The Cloud is Hungry and Thirsty’: States of Entanglement

Presented by ANU College of Engineering, Computing and Cybernetics

The ANU School of Cybernetics is proud to host this public lecture by Professor Chris Morash of Trinity College Dublin.

The Cloud is Hungry and Thirsty': States of Entanglement

The Irish Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 featured an installation entitled Entanglement, which (to use the words of the accompanying publication) "uses the prism of heat to explore the material relationship between data infrastructure and architecture through a structure that collapses local- and planetary-scale data infrastructure networks into the most primitive of socialising technologies: the campfire." Built into the installation are artefacts and references from the earliest transatlantic telegraph and data cables, and the publication accompanying the physical installation, States of Entanglement, includes an essay by Chris Morash on the transatlantic telegraph of 1858. This talk will look at some of the ways in which this artwork allows us to think in new ways about the materiality of data.

About the Speaker

Professor Chris Morash, FTCD, MRIA, is the inaugural Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin. He has published widely on Irish cultural and literary history, ranging from studies of Irish Famine literature (Writing the Irish Famine, Oxford, 1996), histories of Irish telecommunications and media and of Irish theatre (A History of the Media in Ireland, Cambridge, 2010 and A History of the Irish Theatre, 1601-2000, Cambridge, 2002), as well as a work of spatial theory, Mapping Irish Theatre (with Shaun Richards, Cambridge, 2013). His most recent book is Yeats on Theatre (Cambridge, 2021), and Dublin: A Writer's City will be published in 2023. He served as Vice-Provost of Trinity College, 2016-19, was a member of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland (2009-14), and currently chairs the judging panel for the richest prize for a single work of literature in English, the International Dublin Literary Award. Prof. Morash was elected as a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 2008.

His research interests range across a number of areas in the wider field of Irish Studies, Irish theatre; Irish media history; the Irish Famine; Irish cultural history and Yeats. He has also published on the Transatlantic Telegraph and contributed an essay on the telegraph to the publication States of Entanglement, which accompanied the Irish entry to the Venice Biennale in 2021.

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