O’Riley’s essay ‘From A to B and back’ focuses on the notion of a distributed work comprising a number of elements from which the viewer is free to draw connections. It considers syntactical terms such as hypotaxis and parataxis as ways of generating, thinking about or looking at artworks. These terms provide useful ways to reflect on the lateral forms of art practice. The article’s significance rests in the way that it unites seemingly disparate images and ideas to reflect on how narrative, and the construction of interpretation, are active elements within one’s response to a work.
This essay is an outcome of O’Riley’s research into Printed Matter, a project reflecting upon narrative, uncertainty and de-familiarisation in the reading of artworks. For example, O’Riley’s book Twenty-Seven Kilometres (2013) explores the notion of a distributed work in relation to his experience of looking at CERN in Geneva and is based on photographs taken by O’Riley during the final stages of work on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, before it was switched on for the first time. Conceived of as a kind of ‘speculative archaeology’, Twenty-Seven Kilometres broadly reflects on scientific endeavour and how the immensity of nature and human theories are squared with more everyday concerns. This book was the focus for ‘Exactitude and uncertainty’, a paper presented at ‘Impact 8’ Conference (2013).
The related artist’s book, A Farmer’s Almanac (2011), draws on a distributed work conceived as an almanac. The book is structured around ancient names for the full moon, often derived from Native American appellations. The bookwork also features a constructed image of the full moon generated by Dr Tony Cook of Aberystwyth University from the database sent back by the Clementine spacecraft in 1994. It was accepted for distribution by Printed Matter (New York) in 2013.