An invitation to an exchange between Francis Halsall writer and educator and MFA graduate, artist Melissa O’Donnell supported by co Arthology Collective artists Eileen O’Sullivan and Monika Crowley, with audience participation encouraged.
Building on Francis Halsall’s earlier experiments in dialogue with Basic Space: Dirty Solutions and his performative conversation with Mark O’Gorman at the Hugh Lane, Decoder Loop continues to explore conversation as a site of communication and control. For this event the staging of conditions and assignment of roles serve as both structure and provocation. Vocal projection techniques, syncopated rhythms, and metronomic tempos form a musical underpinning, which is intentionally disrupted—inviting glitches, interruptions, and moments of failure as integral to the process. Structured around the themes of works and overlapping shared interests of Francis & Melissa, this performance of conversation around the installed works in the exhibition space offers a fluid platform for exchange. Adopting the roles of ‘System, Mind, Canvas & Witness’ loosely based on written script as point of departure but open to improvisation and unknown outcomes.
Audience participation is not only welcomed but instrumental: questions are used to draw viewers into the frame, transforming them into active respondents and instigators of a dynamic chain reaction.
Francis Halsall is a lecturer in Visual Culture at National College of Art and Design, Dublin where he is co-director of the Master Program: Art in the Contemporary World. He works on ideas of systems and their cultural and philosophical significance. His book Contemporary Art, Systems and the Aesthetics of Dispersion (Routledge, 2024) recently came out in paperback. Melissa O’Donnell is an interdisciplinary artist whose MFA work examines the societal impact of powerful systems and institutional marginalisation through painting and her self-devised De:Coding Framework. By combining cognitive strategies with experimental processes, she explores how we perceive and respond to systemic issues. Using repurposed materials, coded visuals, and moving images, her practice invites reflection, resistance, and re-engagement with dominant narratives—often through a lens informed by neurodiverse cognitive approaches
**Please be aware that this event is being recorded.
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