ANU, Landmark Productions & Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLi)
Ulysses 2.2: 1 Book. 1 Year. 18 Artistic Experiments
Curated by Anne Enright
What would a brain scan of a Joyce reader look like? What happens between mind and page?
the wandering i is an interactive audio-visual experience which uses eye-tracking software and responsive soundscape to show your unique reading of Ulysses.
We take our reading skills for granted, but it is not actually a plodding business of looking at one word and then the next - reading is a dance of difficulty, interest and delight. Our eyes skip and pirouette across the sentences, while our brains fill in the blanks.
And Ulysses is full of blanks: it is full of things we don’t entirely understand. Joyce demands that we figure things out for ourselves so, more than any other book, Ulysses happens in the reader’s head. This makes it a profoundly democratic work. Each unique reading makes Ulysses bigger, by the choices we make and the meanings we take, as our eyes move across the page.
Read Anne Enright’s Irish Times article here.
First presented at the Museum of Literature Ireland in 2022 to celebrate the centenary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Voices: Anne Enright, Colm Lennon, Doireann Ní Bhriain & Anthony Nolan
Digital Producer: Hugh Farrell
Eye-Tracking Technician: Seán Higgins (for Future Proof Insights)
Videography & Visuals: Ben O’Neill & Christos Celniku (for Future Proof Insights)
Software Developer: Dakota Stipp
Sound Designer: Tyler Kieffer
Sound Engineering & Recording: Ian Dunphy
Producers: Lynnette Moran & Matthew Smyth | ANU; Anne Clarke | Landmark Productions; Simon O’Connor | MoLI
Artistic Directors: Louise Lowe & Owen Boss | ANU
Curatorial Assistant: Katie Mishler
Head of Operations: Mark O’Neill
Marketing Officer: Laura Harvey-Graham
Digital Curator: Benedict Schlepper-Connolly
Production Manager: Ste Bourke
Project Manager: Gráinne Pollak
PR: Sinéad O’Doherty
Design: CI Studio
Supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle
Ealaíon's Open Call Award
“I left under a spell of catharsis and hugged a stranger”
—Peter Crawley, The Sunday Times
You enter a private booth, alone. Someone else enters next door.
Guided by light, sound, and a shared hymn sheet, you tell a story together about change, loss, and redemption.
A contemporary confessional for the modern sinner, this interactive one-to-one experience cultivates space for intimate conversations among friends and strangers, rethreading the seams of our social fabric one good yarn at a time.
Presented at Another Love Story and Dublin Fringe Festival 2022.
Nominated for the First Fortnight Award at the Dublin Fringe Festival which celebrates work that challenges stigma and prejudice about mental health through art.
Funded by the Arts Council/An Chomhaírle Ealaíon, Dublin City Council, Dublin Fringe Festival's Make Space for Art Fund, the Office of Public Works (OPW) and Dublin Castle.
Lead Artist: Shane Sugrue
Dramaturg, Producer and Voiceover: Hugh Farrell
Industrial & Furniture Designer: Barry Todd (Studio Kinnard)
Sound and Interaction Designer: Josh Wilkinson
Graphic Designer: Bláthnaid Conroy
Design Manager: Amy Learmonth
Images by Ste Murray
“An unlikely fusion of low-key urban adventure, mindfulness exercises and immersive storytelling... A fulfilling, singular and even sometimes profound experience”
— The Oklahoman on OF A MIND: OKLAHOMA CITY
Part flash mob, part silent disco, part Mass—OF A MIND is a guided walking tour set in your community.
Guided by a narrator and set to a score of local voices, stories, sounds, and music, audiences of up to 50 at a time are brought on a journey through often-missed parts of their environment in an exploration of mindfulness, urban ecology and social interactions.
Audiences are kept in sync with each other through their own smartphone and headphones.
Meditative, immersive, and informed by the latest in mind-body research, audiences dive deeply into the mystery of our minds as we step into rhythm with our breath and take a trip through the collective consciousness.
Created by Listen and Breathe in collaboration with Hui Cha Poos, Kelly Kerwin, Kevin McNamara, Emily Reilly, and Emily Zemba.
Original Music: Kevin McNamara
Videos by Alan Fisher, Dan Fowler, and Caleb Germany
Photos: Rosie Barrett, Brid O’Donovan
Production history:
Originally commissioned by Mermaid Arts Centre in 2020 and supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, Creative Ireland, and Wicklow County Council.
Subsequently commissioned in 2022 by Oklahoma City Repertory Theatre for their ReBoot season, and again to celebrate Pavilion Theatre’s 21st Season.
Each new commission is an original experience which draws on in-depth interviews with locals in the community, field recordings and and an album of songs about the place in which it is set.
ANU, Landmark Productions & Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLi)
Ulysses 2.2: 1 Book. 1 Year. 18 Artistic Experiments
Curated by Fintan O’Toole
‘When Joyce was writing, and when I was a kid, the only place you could really see the whole of Dublin from was the top of Nelson’s Pillar. Joyce imagined it as being like the mountaintop in the Bible from which Moses can see the promised land. I had never before seen the city from a vantage point so high. It was like you owned the place, like, at that moment, the city really belonged to you and you to it.’ — Fintan O’Toole
Promised Land is a VR experience, exploring themes of memory, commemoration and the abandoned promises of a brighter future.
Hosted in the public office of the GPO, once the heart of Dublin city, Promised Land gives members of the Dublin public the rare opportunity to travel back in time and above the rooftops, to witness Joyce’s Dublin of 1904 from atop the long-since destroyed Nelson’s Pillar.
Launched on Culture Night at the GPO in September 2022
https://ulysses22.ie/episodes/aeolus
Creative Team
Curated by Fintan O'Toole
VR Creation by Viko Nikci, Sean Burns and Jonny Garvey
Sound design: Josh Wilkinson
Digital Producer: Hugh Farrell
Supported by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle
Ealaíon's Open Call Award
Every Year I Grow Again
Twelve audience members, seated around a dinner table, eat their way through a seasonally-harvested, locally-sourced meal.
Cooked by chefs Kevin Thornton (Ireland), Jake Reynolds (Ireland), and Greg Markolis (USA) and guided by the voices of the famers, fishers, brewers and bees who grow our food, audiences eat their way through the story of how we grow from what grows.
To create the experience Listen and Breathe, who make interactive stories about our relationship to nature, travelled to oyster farms, chicken farms, organic farms and wind farms, talked the ears off hunters, fishers, foragers and fermenters, and got their hands dirty with bakers, butchers, brewers and bees to revel in the mystery of our favourite ritual.
Eating together.
Created by:
Hugh Farrell
Nicholas Hussong
Tyler Kieffer
Jake Reynolds
Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland and originally produced by New Neighborhood in 2018.
Photos: Nick Hussong
Composer Matthew Suttor, and an international team of theatre designers and computer programmers, are creating an opera about Artificial Intelligence.
I AM ALAN TURING draws on cryptography, mathematics, AI, and Turing’s fascination with natural patterns in the universe, to present a new model for creating opera in the age of information.
The team have trained an instance of Open AI’s GPT2 natural language model on everything Turing wrote and read in his life and collaborate with this Turing-esque model to generate the libretto.
Music is created by analog synthesisers sequenced to reproduce mathematical series like the Prime and Fibonacci numbers, while visual design is drawn from Turing's later discoveries of the chemical basis for life - morphogenesis.
I AM ALAN TURING leverages artificial intelligence to understand what it means to be human.
Are you ready to take the test?
Created by Listen&Breathe
Presented at Live Collision Festival, Dublin, 2018.
Which eye are you reading with? Is anyone around you? Let your shoulders go.
Stand in your self as immersive theatre makers Listen&Breathe lead you on a journey to your soul with their latest audio headphone experience at Live Collision Festival 2018.
One at a time every 10 minutes starting from Project Arts Centre box office.
by Listen&Breathe
A hero’s journey into mindfulness.
Ever wake and wonder what it’s all about? Let Listen&Breathe guide you and a friend on a journey to now. Two at a time and first come first served.
Presented at Body&Soul, Another Love Story and Clonmel Junction festivals.
Produced by Listen&Breathe
Video by Rosie Barrett Design
You follow a woman walking through town at 7am. You follow her through the quiet streets of Dublin City as you listen to her thoughts in your headphones. It's early and she is going somewhere. She has something she needs to do.
A portrait of a woman on edge, the national mood is her mood. She's alone and she's always watching where she's going.
This guided audio performance premiered at Dublin Fringe Festival in 2022.
Funded by the Arts Council/ An Chomhairle Ealaíon. Supported by the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sports and Media and Dublin City Council. Development supported by the Abbey Theatre Engine Room initiative, Centre Culturel Irlandais Residency Programme. Development at FRINGE LAB.
Woman voiced by Ingrid Craigie
Songs sung by Stella McCusker
Live performance by Aoife McAtamney
Text, music & songs by Zoe Ní Riordáin
Directed by Blaise Quinn
Produced by Hugh Farrell
Poster Image by Tony Murray
Photos by Ros Kavanagh
