Scope and Content:

Oonagh Young Gallery presents I'm Getting Parts by Dennis McNulty which draws together a number of works commissioned for the recent Liverpool Biennial. Originally employed as the constituent components of an installation at Bluecoat, these elements are reconfigured in response to the affordances of the gallery and accompanied by a number of newer works which have been produced specially for this show. Looming in the background of this body of work is the figure of Rene Descartes, the mathematician and philosopher whose contributions to both fields had a profound impact on the Western conception of reality and space. McNulty's work attempts to undo both his mind body split, and his xyz gridding of space. To aid in this endeavour, he gathers together a heterogeneous bunch of materials and technologies: laser-cut hand-bent perspex, HD video, algorithmically structured computer generated images, a slide-projector, a custom LED display system driven by a Internet of Things network protocol, an iOS app tutorial video, polypropylene webbing, a lanyard and access card, microphone cabling and various open source software development platforms. Ideas around technologies of human interconnectedness drawn from Theodore Sturgeon's weird sci-fi classic More Than Human and British tech guru Stafford Beer's design for the Cybersyn Ops Room, are also incorporated as materials. The mathematical field of Topology deals with how things relate to each other, especially when subjected to processes of stretching, bending or folding. It is not concerned with quantity but qualities such as continuity and discontinuity are considered significant. I'm Getting Parts looks to Topology as a useful counter to the quantitative focus of Descartes, in order to move away from how much and how long toward a worldview more closely aligned with our embodied experience.