• The Absolute State Of Us: How Array Collective Works

    January 5, 2024 - By 

    As they head into 2024, Belfast’s Turner-prize winning art group Array Collective throw some light on how collaboration, humility and converging passions work for them How does Array work? Whenever we are asked to talk to students or audiences, the questions we are asked most often are along the lines of, “How do 11 artists make one artwork? What does it mean to be a collective?”. It seems mind-boggling to many people that there is no one in charge (us too sometimes, to be fair). During a press interview not so long ago, a journalist wondered, “How can anyone make…

  • The ddr. Radio Logs – Entry #5: Talking Notes

    August 1, 2023 - By 

    In this month’s edition of the ddr. Radio Logs, Ellen O’Donohue discusses the background of her radio show Talking Notes. In my house growing up, the radio was always something to talk back to. BBC Radio 4’s current affairs programme The Today Show was the backing track to mornings before school, and alongside the smells of ground coffee and charred toast, my mum’s loud retorts to whoever was speaking carried throughout the house. On mornings with a particularly bad schedule, full-blown arguments back and forth would occur. At the weekend, the station’s afternoon comedy programmes brought a cackle so gleeful…

  • The ddr. Radio Logs – Entry #4: Cosmetic Plague x Sources of Uncertainty

    May 10, 2023 - By 

    In the fourth installment of the ddr. Radio Logs – a monthly series by Dublin Digital Radio residents, exploring their practice and the craft of radio-making – Decy Synnott of Sources of Uncertainty and Karen Browett of Cosmetic Plague delve into everything from multimedia practice + participatory engagement to Ireland’s frankly punk af DIY community Decy: Hey Karen! Thanks for agreeing to do this. I figured we’ve had versions of this conversation in person multiple times over the years. You chat to a friend about what they’re up to, accidentally go off on an existential tangent for an hour, and…

  • The ddr. Radio Logs – Entry #3: No Place Like Drone

    April 19, 2023 - By 

    In the third installment of the ddr. Radio Logs – a monthly series by residents of Dublin Digital Radio, exploring their practice and the craft of radio-making – Droid & Neil Dronovan, hosts of No Place Like Drone, give us the lowdown on their monthly show. Like many a wretched thing, it emerged from the muck of Laois, specifically, from a temporary car park in a field in Stradbally and an impromptu contest to find the best drone-related pun. Or we might rewind ten hours back through time, to the sight of dozens of spangled revellers laid out like wartime…

  • The ddr. Radio Logs. Entry #2: No Tourists

    March 2, 2023 - By 

    In the second installment of the ddr. radio logs,  a new monthly series by residents of Dublin Digital Radio, exploring their practice and the craft of radio-making, Gary Farrelly, one half of The Office of Joint Administrative Intelligence along with Chris Dreier give us an insight into their ever-innovative No Tourist show on ddr The Office of Joint Administrative Intelligence is organised as a para-intelligence agency operating between Brussels and Berlin and next broadcasts on Dublin Digital Radio on Monday 13 March at 6pm Myself and Chris first met at a dinner party in Wuppertal in early 2015. I remember…

  • Gibraltar: The Gates of Hell. Twinned with Ballymena

    February 8, 2023 - By 

    Like every fervently masturbating gamer with a penchant for online poker, a nappy and a shut-in level of social ineptitude – I’ve become a retail trader of stocks. The gamification of finance on apps like eToro has made it such that you can easily understand the white sheets (if you can be bothered to read them) and you can doomscroll the comments for ‘picks’ and to remind yourself that men are the literal worst. ‘Bears’ or ‘Bulls’ adds a beautiful homoerotic wink to the pink-sword measuring duel that is the world of online traders. There’s a cosmic explosion anytime a…

  • The Mandlebrot Set

    November 29, 2022 - By 

    You know that equation in Fractal Mathematics, The Mandlebrot Set? When a formula is applied, an organic form that looks a bit like a cockroach repeats itself into infinity? Male comics in Ireland today. How these sentient Reddit threads stop masturbating over Meme Stocks long enough to sell out shows at the SSE Arena, is beyond me. The Positive Spide was probably my favourite male comic from Belfast. He would get in his car and shout out the window to people in a working-class, aggressive Belfast accent things like – “What’s for ye won’t go by ye!!” “If you’re feeling…

  • Tour Diary: Leigh Arthur on Spilt Milk Festival 2022

    November 25, 2022 - By 

    Extravision member, photographer and ddr. resident Leigh Arthur reports back from Day One of this year’s Spilt Milk festival in Sligo I stood a Johnny Ramone stance around a pile of drum breakables, guitar cases and overnight bags, as Seán Goucher of the Number Ones pointed over to a shelf in the newsagents of Connolly Station. “There’s Jen Connell”. The former Cave Ghosts singer was not stocking up on train snacks to come with us, but instead was being celebrated on the cover of House and Home magazine. I remember seeing Cave Ghosts in The Stag’s Head years ago with…

  • Infinitesimal Hinge: Tender With Malcontent

    June 8, 2020 - By 

    In the latest installment of his column, Infinitesimal Hinge, Belfast musician, producer and writer Jamie Thompson aka James Joys reflects on the political and economic realities underlying the momentous times we find ourselves in. Perhaps the salient characteristic of our neoliberal capitalist moment is that the people who benefit most from the orthodoxy of centuries of structurally reproduced inequalities are the ones who present themselves as the only pragmatic, electable solutions to the eruptions of discontent these inequalities spur. That our system – a festering seam of collaborators – of the expensively schooled, of finance lads, of property developers, landlords,…

  • Lists For Life (Not Just For Christmas)

    December 8, 2017 - By 

    Christmas has finally come! Streaming sites are starting to publish playlists showing which songs we’ve all listened to this year, and while I, like many of you, have enjoyed seeing how that particular contest panned out for me (Not at all what I expected, but the order is entirely believable) it also indicates the beginning of another and much more important recent yearly tradition, saving/stealing all my friends procedurally generated top songs of the year playlists. After last year’s surprising elections and much talk of how we all live in news bubbles it stirred the idea that a similar bias…