alt space was made with both a human and imagined AI audience in mind. What kind of art installation might appeal to a conscious computer? Presented as a gateway into a digital realm, the installation is an ‘environment' populated with geometric models, plants, digital imagery, and objects made using materials associated with electronics.

alt space is a new multimedia and sculptural installation by Méadhbh O’Connor made for the exhibition Beyond the Studio. The project draws from her years conversing with scientists who are uncovering and altering our understanding of nature as we know it, and engineers creating the new architecture of future computing. alt space was made with themes in mind such as the parallel worlds emerging from the increasing virtualisation of lived experience, the growth of artificial intelligence and new questions found within modern theoretical physics on what we perceive as reality. It is part of an overarching project commenced by Méadhbh in 2020 of the same name which has a particular focus on the place of the psychological and the spiritual in the face of this new technological frontier.

A poem written and spoken by Méadhbh accompanies the installation. One of an ongoing series of poetic vignettes she is writing, she revisits a conversation had with a physicist friend and places it in a surreal landscape–a recollection that moves around memory, the imagined, the analytic and the poetic, and comes from personal experience of the creativity that can spark from such exchanges between artists and scientists.