Sandra and Gaspard Bébié-Valérian will be on residency at Rua Red during Glitch 2018.
They are artists and curators that have worked together since 2004 and have participated in numerous exhibitions, editions and residencies. Their projects cross the question of living and interdependences between technologies, humans/animals/plants/microbes. In general, they address environmental issues including energy, food, natural and industrial resources.
On Wednesday 19 September, Sandra and Gaspard Bébié-Valérian will host Photophone or the Modulated Light Workshop as part of Glitch Festival 2018.
The photophone is a telecommunications device that allows the transmission of speech on a beam of light. It was invented jointly by Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Charles Sumner Tainter in 1880. Similar to a contemporary stationary telephone, except that it uses controlled light as a means of wireless transmission while the telephone relies on electricity carried over a conductive wire circuit.
In contemporary times the photophone has been outlived by the smartphone, a mobile telephone that behaves like a portable handheld computer allowing emails to be sent, video conferencing to take place and GPS locations to be found. We can check into flights using our phones, buy shopping and even take and track our vital health statistics.
In this workshop participants will deconstruct how we communicate by stripping communication methods back to those used by Alexander Bell. As light is not conducted through any digital or computerised networks communication it can operate outside the protocols and algorithms of technology. Thus, the workshop can offer an alternative dynamic to rethink the politics of data and how to reappropriate it.
The workshop takes places between 1am - 4pm. More info here.
Presented in association with the French Embassy in Ireland. www.ambafrance-ie.org
Image: Sandra et Gaspard Bébié-Valérian © Mylène Blanc
