CENTRAL BANK, IRELAND
ideas competition
...THE GREY (a)WAKE
Have a desk and lamp all to myself and not at all much to do,
I am constantly making the most absurd mistakes here,
knowing damn all about banking business.
(James Joyce, Rome, 1906)
The Central Bank, as it stands, towers unapologetically above Dame Street, yet it is cavernous echoey. From this vantage point what is imagined, is a entangled, magic/real, intensified city miniature which we titled; The Living Rooms of the city. It is perceived as; a vertical city garden, archive and hyper sensorial space. Each program is consciously uncloaked.
OPUS I { RECURRING HARD TIMES IN WORDS AND IMAGES }
The spectre of market and fiscal deregulation looms over Europe
At its emblematic epicenter- a fallen state. Ireland
Bound-in, Endlessly unsettled
Unfamiliar
OPUS II { A WELTER FOCUSSED }
4 material languagescapes
72 rambling loose programmatic operations
A Babbling Penury
OPUS III { A PAUSE }
The opening subject is played muted
Knowing, as they are inclined to do so, they know that no matter what they seem to do, they are somehow destined to endlessly do it all over again
They begin to fail better.
[Again]
OPUS IV { SILENCE, THEN TREMBLING, AND AFTER THE FALL }
The canonical account in the Precepts describes the founding of the gaelic language;
A cut and paste operation on other languages that the 72 disciplines undertook after the dispersion
it was then that the rules of this language were constructed,all the best in each language, all there was that was grand or beautiful, was cut out and retained in Irish wherever there was something that had no name in any other language, a name for it was made up in Irish.
(Poli)
OPUS V { BEGINNING }
Others affirm that in the babbling tower there were only nine materials and that these were clay and water, wool and blood, wood and lime, pitch, linen, and bitumen.
These { nine } represent noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, participle, conjunction, preposition, interjection.
(note the discrepancy of nine materials vs. eight parts of speech).
OPUS VI { BEGINNING AGAIN }
1st Movement
16 select bars with fob topped pints, visual liquid, titillating.
2nd Movement...
16 bars - sinister.
3rd M-ove.... { allegro }
16 bars of 20 mm square twisted at various intervals, up and
down, FF and NF, in and out, over and out.
OPUS VII { A FORM OF SPECIFICATION }
{ THE SECOND MOVEMENT} With long drawn left hand cadenzas, is dedicated to all who stand in the way of smooth uninterrupted progress to the passage marked tender and thence to the excavation (behind the orchestra the phyllicity of silver is heard).
Discordancy. { MUST BE TOLERATED }
But, occasional outbreaks of harmony will be played sostenuto, with all the optimism of him who first finds it, and those still fit to sustain a third movement…{ A DISJOINED RHYTHM OF LINE }
A dry heavily played [bowed] structure.... { A FORM OF THIS FORM IS THAT IT IS ECHOIC }
{ THE MUSICAL AND PHYSICAL } It weaves its way in & out... ( Start agin’ )
OPUS VIII { PRESTO }
The third and final movement is climactic (it has to be in 48 bar overtone). As there is such a shortage, this sixteen must equal any 128. They shall be free of rust or mill scale after the fifth bar and no loose grout or sawdust shall anywhere adhere or be heard. Any whippy or defective bars shall be bent in unison until all arises are completely parallel with due allowance for sequential ordering.
Ave Iris. What'II you have? Siegfried was never thus!
OPUS IX { A WELTER BEYOND }
a room for fantastical and diabolical visioning (with an table inverted)
72 tables for reading
72 chairs for talking, 72 lift panel buttons of various sizes
1 curator
a keeper of ancient records
an infinite number of lists
a talking corner
a sweet shop
a butterfly hall
7 reading rooms (of deadly sins)
a tower and garden of books
a bird cage
an umbrella stand
a microphone
a safe
a wicker chair designed by Edwin Lutyens
a public toilet
72 digital screens
9 remote controls
a forest of wire
8 japanese goldfish
a rare book
a telescope
a room full of microscopes for viewing the butterfly drawings
a wind room for flute playing
a small corner for curious and untitled objects
4 gates of the cardinal points
countless mirrors and other reflective devices
2 cleaning cranes
4 whispering galleries
Sixteen bridges
a pungent tea-room for two people
a Pugin chair
a room for lost art with countless empty frames
six more bridges
twelve mobile ballasts
twenty-eight counterweights
a nail room
a room that gets excited on the colour red
[an]archic Whispering Gallery
4 scholars reading rooms
7 (hanging) gardens
an ice catcher
OPUS X { ANGELIC PLIGHT VENUS PANDEMOS }
Ave Iris(h).
What was that memorable thing you will have again?
The plight of the people?
... THE GREY (a)WAKE of this 'Banking Purgation'
My hero god! (SHE DIES)
Many most attractive and enthusiastic women also committed suicide
by stabbing, drowning, drinking prussic acid, aconite, arsenic,
opening their veins, refusing food, casting themselves under
steamrollers, from the top of nelsons pillar, into the great vat of
Guinness's brewery, asphyxiating themselves by placing their heads
in gas ovens, hanging themselves in stylish garters, leaping from
windows of different stories.
(James Joyce, The Veiled Sibyl, Ulysses)
OPUS XI { {SIGHING}….SOMEONE...QUOTING BECKETT }
It is not my wish to labour these antinomies,
for we are needless to say in a skull.
OPUS XII { A VISION OF TWO PIERCING GREY EYES }
Beyond The Wor[l]d
(Wait)….
OPUS XIII { THE REVENANT RETURNS AGAIN }
[A]lone in [his] icy bed
Design : Jason O'Shaughnessy and Eoin French
