Hold: Wiggles series
Mild steel and rubber, Dimensions: variable, 2021
Rhona Byrne
Artist In Residence at UCD Parity Studios 2020 -2021
Supported by UCD College of Science
Wiggle series Rhona Byrne 2023
BEYOND SINGLE MINDEDNESS: A Response
Prof Fred Cummins, UCD School of Computer Science
The wiggle,
in all its unruliness, will have a say in things. The wiggle is made of steel, heavy, bendy, wobbly and off-center. It can be wiggled, and it wiggles you back. No private plan, representation, or schema will be
of use.
This is a wiggle. What would you do with it?
The resistance is growing. In a letter to the editor of the journal Cognitive Science, 28 prominent cognitive scientists produce a manifesto, a minimal joint appeal to resist a spectre that haunts the established order. “Move beyond single-mindedness!” is the rallying cry. Why this? Why now?
A brain meets two wiggles. What will it do?
A brain meets two wiggles. It does nothing. It secretes, bubbles, pulses, perhaps, but no more. The brain is a mythical being, to whom we ascribe magical powers in order to shore up an ideological remnant of Protestantism: the fiction that there is a thing called the mind, and that that thing, the mind, is private, singular, enclosed, cut off from things. This is the fiction that we are determinate beings who bear full responsibility for every action. This fiction is needed by a fixed social order, but we do not have that luxury, as a fixed social order is a dead social order. There is no “The Mind”. Mind-talk is talk about us, our doings, and our living. It is not the discovery of a ghostly hidden system.
Scientific psychologists against whom this manifesto is directed engage creatively in a work of misdirection through method, generating a smokescreen of “objectivity,” of equal use to naive educators, rapacious factory bosses, and Machiavellian political theorists. Resistance is growing.
Two people meet a wiggle. What will they do?
Two people meet a wiggle. There is no instruction book. What will they do? We will have to wait and find out. The wiggle, in all its unruliness, will have a say in things. The wiggle is made of steel, heavy, bendy, wobbly and off-center. It can be wiggled, and it wiggles you back. No private plan, representation, or schema will be of use.
A wiggle, when introduced between two people, allows play, but the wiggle is a full partner in the play. The wiggle resonates and you resonate too. A wiggle makes the intrinsic liveliness of the “world” immanent and obvious.
Why 28 prominent scientists, from diverse backgrounds, with diverse interests? These are not ideologues. They are protesting about the hegemony of the Cult of the Individual. Metaphysics alert: Every real event is interactive. Everything Johnny does he does not do alone. We are not in full control. We work with the world, including other people, things, and including wiggles.
For everything that mediates is a wiggle. Every shoelace, text, motorway, junkie’s needle, legal contract, even the humble teapots and tables of the philosophers, these are wiggles. A person encounters them, they wiggle and they make us wiggle.
Wiggles created by Rhona Byrne. Text by Prof Fred Cummins.
Rhona Byrne is an Irish Dublin based artist who works across performative and social sculpture, making sculptural spaces, installations, relational objects, drawing, video and photography.
Often responding to a site or context, her practise is connective, with a collaborative and cross - disciplinary approach. Her projects are an enquiry into the complex multi-dimensionality of physical and social space, embodiment and interaction, place and affect.
She graduated with a BFA Sculpture NCAD in 1994. Rhona has exhibited and has been commissioned extensively in Ireland and internationally most recently Social Fabric IMMA; The Scribble Maynooth University Dept of Education and Downside Up The National Children’s Hospital and Liffey Love Dublin City Public Art Program, Dublin City Council. Rhona’s work is in several collections including The Arts Council of Ireland, IMMA. Rhona has been supported with numerous awards from the Arts Council of Ireland most recently the Visual Artists Bursary Award and Project award Strand 1 2022. Rhona has undertaken several artist residencies internationally and in Ireland including IMMA; The Firestation Artists Studios; Temple Bar Gallery and Studios; FAAP Sao Paulo; Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; Mattress Factory Pittsburgh and in 2020-21 in UCD Parity Studios.
Rhona Byrne's residency at UCD Parity Studio coincided with lockdown. Hold: Wiggle series were used, played with on loan and considered by students and lecturers from the School of Philosophy and School of Cognitive Science.
Her collaboration with UCD cognitive scientist Fred Cummins continues to explore the theme of embodied interaction through art and theory.
The works In Beyond the Studio were held by invited participants on campus in UCD in Jan 2023 and photographed by Malcolm Mc Gettigan creating a series of photographic prints.
Rhona started this series in Gowanus projects residency program in
Workspace 11 NYC in 2019. She continuously and obsessively made the sculptures over a number of years in Ireland supported by Hedderman Engineering Ltd.
This work is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland Visual Art Project Award strand 1 2022.
