Dan Mahony
About
Daniel Mahony is an artist and performer who examines the intersection between mythologies and archives, via machine learning, art making and narrative.
He holds a 1st class degree from Liverpool Hope University and is currently graduating from the Royal College of Art in the Contemporary Art Practice MA with a dissertation that achieved the classification of distinction.
He has explored the forefront of technology and artificial intelligence to platform performance and new writing while seeking to centre underrepresented voices within the arts.
Recent shows include, Tate Lates at Tate Modern, glimpse1 at Staffordshire St Gallery and glimpse2 at the Ivy House.
Statement
Daniel Mahony’s practice incorporates a diverse range of mediums and research to produce an examination of the mythological potential archives. He is informed by his experience of trauma, disability, but expands his work to incorporate geopolitical perspectives and theoretical physics.
The practice is conducted by unearthing buried histories, creating speculative spaces for forgotten things and animating research via performance and machine learning to produce an accessible engagement for complex systems.
The practice takes in de colonial politics, critical theory, and experimental music, it references personal narrative but is not lyrical. It is centred around the speculative liminal space of the wormhole, a term within theoretical physics which describes a portal between two separate points in space and time. This speculative space allows histories of trauma, disability and geopolitical conflict to emerge, it gives a home to things which have been forgotten and do not belong in our current existence.
I'm Not Getting Through To Him (emdr edit)
Medium: Performance
God Appears
God Appears
An ongoing research project into the mythological potential of a.i mythology creation, images cited were generated from open source software run locally on artist's computer. Model was trained on public domain image archives from cultural centres across the world. These images offer new agency to art historical canon, freeing it from a history of exploitation to at risk communities.
Medium: Stable Diffusion
Living In The Einstein - Rosen Bridge
Living In The Einstein - Rosen Bridge
The Einstein-Rosen Bridge is a theoretical phenomenon in the physics of outer space which posits a potential link between two separate points in space and time. It occurs when two blackholes join in a marriage of destruction and creation. When the blackholes are joined they create a traversable connection that joins one point to another, a potential liminal zone and a flattening of the traditional laws of space and time.
In brain scans of people effected by trauma and ptsd, black zones of absence are visible. Deep recesses were activity has been silenced by history, voids of cognition that neuron’s can no longer illuminate. These zones are analogous to black holes, they are potential portals to an unknown universe of possibilities, as a the stars of nebulas are similar to the neutrons of the brain.
This zone has many potentials, it exists as a link between disparate places, it establishes new frontiers in the conventions of natural physics, but most importantly it suggests a new home for things which do not belong in our acceptable universe.
An act of trauma created this bridge, in the slow dying collapse of two stars they joined together to create future for themselves in partnership. A fold in the fabric of space and time that allowed a new domestic space to emerge. As travellers on the bridge, we can hope to reflect some of their unique qualities onto our journey, embody their characteristics in the hope that it might transfer onto us.
Celestial bodies are only visible once the light that illuminates them past to us, in time they are clearer, viewable with the perspective of history. Massive ruptures of stars collapsing, so seismic in their moment are viewable and the impact they have on us is barely possible to comprehend. So too is trauma, it acts on us like an unseen force and defines the solid ground beneath us.
Medium: Painting, india ink, photomontage
Size: 50 x 60cm
The Sweetness You Will Come To Miss
The Sweetness You Will Come to Miss
A long term research project into the cult of the chinese mango in china at the time of the cultural revolution, charting the story through my family history as a relic of empire and geopolitical conflict.
Medium: multi medium
A Home for Redundancy
Medium: video, performance