Brian Duggan × Caroline Cowley

For this film released in 2011, Duggan has mapped a curious journey through Fingal citing E.M. Forster`s 1909 short novella The Machine Stops as a guiding text to develop a way of re-looking and re-thinking the landscape and the physical changes that have occurred in the county. The film takes in a 44km topographical section of Fingal, starting on one end on Colt Island, Skerries and the other at the Huntstown quarry. Parts of these unfamiliar territories recall the journey by Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth by Nicholas Roeg 1976), however, the specific recognisable signs from Fingal ground the story in tangible fixed points but without fixing the time or place. The film has returned to my mind many times this year reminding us of the prophetic nature of art, from Forster to Duggan with over 100 years between their outputs we find ourselves, like our protagonist cast adrift to navigate the limits of digital empathy through technological portals and journeys through empty present and post landscapes ; mirroring our own experiences in 2020. At the time of the commission in 2009, the country was gripped by recession when jobs were ravaged, building production halted and where the artist then, as now has the ability to represent something of both our societal anxiety and our own collective resilience against global forces, the machine may have stopped but art will continue to move.

O'Machine O'Machine, was a Per Cent for Art commission for Fingal County Council. The commission included a book featuring new writing by Fingal writers - Daniel Boland, Pauline O’Hare, Niamh MacAlister, and including Brian Duggan with afterward contribution by Francis McKee

Caroline Cowley is the Public Art Co-ordinator with Fingal County Council whose projects include Resort Residency at Lynders Mobile Home Park, THE HIDE PROJECT with artist Garrett Phelan. She is currently the chair of Pallas Studios/Projects.