Impact: Commercialisation: my book, Amateurs! was published by Verso in September 2024. Verso holds a special place in English language publishing, bridging the divide between academic and general readerships, and is ideally suited to my project, ensuring that my book will reach an international audience of academics, arts practitioners, journalists, general readers, and particularly the online ‘amateurs’ I study in the work. I have delivered a series of short talks on RTÉ, Irish public radio, of work in progress from the book as well as participating in panels, giving talks, and interviews at academic conferences, art galleries, universities, art schools, bookshops, literary and arts festivals, generating income for publishers, bookshops, radio and arts and literary festivals. Details are given in the Communication and Dissemination sections.
Impact: Contribution to Academic and Arts Practice: My work is unique it its development of a style, form, and allied modes of dissemination appropriate to the subject of my investigation, that engage and bring into conversation diverse audiences via the same work, to produce a work that is not only multidisciplinary but multivalent. The hybridity of my methodologies and outcomes is a unique and cutting-edge contribution to the critical form that proposes an expansion of the kinds of practices available within and outside academia, and in art as social practice.
My outputs intervene in and bring togther a range of long-running debates within and outside academia regarding equality and diversity in arts access and funding; aesthetics, class and taste; AI art an artistic autonomy; feminist discourse around onscreen and online representation, and art practice as labour and/or leisure. As a result of my project I have been invited to write a monthly column, ‘Works of Art,’ for Art Review, creating a solid public platform for the discussion of creative acts as labour.
Impact: Internationalisation: Events around the launch of the book in September/October and November 2025 reaching live audiences in Ireland, the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Portugal, plus a larger audience via online recordings. Venues include arts journals (Spike, Berlin), Bookshops (eg Desperate Literature, Madrid, After8 Books, Paris and Burley Fisher, London); universities and art schools (Manchester, RCA, de Montfort); and festivals (the BETA digital arts festival, Dublin), as well as a book launch in Maynooth University. I will work to present my work at futher events beyond these dates. I currently have requests for presentations next year at John Moores University, UK, and at IADT, Ireland.
Ye Wha’similarly has inbuilt impacts:
The website will be free to use, and coding will be, where possible, open source. It will be presented to cross-disciplinary audiences: at a future BETA digital arts festival (Dublin), and I am in discussion with the Irish gallery, Kunstverein Aughrim, about creating an installation based on the work, which will reach a live local audience. Further financial support is needed to create the final stages of the project. I am in the process of making applications.
