IMAGE FIELD

Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan

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You can listen to this work on our dedicated page here

Please select the Doc icon to find the large format transcript

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Introduction

Nina Davies

You're listening to Future Artefacts FM , a bi-monthly podcast/broadcast featuring speculative fiction audio works by artists and writers produced and presented by Nina Davies,

 

Rebecca Edwards

Rebecca Edwards

 

Niamh Schmidtke 

and Niamh Schmidtke, on RTM 

 

ND

and also available on podcast channels. 

 

NS

The programme focuses on fictional works intended for broadcast to carve out a better understanding of the now by exploring various interpretations of the future. 

 

RE

Together with guests we discuss the mechanics of different types of storytelling to reveal the complexities of contemporary culture. Let’s get started.

 

All

Let’s get started.

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NS

This miniseries is commissioned by Henry Moore Institute to accompany their exhibition, Phantasmagoria Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, open 15th May, 2026 to 30th of August, 2026.

 

RE

For more information, just visit the Henry Moore Institute website.

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ND

The opinions expressed by contributors in this episode do not necessarily reflect the views of the Henry Moore Foundation, its trustees, employees or associates.

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Artist Introduction

ND

Welcome back to Future Artefacts FM, Episode 38. And also the last episode of our mini series, Phantasmagoria Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age, which we've produced in collaboration with the Henry Moore Institute, which is part of the online program for the exhibition, which is running until August 30th. And with us in the studio today, we have Bassam Issah Al-Sabah.

How are you?

 

BA

I'm great. Thank you.

 

ND

You come all the way down from Dublin, just to be with us, which is like the first time that we've actually had someone make a specific trip to be on the show, which is like a huge, which is like a big win.

Yeah.

 

NS

International trip. Yeah. Yeah.

 

RE

Well, thank you for being here, Bassam.

 

BA

Thank you for having me.

 

RE

Nice to have you in person. Yeah.

 

ND

So today you're going to be sharing a new work called Image Field, which you've made in collaboration with Jennifer Mehigan.

 

NS

Yeah. So to introduce Bassam and also his collaborator, Jennifer. So Bassam Issa Al-Sabah is a visual artist working across film, animation, sculpture and installation. His practice explores digital and material forms, shifting identities and the circulation of emotion in contemporary culture. Notable solo exhibitions include The Mission is the End, The End is All I Want, FACT Liverpool, and Uncensored Lilac at Transmediale in Berlin, and It's Dangerous to Go Alone, Take This, at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin in 2022.

Al-Sabah has shown internationally at venues like the Barbican Centre, Jeu de Paume, and Lièvres Biennial. He has received prestigious awards including the Pre-Arts Electronica Award of Distinction in 2023 and the Golden Fleece Award in 2021.

Jennifer Mehigan's prints and paintings fused diverse media and sources, including 3D scans of her garden, images of plants growing on the graves of strange Irish women, the archive of the Victorian portrait photographer, Lady Clementia Hwarden, four-dimensional drawings by the Cork-born mathematician Alicia Bull, and an encrusted renaissance codex known as the Voynich Manuscript. Using paint, inkjet, graphics, cards, neural networks, pearl powder and gel, her works blend new and old methods of making and processing the world. A relationship the artist views as a strained mother-daughter bond. Mehigan's wider practice also incorporates CGI, sculpture, perfumery, writing, parties, artificial intelligence and horticulture. Deploying sensory experience to explore queerness and femininity.

 

And today we have Bassam in the studio with us, but we need to have Jennifer's contribution to this work as well.

 

ND

You've been working with Jennifer for quite a while. Your collaborative work spans a few different works, isn't it?

 

BA

We met through a mutual friend, Alyssa, when we moved to Belfast at the same time. There was a moment where we both had known of each other peripherally for a while. I'd known of Jennifer through her Tumblr. Like really way back when, because she had a few works that went really viral on Tumblr.

 

ND

And so you didn't know her before?

 

BA

No. And she has a weird digital footprint that spans quite some time, which is kind of interesting. But we became really good friends, and then we tested out making work together slowly. So we'd make some small things together. It's almost like you're testing if you can be really good friends but terrible collaborators. And you can be really good collaborators but terrible friends.

So I think we started making really small stuff together and slowly built. And like the last thing we did that was really big was Uncensored Lilac in Transmediale.

I think now it's been a thing of like, we'll both do stuff solo for a while, and we'll come back to a collaboration. And I think there's something really nice about like, you get to hide behind each other. You get to be autobiographical and nobody knows where it came from. And like sometimes me and Jennifer like joke that we have like an AI prompt relationship between us. Like I'll be like, I have an idea for a scene and she'll write it.

She'll have an idea for an image. I'll make it. Like we have this, there's like a way you can be like half a person in that collaboration. You don't have to make every decision by yourself. And that feels really pleasant.

 

ND

One of our previous miniseries was about collaborative kind of practice. And we were talking about like the sort of safety and numbers of like, with this is sort of our version of that, like Future Artefacts is our version where you can kind of feel you can tackle more when you're a group or when you're not on your own.

 

BA

Yeah, and I think one of the things me and Jennifer always talk about is like the context in which our work is read, like I'm brown, she's a woman. When we make work solo, it is read through very specific contexts. But when we make work together, it's kind of complicated. So if you have like, Uncensored Lilac had a lot of these like representations of like hypersexualized figures of women. But then it was complicated by the fact that I was there as well. It wasn't just Jennifer making it. So there's almost like, you get to kind of give the work so much breathing space because it's not coming from one identity. We're kind of like always talking about how much of yourself do you want to give out in the work? Because I think that's a really difficult, difficult one when you it's almost like it feels like demanded upon you to be like a PR story.

Like, you know, a very like linear story of like.

 

NS

It's like your identity is as significant to the work as the work itself.

 

BA

Yeah.

 

NS

Or you have to explain it.

 

BA

Yeah, because I mean, the context or like, I remember making a work when I was just at a college and it was like a recreation of our old house in Iraq. And I just remember like everybody could only read it through the context of like migration and people were like crying and I was like,

 

ND

I kind of like, that's not what it was for you.

 

BA

Yeah. Yeah.

 

NS

It's more than that. Yeah.

 

BA

You know, like there's more layers to it than it's almost it's like so easy to take just that context and just run with it. But when you're two people coming from such drastically different backgrounds, like Jennifer grew up in Singapore, she makes paintings, very beautiful paintings, but very like painting paintings. I'm making CGI films and then we kind of kind of come into these spaces together. The work becomes complicated by that inheritance of both of us.

And I think the work we make together is also complicated by the fact that we both come from different contexts. That's not just our own ideas. Like we kind of you have to keep someone else in mind.

 

RE

Okay, so we're going to listen to the work now. It's called Image Field and it's 15 minutes long. We'll see you soon.

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Image Field

1. The Poisonous Bite

(Foxglove & Briar)

They paved the lane last summer, so the servers could arrive without mud on their tyres. The hedges were cut back, squared off, but I prefer boundaries that draw blood, snag wool, skin and corrupt on contact. The countryside now loads like an image, its tiled, cached, surveilled and you can only walk it along the paths that resolve.

Here The foxglove still stands. not so much ornament, but a rendering error the system cannot smooth. Bell-shaped, purple, a throat designed for selective entry. Farmers call it ‘dead man’s bells’, but naming is just another form of containment. I was raised in these ditches, and the ditch keeps its own inventory of runoff, slurry, and coolant leaking from the cubes droning beyond the hill, low and continuous, like a second weather system.

The foxglove sways and I trace the hedgerow’s edge with my tongue, tasting its hostility, The lane curves slightly, as if following a body too large to see from ground level. Containment provokes retaliation. I could bite. I could vanish. I could withdraw. I choose all three, in no order, stepping further down the lane.

 

2. The Raised Tail

(Donkey Thorn)

The lane widens into a yard. Gravel has replaced mud. the donkey turns before it kicks, offering a clear diagram of consequence. Above us, the scorpion arches, though from here the body reveals itself backwards: tail first, warning before form. This latitude only permits fragments.

The donkey thorn clings to your trousers as you pass. A low-resolution alert.

The farm is crowded with misclassified objects, warnings mistaken for decoration. An archive of cues indexed too quickly, flattened into aesthetic. Before the kick lands, I slip through the gate and out of frame.

 

3. Mother

(Bog Cotton & Milkweed)

Soft ground now. The path dissolves into bog. The bog cotton drifts like haunted breath over the black water, marking the places where the land is soft.

Call me mother if you want a mouth to kneel before. Call me saint if you require marble to press your forehead against. Call me glitch if you need to blame the tremor on something mechanical. None of these names are binding.

Milkweed splits its pods and releases silken parachutes into the air. They should not survive the winter, but they do, out of spite. survival dressed as excess.

They approach me for milk or maybe absolution, same mouth, different hunger, and I offer delay. Care is rerouted, no longer soft. A way of feeding what should not survive the winter, of keeping dead systems in circulation just long enough to destabilize the next one.

Endings enter through me and leave unfinished. The bog releases me slowly.

 

4. Horse

(Bristle Moss)

Through the gate. Metal against palm. Interface is always intimate. Metal learns the body slowly. bit by bit, dissolving into saliva, becoming language through repetition.

Bristle moss spreads across stone like a soft protocol, turning structure into substrate, architecture into host. I have known the weight of instruction on my tongue. When she bolts It renders a line through the field so clean it becomes infrastructure. A path others will follow until it becomes law.

The Bristle moss spreads unnoticed underfoot. Containment, you see, is scalable, From strap to system. From system to belief. but only when the pressure of containment finds its own release, when roots split the pavement, the horse can finally run free.

The horse runs. The line is drawn. The shape only becomes legible from above. I follow it out of the field.

 

5. Eyes

(Eyebright & Ghost Orchid)

The path narrows. Grass rises and begins to interfere with visibility. I reduce myself accordingly. I remain in the narrow band between recognition and discard, sub-threshold, partially legible, never fully resolved.

Eyebright blooms in the damp grass, white points of corrective intent. A cure for blindness, or a restructuring of what counts as sight. Two points of brightness hold in the field without collapsing into a single meaning.

The eyebright does not blink. It watches, bright and unyielding, while the ghost orchid, pale as a held breath, waits in the shadows, its petals half-open, half-concealed. One offers sight, the other withholds it. Between them, I move on

 

6. Mother of Sorrows

(Rowan & Ragged Robin)

The path rises toward the chapel, and beside it, the data centre. The rowan tree stands between them, red berries bright against grey stone. A ward against nothing. Low on the southern horizon, a red wound pulses through haze and cloud. Rival heat. Improper for this climate.

This is how I cradle what collapses, calves born too early, drives corrupted by heat. The ragged robin bleeds pink at the roadside, closure is not supported in this environment. Grief underpins everything: the chapel and the data centre alike.

You see the chapel and the data centre share the same architecture, containment of excess, management of overflow, the illusion of processing what cannot be processed. Both failing in different registers

They carve me in marble to freeze the flood, but salt keeps rising. The rowan’s branches creak in the wind, its berries falling unnoticed. I tend to the afflicted without curing them, offering consolation as compression. In the grotto, damp beads on plaster-like tears that never fall. The ragged robin sways, its petals torn by the rain. Sorrow is a commons we inherit like a reservoir behind ornamental gates. I don’t remove grief. I compress it. Make it portable, transferable across bodies, across systems.

The rowan’s roots twist deeper; Things collect here. I empty it when I can, but it fills again. I leave the chapel behind. a vibration follows.

 

7. Mother of Pearl

(Pearlwort and Sea Holly)

The path opens and the surface begins to distort. Distance becomes a processing layer.

Pearlwort renders softness at a distance like stars blurred through moisture and atmospheric drag. A field of white points, like pixels resolving into coherence the further you step back. Resolution is positional.

The sea holly readies its spines to prick your fingers as you reach. Go ahead, touch it. Your skin will betray you first, a bead of red on opalmilk. The image does not need to be transparent to be radiant. The pearlwort shimmers in the sunlight, a false promise of softness. The sea holly does not yield and neither do I.

The system learns through corruption.

I walk on before it can stabilize the frame.

 

8. Our Lady of Consolation

(Lady’s Mantle & Feverfew)

Morning damp gathers along the path. Kneel if you must, but understand this is not a solution, only a cool hand on a fevered algorithm. Lady’s mantle cups the dew in its velvet leaves. Feverfew crowds the ditch, white flowers bright against the wet.

A slowing of breath before the next demand. Consolation rearranges the room without changing its walls. You brush past the lady’s mantle and the leaves tremble closed. Underfoot, crushed feverfew releases its bitter scent.

Not the cure. Only a brief softening.

Beyond the hedges, the systems continue. Heat moving through hidden chambers. Processes feeding themselves forward.

The world remains unresolved.

 

9. Consoler of the Afflicted

(Yarrow & Monkshood)

The wind shifts. The path bends back on itself.

Redemption, as you think of it, is too linear for the terrain we share. Consider the spirals. They are more honest about the shape of grief, and the ways we return to it.

The yarrow thickens blood, its white flowers a balm for wounds. The Monkshood grows nearby, blue and absolute. poison and cure held in the same structure, depending on dosage, timing, and proximity.

Neither settles the other. They coexist without synthesis

The wind carries the scent of both, a reminder that healing and harm are never far apart. nothing is cleanly isolatable in this air. I stroll between.

 

10. Consolatrix

(Meadowsweet & Honeysuckle)

Evening begins to gather. And the Sweetness is adhesive. I hold the space.

wait here, just a little longer.

The honeysuckle’s embrace is neither cruel nor kind; it just tightens according to its own logic of orbit and return.

It draws you close, then releases you.

The meadowsweet sways as the wind picks up. The honeysuckle’s tendrils tighten, pulling you closer, then letting go. Stay awhile. Then leave when you can stand again.

 

11. The Heart of the Scorpion

(Scorpion Grass & Nettle)

Cold returns as the path dips. The Heart of the Scorpion is a server rack overheating in February, A southern heat trapped too far north. The scorpion grass arches in the field, its barbs glinting in the bleak winter sun.

Pressure.

Held.

The nettle stands guard, its sting a promise of what comes next.

The image fails spectacularly only after it has been patient beyond reason. The scorpion grass does not move; its threat is constant. The nettle does not apologize for its burn. That’s the thing about pressure: it doesn’t leave until it’s too late to save what it’s consumed. The grass waits. The nettle spreads. The server hums. The star burns incorrectly for this weather.

 

12. Mediatrix, Redemptrix, Dominatrix

(Ivy & Bindweed)

The hedges close in again. Between you and what you worship, I install latency. A buffering wheel of lace and chrome. Kneel if it steadies you. Stand if it doesn’t.

Ivy scales slowly, it starts as surface detail but ends up rewriting structure over time until the original architecture is unrecognizable. Bindweed accelerates the process, faster, less elegance. tightening, redirecting, pulling everything toward its own logic of proximity.

The ivy chokes the oak

The bindweed strangles the corn

I mediate by misalignment, redeem by refusing resolution, dominate by withholding immediacy. No permission, no letting go.

Just enough friction to produce desire. Just enough delay to produce devotion.

 

13. Temptress, Dictatoress, Cowardess

(Belladonna & Thorn Apple)

The path narrows into shadowed ground where light behaves as if partially refused.

Belladonna holds its fruit like stored instruction: dark, lacquered, legible only at the edge of looking. Thorn apple opens into spined geometry, each surface a decision against approach. Nothing here permits contact without consequence.

Desire is not drawn toward objects. It is drawn into spacing.

What you want remains slightly misaligned with what appears.

That gap is the mechanism.

I remain there, Ruling by hesitation.

 

14. The Solitary Pursuit of Infatuation

(Harebell)

With its delicate blue flowers, the harebell trembles in the wind. Ephemeral. Distance maintains divinity. Infatuation scales better than intimacy

The harebell bends as you approach, then rights itself when you pass. Across field, across hedge, across screen, longing preserves structure. The harebell does not promise forever. Get too near, and worship collapses into habit. I remain just far enough to be myth.

 

15. I Don’t Know How Many Hollow Gestures I Have Left

(Kneeling Grass & Stonecrop)

Ruins ahead and Kneeling has worn grooves in stone. The kneeling grass bends under the weight of prayer, its blades flattened by repetition. The stonecrop clings to the ruins, its fleshy leaves a testament to endurance. The same devotion repeated until language disperses.

The kneeling grass does not rise again. The stonecrop does not complain. I have performed apparition so often that the outline remains after I step away. The grooves are deep now. The grass is worn thin.

A system can continue on the strength of its own afterimage.

The danger is that it no longer requires a body.

Cloud cover interrupts the pattern before completion, but still the body is inferred. Still the believers connect one point to another. The stonecrop spreads, silent and stubborn. I am considering stepping out of alignment.

 

16. The Great Image Has No Form

(Mist & Bog Asphodel)

The path disappears into mist, the haze swallows the path, erasing the line between earth and sky. The bog asphodel glows in the dark, a ghost light with no source, a beacon with no destination.

The mist does not explain itself. The bog does not answer. In the space between things, the emptiness that suggests so much more than the visible ever could. The mist thickens. The asphodel fades.

This is what the system cannot tolerate. formlessness.

No edges to extract. No units to measure. No subject to own.

Meaning without containment.

 

17. The Great Image Has No Form and Neither Do I

(Shadow & Wind)

At the edge of the field, there is no edge. I’m done rehearsing collapse, for now. The shadow stretches long across the field, a presence without substance. I’ve become the absence, the nonobject

The shadow shifts with the sun. The wind does not stop to listen.

The landscape will continue to render around you.

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Conversation

RE

Welcome back. That was Image Field. Really beautiful work, Bassam. Before we get into the landscape and the politics of the work, I wanted to start with the narrator.

The landscape feels really full of human traces, but completely devoid of human life. So is this narrator someone walking through this place, or have they become a part of it? How do you see them as a body or an object?

BA

Yeah, I think I really wanted the work to begin with the narrator seeming like just someone walking through the landscape, but over the course of the work, their position becomes increasingly unstable.

I wasn't interested in creating a fixed character moving through a setting, I kind of wanted the voice to shift between observer, participant, and even like infrastructure, mythological figure, or even weather system. The landscape is full of human traces like roads, hedge roads, chapels, data centres, agricultural systems, but human bodies are largely absent because the work is interested in the structures that remain after people have passed through it. And I think the narrator occupies a certain position within those structures.

Sometimes, they seem to be walking the landscape, describing what they encounter, or at other times, they appear to be speaking as the landscape itself, or as the system operating within it. And I think as I was writing it, I wanted the identity of the narrator to behave similarly to the plants that appear in each section, something that spreads, mutates, or even like refuses containment. And that felt really important because one of the central concerns of this project which me and Jennifer are developing is how contemporary systems, whether technological, bureaucratic, or historical, depend on making things legible or classifiable. So the narrator resisting that process, they never give you that full resolve into like a singular subject. And the final section when the text arrives at the great image has no form and neither do I, the voice has become almost inseparable from the environment. It moves through less like a person in a landscape than a consciousness circulating through a field of relations.

So I think the absence of visible human life also allows other forms of agency to come forward, plants, weather, infrastructure, myth and architecture all become active participants. The narrator is one voice among those forces rather than the central authority organizing them.

 

NS

Part of my encounter with the work and thinking about that narrator being kind of devoid of a human perspective is also the wash of the different types of plant and life that exist in the bog.

You know, there is, in the way that it's structured, is almost like a series of chapters and segments. It's kind of like both acknowledging classification while trying to reject it.

 

BA

Yeah.

 

NS

You know, it's like you're giving us the names and the titles of these different types of plant life. But then it's dissolving into the technological, which I think is also when you're walking through a bog kind of in the flesh in a way. Like I listened to this almost like a guide through a bog landscape. That was my encounter with the work rather than this sort of sense of what exactly plant is this.

 

ND

There's a practice of artists like doing art walks and like sound works for art walks. While you were making this work, did you consider that this could be an audio work for a walk? I know it's kind of a work in progress.

BA

Yeah. I think like in my head, it's almost like a meditation. Because I think me and Jennifer always talk about like, I mean, there was a moment where I just listened to so many meditation podcasts. But sometimes we'll be in the car and we'll be like, oh my God, I hope nothing embarrassing is on. I'd be like, oh, maybe like a really terrible song. She'd be like, no, it'll be like, you know, because we both have this book called Meditations for Women Who Work Too Much, which I would recommend that's got one meditation for each day.

 

ND

I think I need that. Yeah.

 

BA

It's like a really small book and you can just keep it in your bag. And then like every day open it and be like, care for yourself. And you're like, ah. In a lot of our films, the voice is really slowed down. So you really get this like cadence of just like something really slow and almost like slightly meditative but also almost something like allows you to dissociate into where the work is leading imagery-wise.

Yeah. So it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think sometimes if you were to transport that into the real world, you wouldn't get that effect of it like blurring over you because you're in it.

 

ND

Yeah. So it's like- Be distracted by the other.

 

BA

So it's almost the transportation of audio or like video that allows you to like move from one place to another. And even like the soundtrack is like really pulled and really kind of eerie, which was like very specific because I mean, also part of this project we were doing a lot of research into like mythological figures. And in Ireland, there's this like moments where you kind of realize like a lot of the times, these like feminine female mythological figures exist on the periphery of stories, like banshees existing on the periphery. They never appear in the open.

They're always like peripheral. So there's something interesting about some things existing peripherally rather than like in.

 

ND

Is the banshee something that you've like worked with a lot? Is that like a reoccurring?

 

BA

No, I mean, I think one of the things I think maybe now, because me and Jennifer have made a few works together, we've realised like a lot of the times it is just focuses on female mythological figures across like different ideas of mythology. So like I think the first film we made together was about a zombie. And we made the film during COVID. And there was this voiceover that talks about the Irish graveyard as like a garden.

The next film was about goddesses. But again, they're kind of amalgamations of ideas of goddesses rather than a representation of a goddess. So I think even the reference of a banshee is it's interesting to look at. But there's also a moment where you're like, now I just want to create a world with this information in mind rather than I'm going to take on this context of a banshee.

Yeah. Do you know? Because I think sometimes it's so loaded when you take on these things that have been studied and talked about in so many ways. It's kind of interesting to just think about them and how they exist in a culture and then be able to kind of nitpick that and create a version of it.

 

ND

Or the feeling of it rather than the actual imagery of it.

 

BA

Yeah. And to not necessarily just take that vessel, but to take the contents of the vessel and just put them in something else.

 

ND

Talking about bogs, this brings us to the second question pretty seamlessly. So yeah, bogs are one of the oldest natural archives we have. They preserve bodies, objects, and organic matter for millennia, holding things intact against time in the same wet Irish climate that now cool server racks.

How do you see the bog and the data farm as doing the same thing? Or is the bog in this work offering a different kind of memory, one that is accidental, collective, and without ownership?

 

BA

Yeah, I mean, I don't see them as doing the same thing, even though like maybe in the beginning of writing this, the comparison was like tempting, because both are like forms of storage operating within the same landscape. And I guess what interested me was the strange proximity between these two archives. And the bog preserves through saturation, slowness, and accident. It doesn't decide what is important between bodies, pollen, seeds, tools.

Everything becomes folded together into a kind of collective memory without a clear author or owner. Things survive because conditions allowed them to survive, not because they were selected for preservation, whereas like a data centre operates very differently. It's highly managed, and it's built around extraction, classification, retrieval, and ownership. Information is constantly being organised, indexed, and made available for future use. Its memory is instrumental. While, the bog's memory is indifferent. And I think in this, when I was writing this, I was interested in how these two forms of storage sit alongside one another in contemporary Ireland. Like the same damp climate that has preserved organic matter for thousands of years is now marketed as an efficient cooling system for digital infrastructure. There's like a strange continuity, but also a profound difference in what is being preserved and for whom. In a way, the bog becomes important because it offers an alternative model of memory, something that's fragmented, collective, and often illegible. That's very close to the project's broader interest in opacity. And like through the work, I'm thinking about what happens when things refuse perfect legibility. The bog doesn't function like a database where information can simply be retrieved on demand.

It stores traces rather than answers, and it preserves relationships, atmosphere, and residues rather than clean records. So if the data farm represents a contemporary desire for complete storage and total accessibility, the bog represents another possibility, one about memory without ownership, preservation without extraction, and a form of knowledge that remains partial no matter how closely you examine it.

 

NS

By the end of next year, data centers will take up 30% of all Irish electrical production. 30% of the grid is going on data centers because of this marketing ploy of like, oh, it's a colder climate, it's easier to cool down. And I say this because I think there's something about this kind of construction of data centers that's also, there's kind of two sides to this. One of it, it's like it's a globalized thing, which is sort of, to me, is interesting in the Irish context because that globalization has led to mostly kind of mega-corps like Google, Microsoft, et cetera, having cheap corporate tax, so they'll kind of place their offices in the country. And so it's like this kind of small peripheral nation, but now very wealthy nation, supplying this data center, data server production for kind of, I'm assuming, the majority of other parts of Europe.

And then the other side of it with the bog and thinking about the bog, for me, was like the urban versus the rural, which is also kind of the data center thing, is like the supposedly empty land, like the bog is kind of sold as empty land. I was wondering when you were also thinking about the construction of this work, because the work itself doesn't feel like it's a series of contrasts.

You know, it's about kind of trying to draw in these ideas around, let's say, ecology and technology and mythology that are usually kind of held quite separately from one another and allowing them to coexist.

Was there also a thought around those types of contrasts in terms of who is it for? You know, as you're talking about like ownership, you know, like the bog doesn't belong. I mean, there was a period of time when it belonged to the state, but the Irish state, but was there a sense of that contrast of kind of who is this for?

 

BA

The reason why I'm so interested in bogs is because they've constantly been reimagined according to the needs of different economic or political systems. So like historically, it was often understood as a wasteland, something to be drained, cut, improved, or made productive.

Then it became a site of industrial extraction through peat harvesting, and now recently it's been reframed through carbon accounting, conservation, biodiversity markets and discussions around digital infrastructure. The bog seems to repeatedly become valuable according to whatever logic of management is dominant at a given time. And I think what interested me is that despite all of these attempts, the bog never entirely cooperates. It's a landscape that exceeds the categorization imposed upon it. It stores carbon, preserves archaeological remains, supports ecosystems, carries cultural memory and resists easy development at all at the same time. And it remains so stubborn. And I think the relationship between rural and urban spaces is really important here. We often imagine bogs as remote or peripheral places, but they've always been deeply connected to wider systems, peat-heated homes and powered industries.

And today's questions around carbon storage, environmental policy or like energy infrastructure, connect these landscape to a global network of capital and information. What appears peripheral is often central to how these systems function. So that relationship between centre and periphery runs throughout this work. And Ireland often occupies a similar position within larger technological and economical networks. It's presented as a gateway, a host and a site of storage or processing. While the benefits and costs of those systems are unevenly distributed. One of the things we're exploring through the Rococo research of this project is how Ireland has repeatedly occupied this contradictory position, appearing central within larger networks while remaining structurally precarious.

More personally, I'm interested in bogs because they challenge the way we imagine place itself. They're difficult landscapes to navigate map or stabilize, and they don't conform easily to visual logics of roads or property lines or agricultural productivity. They're constantly shifting between land and water and surface and depth or visibility and concealment.

 

RE

I mean, I think this kind of points to a much broader, maybe longer standing history of land always being sort of valued under the demands of capital, whether that capital is technological, whether that's infrastructural, whether that's industrial, and right back to serfdom and kind of feudalism, right? What I think is interesting about the bog here is that it's, I didn't know this, but it doesn't contain oxygen.

 

ND

Is that why it can preserve?

 

RE

Yeah. And bog butter, that's literally people keeping things in a bog to preserve them because there's no oxygen. Maybe there's an interest in this as well because the bog is kind of, it forms part of Irish folklore, right? There's this idea of the Wool of the Wisp, which are these faint flickering lights that kind of appear over bogs and people were thinking that they were spirits leading travellers astray. So they also operate under this kind of like horror lens as well.

 

NS

So moving on to the next question, when we invited you on the show, you mentioned that you were looking at how Rococo architecture in Ireland was itself an imported style that became something distinctly local and how scholars have argued that Ireland actually exported it back outward, reversing the usual colonial flow. Do you see the plants in this work doing something similar as life that refuses the systems laid over them and maybe even corrupts those systems from within?

 

BA

Yeah, I think one of the things that really fascinated me about Rococo in an Irish context was that it complicates the idea of cultural influence moving in one direction. So although Rococo arrived through a broader European network, and scholars have argued that Irish plaster workers developed an insular variation that became influential beyond Ireland itself. So rather than simply receiving a style, local makers transformed it, quote unquote misused it and sent it back out again in altered form.

I'm interested in the plants and the work in a similar way, and they're not passive elements of the landscape, they don't simply exist within a system of classification, agriculture, property or infrastructure. They constantly exceed them. Hedge rows break roads, roots split concrete, invasive species ignore warders, and weeds appear in places they weren't meant to grow. They operate according to their own temporalities and logics.

So throughout the text, the plants function almost like glitches within a larger system of organisation. And the foxglove is described as a rendering error, or the donkey thorn becomes a warning sign. Bog cotton becomes unstable ground. Again and again, plants interrupt smooth navigation, visibility or categorisation. They expose the limits of systems that imagine themselves to be complete. And I think what interested me in that is that they don't necessarily resist from the outside. They often work from within systems, in the way that like Bindweeds uses the host system's architecture to spread itself further. That's a very different from an image of a heroic opposition, and it's slower, more parasitic, more transformative. In that sense, there's a connection to rococo. Historically, ornament is often dismissed as superficial or secondary. But rococo decoration could become so excessive that it destabilised the structure it was supposed to be serving. The plants in the work do something similar in that they begin as botanical detail, but gradually become alternative forms of intelligence. They take the infrastructure built around them, whether that's roads, hedges, farms, data centres, archives, and redirect them towards other end. I think that's really the political gesture running through the work.

I'm less interested in clean acts of resistance than in forms of corruption, mutation and misalignment.

 

ND

When we were talking about bog as an archive and like how it doesn't select anything, it's just whatever happens, it was just making me think like, what if these data farms ended up being the thing, that ended up being archived and what if it suddenly being this weird flow of actually, the thing that is meant to collectively store information becomes the thing that is stored. But the information itself will never be stored.

 

BA

It makes me think of your work in fact. If you kind of like the way yours was like a fiction about, if you encountered this archive, how would you imagine it? But what if you found a data center in a bog?

 

ND

What story would that tell?

 

BA

Yeah, like what would that tell you about the world?

 

ND

And you had no way of actually getting the information out of it?

Like, what would these sort of like weird, I want to say monolithic, but they're not monolithic. What would these sort of weird kind of hardware structures? Like, I mean, I'm-

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BA

Maybe they'd be like pyramids or something. You know, like they'd just be these kind of like relics that nobody understands and there'd be like data centerology.

 

ND

Yeah, it would just be like, what is this, like, what is this, like-

 

BA

Yeah, and then like young, weird kids, like you had to, you know, I feel like now it's like you're either, you're obsessed with Egypt or mythology, and then you'd have like a third, like data centerology, you know?

 

ND

Yeah.

 

BA

Just like an unexplainable-

 

ND

Yeah, would they even think it's data centerology? You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

BA

It could just be like sculptural almost.

 

ND

Like, yeah, would people even think that there was actually information being stored in here or would they think that it's like, could people suddenly be like, oh, these are just big batteries?

 

RE

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's a really interesting idea because I'm thinking about like the flash play and how that's just like no longer. Like, if we encounter these things 100 years from now, we won't maybe have the technology to actually get into them. And it reminds me of like this theory that we've maybe already encountered aliens. We just don't have the technology to understand that yet, which is maybe a bit conspiracy theory-led.

But like, just this idea that like we only have one kind of knowledge or we don't have like all knowledge of the entire universe, so we can't know everything.

 

ND

Yeah, and I think maybe bringing that back into like what you're talking about with like Rococo, I guess, like, when you were talking, I had this visual in my head of these sort of plants creeping up, like the data centers, and how would they somehow play a part in preserving these structures.

 

BA

Like, around where I live, there's like a, I think, like a derelict car dealership. But the entire building is like overgrown with buddleias.

 

ND

Right, okay.

 

BA

And it's like the whole thing kind of like is so beautiful in the summer because you just get this like sea of purple. But other than that, it's like the whole building is getting like destroyed by these like, like, I don't know if buddleias are classified as invasive in Ireland, but they definitely do take over. And it's like, because the only thing in that space is concrete. They're the only thing that's able to like crack the road. But then the other things are like growing within them.

So there is something interesting also about like, maybe plants destroying data, like, you know, at a time after us, all of these things will just become like rubble.

Inevitably.

 

ND

Will there be like a certain kind of plant species that like, totally flourishes inside the servers or?

 

BA

Yeah.

 

NS

Well, I mean, I remember having conversations with architects before about using Japanese knotweed as a way to destroy concrete foundations in terms of it will literally grow through concrete, but thinking about what are ways that are more ecologically sensitive, because obviously it's incredibly energy intensive to destroy a concrete foundation. I guess my question about the rococo thing is also about how the interior of rococo structures also itself sort of archives maybe the desire of what type of plant life is valued, and are there ways in which the architecture of the data center, the data servers themselves also reflects or denies that? Like when, as soon as it's not attached to the grid, like what do they become without an electrical source? You're just left with this kind of monument to something that is no longer important.

 

BA

I think maybe one of the things that's also really interesting is that there's a lot of data centers on like the west of Ireland, and I think the west of Ireland has like a very specific image of Ireland, which is Ireland almost like the Butter Ad, Ireland, which is like hilly, grassy, there's cows on the hills. So it's really interesting when you see that like, you can drive and it looks so idyllic and it really looks like a Butter Ad, then all of a sudden you see this just block that does

look just like superimposed onto this landscape. So it's also, it's almost like it does feel like quite alien when you see that.

 

RE

Like the monolith and-

 

BA

Yeah, or just like how, and I think there's parts of-

 

ND

It doesn't fit, it doesn't fit in.

 

BA

Yeah, or like, you know, when you're in Donegal or Kerry, you really feel how ancient a landscape Ireland is because the mountains are so undulating, they're not sharp, and you really feel just like how old it is. And then it's like really strange to see these like very sharp edges and a landscape that is actually quite soft.

 

ND

Yeah, even like when you mentioned the pyramid, for me looking at a pyramid in a desert is like the image that I, it doesn't seem weird and I wonder whether like this is where we're heading where like,

 

BA

Yeah, like usually-

 

ND

lowly, hilly fields, like it will eventually become, maybe not for us, but maybe for future generations, it will become like a-

 

BA

When you see these fields covered in solar panels, it is like very shocking when you see it. And I'm not super familiar with the politics of that. But as in it is very like bizarre when you see it, just like this like sea of reflective-

 

ND

Yeah, panels.

 

BA

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like dead underneath. So it's like no longer even serving like any ecological.

 

NS

So it's almost like urban life is allowed to continue relatively uninterrupted.

 

BA

Or unquestioned, you know, that like.

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RE

I want to draw out the relationship a little bit more between older systems of organizing land or belief and perception, and the contemporary computational infrastructures that are running through the work. Throughout the texts, we hear about these hedgerows, bogs, and agricultural boundaries that appear alongside data centers, servers, and algorithmic systems.

These older forms of organizing knowledge and movement, I think I see them as proto-technologies. I'm thinking here about Eric Davis' technosis, and how it traces a tendency within digital culture to imagine information as immaterial or transcendent. But your work repeatedly brings us back to soil, heat, toxicity, and these ecological systems. Is this a way of maybe rematerializing the digital?

I'm thinking also in your work, there's a really beautiful image when I read the bit, or when I listened to the bit, they paved the lane last summer so the servers could arrive without mud on their tires. Like this very kind of contradictory thing between the shiny data center and the dirty nature.

 

BA

Yeah, I think it feels so constant that digital culture produces these fantasies of transcendence or immateriality, or even frictionless communication.

And I think they all feel like these ideas aren't like an escape from the body, and this idea that information appears to float free from the material world. But I think what is really interesting is that the reality is that these digital systems are so profoundly material. They require land, mineral, energy, water, labour, logistics and maintenance. They produce heat and they occupy territory, they reshape landscapes. And I think maybe that line that you just mentioned is trying to collapse that distance between what is supposedly virtual and the stubbornly physical. And I think I was interested in the fact that even the most advanced computational systems remain dependent on very ordinary material conditions. Like roads have to be built, fields have to be cleared, electricity has to be moved through cables, cooling systems have to function.

And throughout the work, plants, mud, bog water, toxins, weather systems, and like bodily fluids, continually interrupt the fantasy of digital abstraction. They remind us that information never escapes matter, it simply passes through different material arrangements. That's also why the landscape is so important. Like the West of Ireland often appears in promotional narratives around data infrastructure as a kind of empty space, a cool climate, or like a useful geographical condition.

But landscapes are never empty, they're full of histories, ecologies, memories, and competing life forms. The work tries to keep these things present, rather than allowing the landscape to become a neutral backdrop. In a way, the plants are doing a similar job, they keep dragging the work back into embodiment, every plant in the text has a specific physical reality. They insist on remaining material actors within the world.

So I think for me, I think the project is partly about rematerializing the digital, not to demystify it completely, because I'm still interested in myth, fantasy and desire, but to show that even our most abstract systems remain entangled with soil, climate, infrastructure, bodies and forms of extraction. And the spiritual and the material aren't opposites in the work, they're constantly contaminating one another. I think what's interesting is that digital infrastructures also present themselves as radically new. That's the image they tried to build, but actually they're based on these quite old technology.

There's a lineage of these things, and they're connected to these lineages, but there's almost like they tried to paint this break between before and after.

 

ND

As in the before and after the installation of these technologies.

 

BA

Of the stuff. I think tech is a kind of genre of stuff that seems to be occurring in our world more often. Even like now, AI very specifically, there's like a pre and post, but actually there is like a line of stuff that has had to happen for... This is just an extension of it. It's happening very quickly, but as in like these stuff have existed for a long time.

Like the idea in video games, everyone talks about the AI of like your opponent and how bad or good they are. So artificial intelligence and how to like interact with stuff has existed. And people have been building these models of like creating images for a long time. It's just it's never been this sophisticated or this accessible.

 

ND

It's not been accessible. Yeah. Yeah.

 

NS

I'm thinking even like the Kate Crawford, Joel Voller work.

 

RE

A map of AI.

 

NS

Yeah, like tracing these technologies, but kind of back from the 1600s through to the present.

And like, as you're saying, kind of documenting that lineage through time. I think also in terms of, I guess, because there's a sense of like, there's the before and the after. And I think particularly in the West of Ireland, there's that image of how it's promoted via tourism, where it's empty space, but also its untouched space, like particularly places like the Burren, which is classified as a desert. And also it's really interesting in terms of plant life, because loads of plants like don't exist because the climate is so unique there, only exists there. But thinking more so about the idea of that sense of the untouched, you know?

And also like when the data centre arrives as this kind of sleek, contemporary box shape in this undulating landscape, it like appears like as a simulation in the landscape. It appears unreal.

Like the closest thing I can think of to it is there's Mudchute Farms in London, which is in kind of southeast London, close to Greenwich. But when you go there, you can see kind of fields with sheep. But in the background, you have Canary Wharf. You have the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf. And it's such an odd contrast between the two. And that's sort of what like the data centre in this rural context is doing as well. It's like taking the urban, taking the technological, placing it into an environment where you wouldn't, you wouldn't.

 

BA

But I think it feels so out of place that your mind doesn't even contextualise it very quickly. That it does look superimposed. And I think maybe decidedly so. Like it doesn't look like a factory. It's not like producing smoke that you can see. And therefore it does just look like a break and like a render or something.

 

ND

Yeah.

 

BA

Do you know? It looks so out of place in these things. And I think maybe that's part of their design. I don't know. It's such a strange thing to look at. Even when we looked up a lot of them. I mean, I've been doing a lot of image research on these things. And none of the images look real.

 

ND

Right.

 

RE

Yeah.

 

NS

They've started because there's now specific firms in Ireland that are designing the data centres. Now because they've done so many of them, they're actually becoming experts and being exported out to other parts of the world.

 

RE

But there is a movement against this, like the permacomputing movement and things like this, where people are actually salvaging e-waste, essentially to stop computing being associated with these shiny black boxes. It's more like DIY, hacky assemblages of processing.

 

ND

Just to finish up with our last question, as this mini-series is responding to the theme of folkloric sculpture for the digital age, I was thinking about sculpture and how it is traditionally about fixing form, giving something permanent, touchable presence. This work seems to resist that completely. The great image has no form, the narrator has no form, and yet the piece keeps circling back to that phrase, the great image has no form, as if this formlessness is itself a kind of arrival rather than an absence.

Is that a conversation with sculpture or a refusal of it? And can something that actively resists forming ever really function as an image?

BA

I don't necessarily think it's a refusal of sculpture so much as an attempt to think about sculpture differently. Like maybe traditionally sculpture is often understood through permanent solidity and the idea of fixing a form, but I'm also interested in sculpture as something that records instability, pressure, erosion, or transformation, cause even the most solid object is really a temporary arrangement of materials passing through time. So I think the phrase the great image has no form comes partly from a fascination with traditions of thought where the highest or most significant image is precisely the one that can't be represented. The idea felt useful when thinking about contemporary image culture, which is increasingly organized around visibility, recognition, or extraction. And I think throughout the work, the images keep failing to stabilize, the narrator shifts identity, the landscape dissolves into mist, plants move between symbol and material realities, and the entire walk that's the sound work is based on the points of the constellation of the Scorpius structure, but from Ireland, it never fully appears above the horizon, so everything remains partial, and the work keeps approaching form, but never quite settling into it. And for me, that's not necessarily an absence, it's actually a productive condition. Formlessness isn't the opposite of form, it's what keeps form open, it's what prevents an image from becoming fixed, exhausted. Once something becomes completely legible, it can be classified, indexed, or instrumentalized, and the work is interested in preserving a degree of excess that escapes those processes.

And I think that's also why Rococo became important to the project, because rococo ornament often operates at the threshold between form and dissolution. Surfaces fold into one another, figures emerge and disappear, boundaries become unstable. You never encounter a perfectly resolved image, you're constantly moving through layers of destruction, interruption, or access.

And I think the great image in the final text isn't a final picture waiting to be revealed, it's more like a field, a way of navigating uncertainty without reducing it to a single form. And by the end when the narrator said that great image has no form and neither do I, it's less a disappearance than a release from the obligation to be fully visible or fully coherent.

 

RE

Yeah, I mean, I would argue, is an image actually ever fully formed? Like, especially digital imagery that moves through different people passing it on, like it loses its, it has its lossy, it's a lossy image.

 

BA

I think what is interesting, I mean, it's so interesting, like living through a cycle of the Internet. And like also now when you see old memes that were being spread on like Tumblr, being spread on like Instagram now, but they've been passed through so many filters that they're like a different thing. And it's funny when like, I know they're all saying like when something is on the Internet it never disappears and now, like having been on the Internet for so long, ever since I was like nine, things do disappear. Things like things that you used to like watch as like kids, like these like vines and like memes have completely disappeared from like if you try to look for them, they're actually quite difficult to find. Even if they were at a certain point quite popular.

 

ND

No, I find that on TikTok. Like if I don't like something, it's gone.

 

BA

Yeah, it's just gone. And you can never find it because also like it's not like there's a search engine that you can like search very specifically. And I think maybe that's also the interest in that there's such a sea of images, but none of them feel like solid, like everything feels like it's just like slipping in and out of like consciousness. And I think specifically with Instagram, and I think especially with being an artist who makes images, the difficulty is then like having to engage with that way of like...

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ND

Solidifying.

 

BA

Yeah, but also like making digital images also then more difficultly because they can navigate that system so easily. And I think there's maybe occasionally the impulse to keep posting work.

And I think as of like the last five years, part of me has like withdrawn a little bit from doing that because I don't necessarily know if it's like that useful.

 

ND

What to be visible.

 

BA

To be that visible. I think there's a degree of mystery that is actually quite important as a person, but also in terms of like creating work because actually part of...

 

ND

You have to disappear.

 

BA

But also like the mystery of art is kind of so interesting when you go to a show and you don't know what you're going to see. And this was like so interesting because like this Venice Biennale was the first time I'd been to Venice, but also it was the first time I'd been to Venice at its opening. But usually you feel like you've seen it anyway because everybody you know posts at the same time and they all do their like carousel of like their 10 best pavilions. And actually being there while that was happening was like bizarre.

 

RE

I think I got this from your show at FACT, Bassam, because I didn't really read about that before going to see it or I didn't see any images of it. And I think what the images do is they flatten kind of like affect and emotional experience with the work, which I found with your show, just being in amongst these huge sculptures, like an image cannot do that just as.

NS

Well, I think also it's like as, especially when we're talking about sculpture, like one of the things I always think about with sculpture is, is space, is building, is room in terms of where, like if you are making physical sculpture, it's like, how does, like how are you also curating that space in terms of the person's approach towards and things like this. And all of those are so individual. You know, the image, as you're saying, Rebecca, it flattens, it forces one perspective, whether as part of the reason why you're making something in 3D, whether that be as physical or as digital, is the fact that you can move around in the 360.

 

ND

It's multiple perspectives of an object or of something.

 

NS

It's multiple perspectives, but it's also like, my height will affect how I view it. The body that I'm in will affect how I view it. And that's such an important thing to be able to hold on to in terms of as an artist and how you're creating that affect.

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