Gerard Byrne - Sven Anderson

Long-time artists and partners Sven Anderson and Gerard Byrne create an ambitious multi-screen project that tries to construct a “visibility matrix” in a digital era in which images are connected, and everywhere.

A Visibility Matrix is a new artwork by Sven Anderson and Gerard Byrne that probes the politics and conditions of visibility. Exploring the paradigms of what we see and how we construct visual knowledge, A Visibility Matrix proposes a counterpoint to the migratory, hyper-networked nature of visibility in contemporary culture by conjuring an offline matrix of video material presented in the gallery space for communal observation. The artwork speculates on an alternative to the composite formed by subject + smartphone + online-video-sharing-platform that has come to represent the current standard of visibility. It gathers content through an associative network of collaborators including visual anthropologists, cinematographers, documentary-filmmakers and others from across the globe. By shifting focus from the production of images for sharing online to their reception in a shared, fixed-time spatial context, A Visibility Matrix offers another window on visual excess, confronting its own situated spatiality to reflect the more universal conditions that it addresses. This sys-

tem speculates on the possibilities of video not as passive image but as an active signal, and the gallery as a site of condensation; a shared space and a space of reflection.
 

Sven Anderson

Born in 1977 in Boston, he lives and works in Dublin.

Sven Anderson’s sound and video installations, systems and performances feed off of details of the immediate built environment and fragments of local history and ecology to suggest emergent, site-specific forms. Often working through sustained collaborations with architects and urban planners, his permanent public artwork Continuous Drift blurs the borders between public sound installation, architectural intervention, and curatorial framework.
 

Gerard Byrne

Born in 1969 in Dublin, he lives and works there.

Between photography, cinema, theatre and installation, Gerard Byrne reconstructs conversations, interviews and performances perfused with history using sources as diverse as The Surrealist Revolution, Playboy or National Geographic. With terse humour he tests our perception of past and present as well as the chal- lenges associated with recorded image, documenta- tion and language with terse humour. Gerard Byrne completed a degree at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin. His work has been shown in many solo exhibitions across Europe and the USA. He represented Ireland at the 2007 Venice Biennale.