Manned-Unmanned was filmed on Inis Oírr, the Aran Islands, in July 2020. The work stages an encounter between a destroyed, automated US military vessel and Sean-nós improvisation in music and dance, performed by brothers Colm and Gearóid Devane. The boat is a model used for target practice which was destroyed in the Atlantic ocean before eventually being washed up on the island.
Dancer: Gearóid Devane
Accordion player: Colm Devane
Cinematographer: Tom Flanagan
Sound recordist: Bob Brennan
Editors: Kennedy Browne
Colourist: Michael Higgins
Sound mix: Seán MacErlaine
Commissioned for AERIAL/SPARKS by Louise Manifold, presented by Galway 2020 European Capital of Culture in partnership with the Marine Institute Ireland; Commissioners of Irish Lights; Áras Éanna, Inis Oírr; Comhar Caomhán Teo, Inis Oírr; and Ars Electronica 2020. Supported through Arts Council of Ireland Project Awards 2017 and 2019.
Amhrán a Gligín is a song and sculptural artefact that accompanies Manned-Unmanned, produced for AERIAL / SPARKS by Louise Manifold in 2020
Kennedy Browne’s project stages encounters with real and speculative artefacts washed up on the island. An automated US military vessel used for target practice, destroyed by gunfire and beached on the island in 2019, becomes an instrument for Connemara Sean-nós improvisation in music and dance. An ornate silver coral rattle (gligín) becomes the subject of a Irish-language ballad of a libertarian space or sea colony gone wrong.
Amhrán a Gligín
4:07 minutes
Written and performed by Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin
Imperial probe droid rattle (made from silver, coral, acrylic and corian). Photo: Kennedy Browne. Supported by a Project Award from the Arts Council / An Comhairle Ealaíon
Real World Harm, 2018
360-degree HD video for Oculus, 5.1 sound, installation environment
Video: 5’47”
Sound: 18’30”
‘This work stages an encounter between two types of environments and their actors who have appeared with the rise of social media corporations. On Oculus Go, a virtual reality platform now owned by Facebook, a white male figure called Glaucon asks whether our actions would be moral if we were invisible as either an individual or a corporation. With Glaucon, Kennedy Browne brings a thought experiment from Plato’s Republic to the small town of Portarlington, Ireland, home to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner’s office. This office is responsible for upholding individuals’ rights to data privacy and control over how their data is collected and used under EU law. The video is fully immersive while we take a walk in Portarlington and share Glaucon’s privilege of invisibility. He asks, “Can there be such a thing as a harmless pleasure?”
Across the black vinyl mat, a sound installation consists of interviews with former content moderators at social network corporations. These low-wage and often multilingual contract employees are vocal about their traumatic experiences on the front lines of Internet content moderation. In this complex staging, Kennedy Browne interrogates the parameters for all Internet users in view of the consequences for such figures charged with mediating “real world harm” between virtual and actual realms.’
– Amy Powell, Curator, Krannert Art Museum
Real World Harm is the third work in The Redaction Trilogy, a series of artworks about early twenty-first century capitalism. Each work in the trilogy is accompanied by a disclaimer in some form, suggesting a truthful relation between Kennedy Browne’s factual source materials and the artwork.
Disclaimer, 2018
Vinyl letters on headset
Adapted from Oculus Go Terms of Service & Privacy Policy
Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland / An Comhairle Ealaíon and supported by Fire Station Artist Studios, Dublin
Exhibited at:
The Special Relationship, Kennedy Browne at Krannert Art Museum, Illinois, U.S.A., 2018
2012
HD video with sound, 19 minutes
This scripted work is the second part of Kennedy Browne’s Redaction Trilogy and draws on the genre of the business biography. Identifying a selection of these texts, this work attempts to decode the myths surrounding visionary, entrepreneurial leaders of the tech industry – Bob Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and others – and does so through returning to stories told of their formative boyhood years. The disclaimer that introduces the work reads as follows:
This work is a redaction of selected biographical works.
The actor in this work does not portray any one character
2013
Series of eight re-constructed artefacts from the boyhoods of the
entrepreneurial leaders in The Myth of The Many in The One.
See more
2010
2 channel HD video installation, Polish language with English subtitles, 26 minutes
Originally commissioned for the Łódź Biennale, Poland (2010) this project is partly a response to a computer factory relocating to Łódź from Limerick, Ireland. Kennedy Browne has replaced all references to the actual name of this multinational with the pseudonym The Company. As such the narratives, places and characters evoked in the work are both general and particular. How Capital Moves is the first part of Kennedy Browne’s Redaction Trilogy (followed by The Myth of the Many in the One and Real World Harm).
2011
2 boarding passes and 2 digital photographic prints, dimensions variable,
With the closure and relocation of the computer factory referenced in How Capital Moves, the Irish budget airline Ryanair discontinued its service from Shannon, Ireland to Łódź, Poland, where incidentally the factory relocated to. Kennedy Browne were passengers on the last flight from Shannon to Łódź on March 25, 2010.
Exhibited at:
The Special Relationship, Kennedy Browne at Krannert Art Museum, Illinois, U.S.A., 2018
How Capital Moves, solo exhibition, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, Ireland, 2011
2011
2 internet-ordered mugs from an Oregon Newspaper with digitally transferred images of ‘The Company’s’ call centre, and Pajama day redundancy at Roseburg, Oregon, on August 2nd 2007
Exhibited at:
The Special Relationship, Kennedy Browne at Krannert Art Museum, Illinois, U.S.A., 2018
United States of Europe, Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland
How Capital Moves, solo exhibition, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Limerick, Ireland, 2011
2013
HD video, sound, 4:19 minutes
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
Anti-psychotic pharmaceutical pill, manufactured in Ireland
Ireland is Good for You*
Printed poster, dimensions variable
Responding to an unspecified trauma, this body of work investigates the region as a site of Irish / American mobility and investment, exploring the connections between the pharmaceutical industry and Shannon airport as a transatlantic stopover. Ireland is Good for You* presents a map of the Irish landscape in relation to ‘blockbuster drugs’ (patented brand name drugs that have annual sales of over 1 billion Dollars), including their off-label and out of indication uses and myriad side effects.
2011
Poster, dimensions and formats variable
This poster was developed through participation in Think Thank - Troubling Ireland in 2010-11 led by curatorial collective Kuratorisk Aktion and commissioned by the Fire Station Artists’ Studios in Dublin. Further work developed by the artists was presented at Upending, an exhibition in 2013 at Limerick City Gallery of Art: see Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and The Special Relationship.
*In 2010, half of the world’s top ten blockbuster drugs were manufactured in Ireland (rated by global sales revenue figures as published in Pharmaceutical Executive Magazine, New York, May 2010).
Exhibited at:
The Special Relationship, Kennedy Browne at Krannert Art Museum, Illinois, U.S.A., 2018
Radical Actions, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia in the group show, 2016
Upending; Limerick City Gallery, Limerick, Ireland, 2013
Poster Campaign, Dublin city centre, September 2011
2013
Anti-psychotic pharmaceutical pill manufactured in Ireland used in the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Exhibited at:
The Special Relationship, Kennedy Browne at Krannert Art Museum, Illinois, U.S.A., 2018
Radical Actions, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia in the group show, 2016
Upending; Limerick City Gallery, Limerick, Ireland, 2013
2009
2 channel HD video projection, 7.34min
This work is one of a series commissioned for the Irish Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale. It takes as its starting point Dublin as ‘the city Google chose’ for its EMEA* headquarters, and a recent statistic that the city is home to over 167 languages - what the Facebook corporation has described as a ‘multilingual pool’.
2009
Digital video, 38 mins
This work is one of a series commissioned for the Irish Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale. It takes as its starting point Dublin as ‘the city Google chose’ for its EMEA* headquarters, and a recent statistic that the city is home to over 167 languages - what the Facebook corporation has described as a ‘multilingual pool’.
For this work people from across Dublin city who spoke more then one language were invited to Liberty Hall (Dublin’s tallest building and home to the Ireland’s largest trade union) to audition for a film to be made on the roof of the tower. Auditionees were asked to perform the first line of neo-liberal economist Milton Friedman’s text in which he eulogises the pencil as a perfect product of the free market. This was performed in a language the auditionee was fluent in other than English. They were also asked to form an improvised response to Friedman’s ideas and then to pare the pencil for an inordinately long time, thus whittling it away. This was performed against an ‘infinite white’ backdrop mimicking the ‘no where’ utopian space and visual language of Google promotional videos.
Out of those that auditioned, one was selected to perform a gestural response to Friedman's monologue on the roof of Liberty Hall. See here.
*EMEA - Europe, the Middle East and Africa
Exhibited at:
The Special Relationship, Kennedy Browne at Krannert Art Museum, Illinois, U.S.A., 2018
Kennedy Browne at The Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 2010
Kennedy Browne at N.C.A.D. Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, 2010
Blue-Collar Blues, Tallinn Kunstihoone, Estonia, 2009
IrelandVenice at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2010
2009
41 language alphabetical Google translation loop, starting and finishing in English, 42 digital prints on paper, each 21cm x 29.7cm
The artists’ transposed a monologue from the influential 1980 PBS TV serial ‘Free to Choose’, written and presented by the Chicago School economist Milton Friedman.
The transposed text eulogises a humble pencil, describing how it exemplifies the harmonious potential of the free market economy to unite the peoples of the world through its manufacture and the operation of a global ‘impartial’ price system. Kennedy Browne parse issues of globalism, migration and intercultural communication by feeding the text through every language then available on Google’s online translation software – resulting in a poetic, if garbled, final statement.
This work is one of a series commissioned for the Irish Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, taking as its starting point Dublin as ‘the city Google chose’ for its EMEA* headquarters, and a recent statistic that the city is home to over 167 languages - what the Facebook corporation has described as a ‘multilingual pool’.
*EMEA - Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
To see the original Friedman PBS monologue, visit here.
This work is part of the Kadist Foundation’s collection, Paris.
Exhibited at:
The Special Relationship, Kennedy Browne at Krannert Art Museum, Illinois, U.S.A., 2018
General Rehearsal (Moscow), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia, 2018.
And I laid traps for the Troubadors who get killed before they reached Bombay , Clark House Initiative, Bombay, India, 2014
L’Exposition Lunatique, Kadist, Paris, 2010
Kennedy Browne at The Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 2010
Kennedy Browne at N.C.A.D. Gallery, Dublin, Ireland, 2010
Blue-Collar Blues, Tallinn Kunstihoone, Estonia, 2009
IrelandVenice at the Golden Thread Gallery, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 2010
