Kerrie O'Leary

MFA Computational Art
Howth, Dublin , IRELAND

Kerrie O'Leary is a multimedia-artist currently working in Howth, Dublin. Her work is interested in turning complex data sets into simple visualizations that uncover previously unseen connections and patterns. This term she has focused on data sets relating to the sea.

The data driven work Kerrie produces is influenced by her undergraduate degree in Management Science and Information Systems. Blurring the lines between spreadsheets and creativity with Processing, Arduino and openFrameworks she aims to make artworks that surprise and excite.

I'm not homesick, I'm just missing the sea... After moving to London to do an MFA in Computational Art I realised how much I was missing the sea. Using wave data collected from the West Coast of Ireland, the corners of the fabric are tilted using micro-servos. The degree of rotation is determined by the wave heights and is connected to the fabric using invisible thread. The reflection of the fabric and the wave like motion hopes to connect people to the sea when they cannot physically get there.

SEA ~ SICK , 2020, multi-media installation

Page extracts from The Diary of a Wave. Using data collected from a buoy off the West Coast of Ireland, this PDF was created in Processing using different functions to map the values of the key features of the waves recorded during October 2020.

RECOGNISING OUR SEAS in 2100

This book aims to create awareness for the rising sea levels. Taking 80 news headlines that contain ‘Global Warming’, ‘Sea Levels’ or ‘Climate Change’ using an API, each headline is printed incrementally on each page. The titles are printed along a sine curve of the predicted rise in sea level for that year (2020 - 2100). As the book develops, the distorted text reveals an image of the sea. Are the headlines legible on the 80th page? Will our seas be recognisable in 2100?

Each time the code is run, the book contains different headlines on each page as a result of the call being made to the API.