Dennis McNulty
Alan O'Boyle and I began making music together in the early nineties, deciding after a while to call ourselves Decal. Over the course of the decade or so before we parted ways, we produced numerous 12”s on labels such as Rotters Golf Club, Satamile, D1 and our own Ultramack and Trama Industries labels and released three albums, including 404 Not Found on Planet Mu in 2002. For many years we had a show on Dublin's Power FM pirate radio station and with promoter Paul Timoney, we ran a club night called Phunk City at The Funnel Bar (1999-2000). Guests included Autechre, Andrew Weatherall, Andrea Parker, Richard H. Kirk and a whole host of Rephlex, Warp, Planet Mu and Skam artists, among others.
On graduating from MMT in 2000 I began to contribute small audio works to group exhibitions taking place in non-gallery spaces and started working as an audio researcher/DSP developer for a start-up, for whom I coded a dynamic multi-source audio spatialisation application and a scripting language for flexible interface description in SHARC DSP assembler.
Around the same time my friend David Lacey introduced me to free improv and in 2003 we started playing together and promoting concerts for the likes of Rhodri Davies, John Butcher, Keith Rowe, Angharad Davies, Peter Rehberg and Sean Meehan. In order to participate in this community I developed a system which would allow me to improvise with a computer using max/msp and some MIDI controllers. David and I formed an organisation which we called i&e and in 2005, put together the first of 6 annual festivals which took place at The Printing House in TCD.
In 2004 I was invited to be one of Ireland's representatives at the São Paulo Bienal, thus accelerating what had up to that point been a slow drift into the visual arts. Since then I have exhibited in a wide range of contexts, drawing on the things I learned from MMT, my civil engineering education and my own research into a variety of fields such as architecture, geography, cybernetics and media archaeology, to produce physical objects, media entities and performative situations of various kinds. I often make work for non-gallery spaces.
Over time I have realised that Dermot Furlong's Psychoacoustics course was a fundamental building block in all of this activity, not only from an audio perspective, but also for its wider implications in relation to human perception, embodied cognition and the whole Cartesian house of cards.
Dennis McNulty. May 2018.
Selected projects include:
TTOPOLOGY, VISUAL, Carlow (2018)[solo]; Homo Gestalt, Liverpool Biennial (2016); IMMA Collection: A Decade, Irish Museum of Modern Art (2016); LIAF: Disappearing Acts, Lofoten, Norway (2015); Relaxation Time, Hmn, London (2015); A Leisure Complex, Collective, Edinburgh/Carnoustie (2014)[solo]; PROTOTYPES, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Ireland (2014)[solo]; The Face of Something New, Scriptings, Berlin (2013)[solo]; The Eyes of Ayn Rand, Performa, New York (2011); Space replaced by volume, Granoff Art Centre at Brown University, US (2011)[solo]; Nothing is impossible, Mattress Factory, US(2010); Encuentro de Medellin, Colombia (2007) and São Paulo Biennial (2004 & 2008).
Visit: www.dennismcnulty.com/