Subversive, Investigative, and Open Source Practices

Dates: Monday 25th & Tuesday 26th of May, 2026       Times: 09.00 - 16.30

Location: Centre for Creative Technologies, O'Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance, University of Galway.

Speakers: Rose Butler // Anthea Caddy // Yiannis Colakides // Robert Collins // Vuk Ćosić //Jenny Jih // Nadja Verena Marcin // Alaz Okudan // Lucy A. Sames // Leda Sadotti // Miyö Van Stenis

Organisers: Rose Butler // Anthea Caddy // Yiannis Colakides // Paul O' Neill 

Calling artists, agents, shape shifters, spooks and tricksters: those who work in the spaces between certainty and possibility, who thrive in ambiguity, on the ground and underground, challenging and subverting systems of power using any tools and techniques available to them. 

Subversive artistic practices have a long history. The internet and digital platforms have provided opportunities not only to oppose hegemonic politics or culture directly, but also to ‘sidestep’ or ‘hijack’ institutional power, allowing artists to operate within their own rules.

Artistic practice often spans or blurs ways of working, straddling disciplines that have conflicting authorities, histories, or modes of representation. These practices may incorporate, work with, and cross over with activist methods, but expand and move between different modes of engagement and representation. In practice, such methods can be humorous, investigatory, and non-conforming, sometimes flawed or failing. They sidestep, dodge, flip-back and are not troubled by their limitations or imperfections. Often carried out away from or at a distance from the structures of academic research, these works are modest, low or no-budget, and self-directed. Their playful undercover-ness is embedded in art practices that may trouble or challenge authority, power structures, institutions, or established hierarchies. They are, according to Lucy Lippard, “[b]ased in subversion on the one hand, and empowerment on the other, [… and operate] both within and beyond the beleaguered fortress that is high culture.”

This way of working also challenges how knowledge itself is produced and legitimised. Donna Haraway proposes that “situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship of ‘objective knowledge.’” This reframing frees up knowledge to be ‘fleet of foot’ or fluid, suggesting opportunities for dalliance or diversion as knowledge evolves. It releases the researcher and artist from dominant, omnipresent or overbearing authorship and creates a space for divergence, foregrounding the minority or lone voice.