Irish Lights

Irish Lights is a digital film installation which explores the philosophical ideas of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’, as experienced and understood by an individual subject. In the piece one sees footage of the lighthouses of Dublin Bay, filmed at dawn and dusk, and often out of focus. As they blink on and off according to their predetermined rhythms, the lights seem to speak to one another across the bay that they guard, reminding us simultaneously of safety and danger, welcome and exclusion.Meanwhile, some simple, representative actions performed by the two actors on screen – digging, sharpening a stick – come to stand in for all of our efforts to gain some control over our surroundings and our environment. The same actors also lip-sync some of the monologue spoken by the narrator (whom we never see). These sections were filmed on the beach at Ireland’s Eye, a small island off Howth in north County Dublin.The work exists in two versions, in which the roles of the two on-screen actors are reversed and an alternative edit of the monologue is used; everything else in the two versions is identical.Irish Lights was produced in response to a commission for the exhibition ‘The Prehistory of the Crisis (2)’, and was shown simultaneously at Project Arts Centre, Dublin and Belfast Exposed Gallery, Belfast in summer 2009. For this original screening, the two versions played in the two venues on alternate days.