Bio

Aileen Drohan is a graduate of the Art in the Digital World Fine Art Masters at NCAD.  She has exhibited in Ireland, the UK and Estonia and has worked as a part-time lecturer in WIT as well as a visiting lecturer in NCAD. Aileen is a founding member of South East Makerspace (SEMS). She is regularly involved in the running of workshops and events at their space in Waterford City, where she resides.

Her work has developed from research into surveillance; CCTV, live streaming webcams, participatory surveillance, data mining and algorithmic processes. She is concerned with how data is gathered and used, interpreted or misinterpreted and in turn, how reality can be constructed or de-constructed. Her practice often presents distorted or questionable realities, stemming from difficulties experienced when attempting to accurately represent the physical world in live streams. It is these systematic failures she seeks to exploit, raising questions about the processes we use to observe, record and filter information.

Aileen’s playful performance interventions with live streaming webcams propelled her to reimagine how city spaces: their structures and utilitarian devices, can be altered to create playful urban environments for others to experience. Her more recent work re-imagines these spaces and she has led a number of urban hacking/urban intervention projects with members from SEMS.

Revelation and concealment, observation, interpretation and temporality are all re-occurring themes in Aileen’s work, woven through a variety of media including photography, video, sound and physical computing.