Conor McGarrigle's Screenwalk looked at the relationships between algorithms, data and images through the lens of two of his internet projects separated by a decade, the BitTorrent Trilogy and 24hour Social. BitTorrent at its peak around 2009 consumed 60-80% of the bandwidth of the internet globally. It was the largest decentralised network of image circulation the world has ever seen dwarfing even Netflix, and most of it was illegal. In the Screen Walk McGarrigle exposed how internet protocols and video codecs came together in the BitTorrent Trilogy to visualise the hidden sociality of file sharing swarms with aleatory images of often striking beauty. Ten years later, for 24hour Social, the artist downloaded a full day of videos, with one video for every second, from the now defunct Vine video sharing social platform. At one level a celebration of individual creativity, shared memes and the weird internet, the project shows how data underpins everything, as social media platforms use the generation and circulation of images to surveil and track their users.

This Screen Walk was a collaboration with PhotoIreland 2020. The 11th edition of PhotoIreland Festival – Ireland’s international festival of photography and image culture –, entitled ON/OFF, combined a programme of online and offline activities and exhibitions. 

Screen Walks is a new series of live-streamed artist/researcher-led explorations of online spaces and artistic strategies designed to illuminate a thriving – often overlooked – digital cultural scene. A new online collaboration between The Photographers’ Gallery, UK and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.

Biography

Conor McGarrigle is an artist and researcher working primarily with digital media. His practice is characterised by urban interventions mediated through digital technologies and data-driven explorations of networked social practices. He is a lecturer in Fine Art New Media at the TU Dublin School of Creative Arts. He has exhibited extensively internationally including the Venice Biennale, Fundació Miro Mallorca, the Saint-Étienne Biennale, Redline Gallery Denver, SIGGRAPH, FILE São Paulo, Art on the Net Tokyo, Seoul New Media, SITE Santa Fe as well as EVA International, Tulca, Green on Red, and the Science Gallery.