Garrett Lynch

Garrett Lynch (born 1977) is an Irish new media artist working with networked technologies in a variety of forms including online art, installation, performance and writing. His work is foremost conceptual and deals with a wide and evolving definition of networks within an artistic context; how networks provide a space for artistic creation. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Digital Media Design at the University of Bournemouth.

Garrett Lynch was born and lived in Cork, Ireland until 1995 when he emigrated to England to undertake higher education in art and design. In 1999 he graduated with a degree in Visual Communication, specialised in Multimedia, from The University of Central England (since renamed Birmingham City University), moved to Paris to work in the new media industry and continue his studies at the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (EnsAD). In 2001 he graduated from the MA Atelier de Recherché Interactive (ARI) and returned to England.

Since 2000 Lynch has a developed an artistic practice centred on the use of networks. He has published papers including "Google and Art: A commercial/cultural new media art economy?" in the ISEA, Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts newsletter and "Net Art : au-delà du navigateur… un monde d’objets" (Net.art: beyond the browser to a world of things) in Terminal no. 101, "Net Art, Technologie ou Création?" (Net Art, Technology or Creation), spoken at conferences and events, curated exhibitions and live events, exhibited and performed in a number of international exhibitions and events including "Notes on a New Nature" at 319 Scholes, "The Vending Machine" at the 54th Venice Biennale, "REFF – Remix the World, Reinvent Reality" at Furtherfield Gallery, Jouable; Art, Jeu et Interactivité, and "Liminality: The Space Between Worlds" at Antena.

He actively teaches on the subject of networks and has taught new media at undergraduate and postgraduate higher education in a number of institutions in England and Wales including the University of Central England, the University of Hertfordshire, Canterbury Christ Church University and the University of South Wales. Lynch has maintained the Network Research weblog since 2006 as a means of creating ongoing discourse on a wide variety of artistic uses of networks.

Lynch's work has developed based on a conceptual consideration of the use of networks within artistic practice. Moving initially from a net.art practice and its emphasis on the web and the web browser as artistic form to a networked practice that explores networks in their widest interpretation, his work uses networks as "a means, site and context for artistic initiation, creation and discourse".

Informed by Cybernetics and Communication theory, his discourse frequently deals with issues concerning nodes and their arrangement, the spaces between or the internodal and the behaviour that can occur between nodes in a network. As such he views his work dealing with these concepts and issues as largely opportunist, potentially parasitic in nature and his practice as essentially one of arrangements aligning it with key concerns within conceptual art.

He states that his networked practice aims "to get people to think about the ideas I'm making connections or links between. I personally like work that makes me think so I try to make work to make others think…What obsesses me is not the internet per se but the idea of networks, all sorts of networks, technological (digital, electronic and electrical), social, biological etc. My work is starting to be a networked art rather than net.art, an internet art".

Curating and sonic arts

Garrett Lynch performing Trav-erse at REFF Furtherfield on 25 February 2011.

Since 2001 curating has been a part of Garrett's practice. Initially curating online net.art works through the "Banner Art Collective", in 2006 he co-founded the sonic arts events "Open Ear" which ran ten live events at various locations in England and Wales until 2009. These events provided performance opportunities for artists working across the spectrum of sonic, performance and audio-visual arts. Events occurred within club, gallery, stage and site-specific venues and included a number of collaboration, live, generative and audio-visual performance, hybridised art, DIY soundart, circuit-bending and networked works. Performers during the three years of its existence included Janek Schaefer, Semiconductor Films, Ampersand, Disinformation and John Wild.

Performance in virtual worlds

Lynch created the site-specific work for the online virtual world of Second Life "Between Saying and Doing" in 2008 as a critical comment on performance and virtual worlds. This initiated a series of installation and performance works dealing with ideas of identity and place as they relate to networked spaces that remains ongoing. In these works Lynch explores the "real" and the "virtual" through the transposing of his own identity to virtual worlds without any attempt to masquerade or imagine a new identity. This process involves the use of his real name for his "representation" or avatar, word play that references his names origins as both real and Irish and the use of a sandwich board prop stating this that is worn continuously.

In 2010/2011 he was artist in residence at HUMlab, Yoshikaze Up-in-the-Air Residency and produced eleven works concerning place and identity including "Three Wearable Devices for Augmented Virtuality", "Meeting Sang (Colorado / Cardiff)" and "The Green Stage". Curator Sachiko Hayashi stated the following about his practice; "Stripped of any relation to other humans/avatars, Garrett Lynch (IRL) is an entity, almost an essence, whose existence is formed purely in relation to RL artist Garrett Lynch and to the environments his creator carefully selects. By consciously examining the two worlds through various reference points, Garrett Lynch (IRL)'s unique performances delicately yet deliberately reveal the enigmatic intersection between the real and the virtual. Beneath his tech savviness that expands Second Life's boundary into several external devices lies the core of his exploration into the nature of representation in the era of virtuality, the unknown territory of multiple realities which even encompasses several layers of virtualities." He has since published an article in Metaverse Creativity (Volume 2, Number 2) detailed outcomes of the residency.

Currently Lynch has and is currently performing with a custom-built scale reproduction of his Second Life "representations" sandwich board. This has been worn at a number of exhibitions and performances.