Curator’s Tour: System Arming

Curator’s Tour with Aoife Banks of System Arming a group exhibition featuring work by artists Aisling Phelan, Nadia J. Armstrong, Kennedy Browne, and Colin Martin. 

SYSTEM ARMING explores the complex ways digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism intersect with contemporary power structures. Through paint, sculpture, film, and installation, the exhibiting artists examine how data mining, algorithms, and machine learning shape our daily lives, and how these technologies are increasingly used to influence or control behaviour, reshaping human agency, perception, and collective intelligence. The works in this exhibition confront the tangible, real-world impacts of these systems, from the psychological strain of algorithmic manipulation to the environmental costs of energy-intensive data centres. SYSTEM ARMING invites audiences to consider the ethical, social, and existential questions of living in a world designed to anticipate, influence, and ultimately arm itself against us.