NADIA J. ARMSTRONG is a visual artist working with digital mediums, film and performance. Her expanded video experiences seek to provide insight into how humans might better understand our relationship to the machines we create. Her videos pursue the subterranean currents of technological ubiquity, bringing them to the fore through the use of spectacle, experimental metaphor and both physical and virtual performance approaches.
Armstrong is in the first year of her fully funded interdisciplinary practice-Based PhD scholarship at NCAD & the Science Foundation Ireland’s Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications, CONNECT. Her research project is taking shape as an artist-ethnographic, ecosocial, cyborg feminist examination of the varying forms and systems of knowledge that underpin technology research, development and application.
Her most recent artwork, RENDER ME TENDER (2023), will be exhibited at upcoming RENDR festival in Belfast from the 29th of February till the 1st of March.
EDIFICE UNBOUND (2022)
Above is a still depicting an imagined Facebook Data Centre on Mars, taken from EDIFICE UNBOUND, a recent video piece by Nadia J. Armstrong, that incorporates observational documentary footage with AI-generated footage, depicting speculative landscapes of the future. Through this process the work seeks to highlight the hidden networks that observe, survey, influence and regulate us through their presence within the technological, social and political infrastructures that have been established through late capitalism.
Current/Recent/Upcoming Exhibitions & Projects:
RENDER ME TENDER (2023) was part of the 2024 edition of RENDR Festival in Belfast, NI, February 29th - March 1st.
Beta x transmediale
Nadia J. Armstrong recently completed the Beta x transmediale 2023/24 Residency Programme. The residents were selected by Aisling Murray, Sheena Barrett, Tomke Braun, and Nóra Ó Murchú. The Beta x transmediale residency is a cooperation between transmediale, Berlin, and Beta festival, Dublin, and is funded by the Arts Council of Ireland International Residency Initiatives Scheme.
During her residency Armstrong will be continuing her project RENDER ME TENDER, an audiovisual experience that invites the public to consider the neo-primacy of the chat forum in our present understanding of communication. Rooted in cyborg feminist practices and eco-social concerns the project attempts to unbury the liveness and physical immediacy of the socio-political, and the oratory origins of the word “forum.” Through aesthetic signifiers, scripted conversations, and public interaction, automated AI characters will emerge on screens to engage spectators in rhetoric around the mutations of social interaction that the socio-technical history of the forum presents to us.
ALTERED TERRAIN
In August 2023, Armstrong exhibited with screen service for their AR exhibition, Altered Terrain. The exhibition took place in Augmented Reality and at 8 locations across Ireland. The virtual QR code map is still available to view online.
For this project, Armstrong looked to the digital beings that inhabit her work. Through the three exhibited AR video works, she traces the emotional resonances and interpersonal signifiers they produce back to the ancient origins of communication. This three part experience seeks to bring the origins of public voice into the virtual social sphere - through means of 3D composition and augmented reality technology. Placing the QR code within a physical social space, that holds the histories of human communication within its infrastructural fibres, activates the network of actors Armstrong harnesses to speak out to a public, anonymous audience.
These digital interventions into physical space explore how landscapes of social exchange have found new forums that do not rely on the planes of reality, highlighting how the dynamic reformation of these spaces remains ever-constant. The shifting public and private natures of the forum define the parameters of human exchange and influence social values accordingly - Armstrong asks, how can we regain agency as we navigate these spaces, how can we harness the physical liveness of communication within these now predominantly virtually-driven environments?
The exhibition, Altered Terrain, ran from August 1 - 23, 2023. Curated by Bronagh Gallagher with production assistance from Ellen O’Connor.
Armstrong’s piece was located at Dun Laoighaire East Pier Bandstand. Three QR codes were installed in the space, each activating a particular AR experience - accessed via the audience’s mobile phones - that challenges the contemporary transition to predominantly digital communication spaces.
DIGITAL NATIVE (2020) was on show at the 2023 Mart Studios Members Exhibition at the Mart Gallery, Rathmines, Dublin. 7th - 20th January.
Nadia was based at the MART Studios in Harold’s Cross during 2023.
CYBERNATE
RESIDENCY PROGRAMME
Nadia J. Armstrong was one of six artists selected for the 2022/23 CYBERNATE Residency Programme, a digital arts in public space research residency, created by Galway Culture Company in partnership with Pôle PIXEL, HACNUM Network, CREW, the French Embassy in Ireland and ATU and funded by The Arts Council. The residency is produced by Culture Works and three Irish digital artists and three French digital artists were selected for the programme.
