Echo Chamber

Matthew Nevin, EUCIDA Curator in Residence for 2017, took the idea of an ‘Echo Chamber’ as the starting point for this project. An example of an echo chamber effect can be seen in social media where users engage only with people and media sources that share their particular beliefs and viewpoints. In this way the digital arts may sometimes seem like a medium which caters only to a specific tech-savvy audience. Our aim is to create an accessible Europe-wide dialogue on digital arts technology and its interpretation of politics, culture and society.

The Echo Chamber exhibition ran concurrently across three European countries (Ireland, Latvia and France) in 2017, and for this reason our commissioners – Rua Red Gallery and EUCIDA – asked us to consider fundamental aspects when delivering the project’s identity, highlighting the collaboration among the three contributing galleries. As outlined by the commissioner from the beginning the project was produced on a restrictive budget, and as a result our design solution for both the exhibition identity and the printed media needed to visually communicate the central ideas of the exhibition across language barriers.

In our project research we explored the idea of an echo chamber in terms of the online digital world and within music. We created an abstract symbol to symbolise an echo chamber drawing on three sources representing the contribution of three distinct partners. The final symbols’ orientation is a direct geographical reference to the positions of the contributing galleries.