Doireann O’Malley: Prototypes

Doireann O’Malley’s film Prototypes brings together transgender studies, science fiction, bio politics, psychoanalysis, AI, and experimental music.

Doireann O’Malley’s film Prototypes brings together transgender studies, science fiction, bio politics, psychoanalysis, AI, and experimental music. She skilfully ties these to phantoms of modernist utopias, epitomized by the post-war architecture of Berlin, which serves as a dreamlike scenography for the main, protagonists’ ghostly actions.
– Jury Statement, Edith Russ Haus fur Media Art Stipendium, 2016.

Prototypes is a multi-screen film installation by Berlin-based Irish artist Doireann O’Malley.

Prototypes I focuses on female to male gender transition and the intra-actions of bodies, objects and drives. It is set in The Interbau Project, a modernist architectural housing project built in Berlin in the height of the cold war.

Prototypes II & III follow a further exploration of trans embodiments with trans female protagonists, going further into computer generated dream landscapes.

The combination of film, CGI (computer-generated imagery) and Virtual Reality which O’Malley is developing in relation to the construction of trans bodies and subjectivities is an interesting layering of contemporary forms and complex identities in the digital age.

The work is the result of a collaborative methodology. Part one comprised research, reading and writing sessions with the main protagonists. These included Jungian dream analysis sessions with the psycho-analyst Andrés Ocazionez and Social Dreaming workshops with gender psychiatrist Eva Sophie Philipps. Monologues were written in workshops exploring trans subjectivity with the protagonists.

O’Malley’s work is a result of this exploratory methodology which generates new forms of knowledge, drawing on a wide range of feminist perspectives within queer theory, psycho-analysis, quantum physics, genetics, cybernetics and systems biology.

Prototypes I was made with the kind support of Stiftung Kunstfonds, Edith Russ Haus Stipendium: Lower Saxony Grant for Media Art, Xposed Film Festival Production Prize and 25P Cine Support. Prototypes II will be filmed in Berlin in spring 2018. Both parts will be shown as a five screen installation at The Hugh Lane in summer 2018.

For more information on the artist see www.doireannomalley.com.