Institute of Art Design + Technology
Dún Laoghaire

Ryan Egan 

BA [Hons] Art

Ryan Egan is a multi-disciplinary artist from Dublin. He uses video, sound and digital sculptures (photogrammetry and 3D modelling) to explore materiality and meaning. Non-linearity and the impact of screen-based perspectives are central to his practice. His work reflects on how languages of digital media structure the user's experience and affect their relation to reality. His video works are playful yet precise, often featuring rapid movement and visual interruptions that serve as slipping points between the passive and the active. He has exhibited at Monopol, Berlin (2023) and In The Making: Navel at Pallas Projects (2024).

Project Description

My practice explores the entanglements of the self with digital technologies and how this gives rise to a different sensual image of the world. World Trap! is a moving image work that examines tensions between attention and distraction. It traps and reformats fleeting moments into shifting modes of fixation. Insignificant spots and cut-aways get lost in states of reiteration, where they begin to morph into something immense. I connect the varied contexts of the images, allowing them to influence the direction of this work, resulting in a rhythm that mimics a generated flow of information. I trapped these subjects using structural techniques, providing space for them to slip out of their original contexts. The current feeling of instability generated by networked environments seeps into the way the material is reconstructed. Resulting in video poetry that meshes disparate sequences, this work reflects on the relationship between the self and small screens.


Intersections of Art and Emerging Technologies in the 20th and 21st Centuries

The hybridization of art and technology, as well as our contemporary state of information proliferation, continues to define and modify our existing realities by reimagining bodies, interactions, and our sphere as a whole. This thesis investigates how emerging technologies, with their expanding possibilities and abstractions, have inspired novel artistic possibilities and pushed understandings of nature to its limits. The thesis also explores how these technologies have challenged traditional views of what constitutes a work of art. Art has been able to raise awareness of the structural and broader political factors that underpin mainstream user-friendly technologies through exposing the patterns that lurk behind the surface of efficiency. In addition to being a weapon of collective presence and political resistance, contemporary technology also paradoxically confines humans to a user surface. This paper explores the implications of these factors on art creation, social reality and the human experience. Finally, this thesis reflects on the ways technologies have altered the relationship we have with our bodies and how cyborg artists are challenging the fundamentals of what it means to be human through experimentation and performance.