Rachel O'Dwyer

National College of Art and Design, Visual Culture, Faculty Member

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Rachel is a lecturer in the School of Visual Culture in the National College of Art & Design where she primarily teaches digital culture.

She is the founding editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal Interference www.interferencejournal.com and leader of the Dublin Art and Technology Association www.data.ie. She is curator of the Openhere conference and festival.

rachel[dot]odwyer[at]gmail[dot]com

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More-than-Human Hotspots

No Matter Here, 2021

On Instagram, an old friend from art college has borrowed her son&#39;s guitar and is singing... more On Instagram, an old friend from art college has borrowed her son&#39;s guitar and is singing about the evils of 5G in a ballad that rhymes &#39;electromagnetic radiation&#39; with &#39;cancer and sterilisation&#39;. &#39;Where are you? The world is turning into a dictatorship. A. Technocratic. Dictatorship. where are you?&#39; The vision of 5G emphasizes speed and capacity. It promises speeds 100 times faster than those of 4G. And partly because of these speeds, it also promises to connect everything, from trees and cows to human bodies, cars, lampposts, and pigeons. Stock images tend to show a global meshwork of point-to-point signals doming a night sky. For the most part, 5G uses what are known as &#39;millimetre waves&#39; to carry signals between things and other things and between things and the cloud. These waves have the same properties as light waves, but they are invisible. They are smaller than a centimetre in length. They intermingle with and are shaped by the surrounding environment. While some radio waves are many kilometres in length, bending around objects and following the contours of the earth, these millimetre waves are so small that they are easily absorbed into buildings, bodies, plants and even raindrops in the atmosphere. Due to their size, they are also unable to travel long distances. The result is that 5G requires new kinds of physical infrastructures to move signals from place to place-smaller base stations every hundred metres or so, blended into street furniture, traffic lights, road signs, and brickwork, sometimes disguised as fake plastic trees dotting the landscape.

Just say no

Neural, 2021

My father dressed me as the Berlin Wall for a party the year I turned five. It was December 1989.... more My father dressed me as the Berlin Wall for a party the year I turned five. It was December 1989. I couldn't understand why all the adults thought my cardboard box covered in green bar computer paper was so hilarious. "The problem with your generation is that you have no sense that the future could be otherwise," my boyfriend told me. It was Spring 2007. I was twenty-two. He was thirty-three, from Northern England. He'd dropped out of school and spent his late teens and early twenties working in a tea factory in Harrogate, and then gave it all up to go to university and study critical theory, first for a BA and then an MPhil and finally a PhD. Now he was a university adjunct. "You-all my students… you have no sense that things have ever been any other way, that there is any other system besides capitalism". We could probably say the same for everyone who was born after the fall of the Berlin Wall or was too young to get my Dad's joke. Mark Fisher called this 'capitalist realism', a sense of the ever-diminishing possibilities in the present to think or be otherwise, 'the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now even impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it.' [1] How to Do Nothing It's hard to refuse. To resist the home appliances demanding we act, the group messages (every few days my husband asks me, a little passive aggressively, if I wouldn't mind wishing his great aunt a happy anniversary on the family WhatsApp), the work emails and push notifications demanding and monetising our attention. It's hard to resist the big and mundane calls to act, and in resisting, it's hard to imagine an alternative. Simply opting out is no longer an option. And, as Jenny Odell argues, It's also almost impossible to imagine how to resist at a moment when everyone, from Deliveroo drivers to university students, sees their margin for refusal shrinking. [2]

Rachel O'Dwyer

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