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 second 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 an artist-ethnographic, cyborg feminist examination of the varying forms and systems of knowledge that underpin Quantum communication technology research, development and application.
Her most recent artwork, RENDER ME TENDER (2023), will be exhibited at IMMA outdoors on the RDS Visual Arts Living Canvas next January 2025.
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:
Studio Quantum: Quantum Principles and the Artistic Process
Armstrong participated on the Goethe Institut’s Studio Quantum Panel at Re:publica ‘24. On Tuesday 28th of May 2024, Armstrong sat down with panel host Gesche Joost (Berlin University of the Arts / Goethe-Institut), kennedy + swan (Studio Quantum Artists-in-Residence 2023), and Adrian Schmidt (ITAS, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) to exchange their experiences to date with emerging quantum technologies. The panel explored ethical questions and artistic responses to innovation in quantum technologies.
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.
^ Still from Armstrong’s work for Altered Terrain (2023)
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 Laoghaire 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 in 2023. She is now based in a studio at the NCAD Annexe.
CYBERNATE
RESIDENCY PROGRAMME 2022-23
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.
Photos of the panel at Re:publica ‘24 accompanied by Armstrong’s 3D models
Allegories of the Metropolis was a screen service exhibition at Beta Festival 2024 at the Digital Hub. Armstrong was invited as curator by Screen Service to design a call out and exhibition framework to support the production of two new artworks by selected artists Mel Galley and Aindriú O'Deasún. This project took place over a three month period where the artists engaged with Armstrong via a hybrid residency structure.
The open call invited early career artists to propose projects that consider the process of ruinology as a creative, embodied act with which to explore the heritage and geographical legacies of urban cycles. Media theorist Jason Parry describes ruinology as “the study of the speculative reconstruction of ruins.”
Documentation of the exhibition is available here and on the screen service website.
