Aideen Doran

Aideen Doran will be using her Creative Lab residency to develop a screenplay for a new moving image work. Through a series of workshops, screenings and discussions, Doran will explore the challenges that advanced prosthetics and sensory substitution technology present to established ideas of identity and the authentic or natural body. By focusing on innovative research on neural interfaces for prosthetic limbs and sensory impairments, Doran will be reflecting on the politics and aesthetics of the technologically augmented body, and exploring the affective dimensions of the symbiosis of human bodies and inorganic matter.

This project aims to address timely questions of how we differentiate between bodies, objects and technologies when the boundaries that separate them are increasingly ambiguous. How do new technologies challenge established ideas of what constitutes thinking and non-thinking matter, self and other? Current developments in artificial intelligence systems, robotics and biomechanical engineering, from machine ‘sight’ to chatbots and battlefield robotics begin to blur the boundaries between traditional dualities of life and non-life, object and subject, and move technological innovation into the realm of affective experience.

Aideen Doran is a visual artist whose practice traverses moving image, installation and writing. Her work attempts to ‘make strange’ the stuff of the world by introducing ambiguity, contingency and subjectivity into our fragmented representations of objective reality. Doran has recently completed a PhD in Visual Arts Practice with Northumbria University. In 2016 she was shortlisted for the Margaret Tait award for moving image artists based in Scotland, and her work has been supported by The British Council, Northern Film and Media and The Arts Council of Northern Ireland.