MARK CLARE: DemocraCity

Mark Clare, DemocraCity (still), 2011. © the artist

Screening Room

14 July – 7 August 2022

DemocraCity (2011) is an animation produced by Mark Clare using the 3D modelling program Google Sketchup.

Taking the contradictory ideologies of B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) and Theodore John Kaczynski as its starting point, and an edited version of Arvo Part's Fratres for violin and piano as its soundtrack, DemocraCity is a combination of architectural models.

The animation takes the viewer on a journey through a timeline of iconic modernist buildings – symbolic of a utopian dream – and onwards through a cityscape and the industrial structures necessary to deliver the fuel that power our cities. We ultimately enter a landscape based on artist renditions for the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository – due to become operational in 2023 – which extends deep into the granite bedrock of Finland.

Mark Clare (b.1968) is an artist whose practice embraces a variety of media and techniques, ranging from audio, animation, and video to photography, performance, and public interventions. He is presently artist-in-residence at UCD Earth Institute, Dublin and has previously exhibited at Crawford Art Gallery with I Believe In You (2014), and at the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.