Writing, catalogs, and proposals by Brian O’Connell, and outside sources. Every document can be searched by its full text.
Big Art Dish: A Report and Proposal. Los Angeles, April 2015.
A proposal for the Big Art Dish — an instrument for gathering astronomical radio-frequency signals to be made available as online streams of data for use by artists of all types. Located in the desert near Los Angeles, it would also be a latter-day earthwork: a parabolic dish carved into the ground, facing the sky directly above.
The “University of Trash” seminar at SculptureCenter (Newtown Creek): over three Sundays, participants built small concrete boats and launched them in Newtown Creek.
Preparatory correspondence and research for 2012’s Openings to the Water — casting a concrete vessel on the exterior of a disused wooden dinghy. The new hull bears the old one’s impression. Includes exploration of shipbuilding in the eastern Aegean from the Bronze Age to the present, and concrete boat construction methods in text and image.
The 2009 build, following the process in the 1971 Whole Earth Catalog.
The original 2005 proposal to the Director of the Central Library, KU Leuven — opening on Bergson’s Matter and Memory and Freud’s Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (1914). Realized as FLASHBULBS.
Flashbulbs: The Central Library Project. The University Library of the KUL, Leuven, Belgium, 2005.
The full catalog for FLASHBULBS at the University Library, Leuven — reading-room texts, contributors, the Ladeuzezaal. The realized publication of the Central Library Project.
“Ghostly Media: What Would an Invoking Medium Look Like?” Art and Research, Glasgow School of Art, 2008.
“About Thick Air…, About Riddles,” in Simon Dybbroe Møller: Kompendium. Kunstverein Hannover, Frankfurter Kunstverein, and JRP Press, 2009.
On a set of printing plates (clichés) found in a 1951 house near Cologne.
“DEMONOLOGY,” in Hey, Hey Glossolalia. Creative Time, New York, 2008.
Contribution to Hey, Hey Glossolalia, Creative Time, New York, 2008.