to refuse individual ownership. She is a member of the collective infrastructure Varia in Rotterdam NL, and is currently co-curating a pedagogical programme for a.pass, Bruxelles BE.

Find out more about Woman in the Machine and the artists involved at www.womaninthemachine.com

Woman in the Machine is part of Carlow Arts Festival 2021, VISUAL’s Summer Programme and presented as part of Brightening Air | Coiscéim Coiligh, a nationwide, ten day season of arts experiences brought to you by the Arts Council. To see the full Brightening Air | Coiscéim Coiligh programme, visit www.brighteningair.com