Concept NULL Newsletter #48
👋 Welcome
Hey and hello, 🤠
The days are finally getting longer and summer is around the corner. We hope everyone is having fun, learning, collaborating and generally being active in this thriving community.
If you want to reach out to us about anything you are doing, feel free. And if you get something out of this newsletter, feel free to share it.
🔦 Spotlight
ALTERNATING CURRENT
Organiser/s: The Complex, Dublin Digital Radio
Location: Dublin
Date: 01-05-2025 → 04-05-2025
Alternating Current 2025 will explore the theme ‘Urban Scores.’ Inspired by the writings of Elena Biserna, this edition seeks to provoke sonic works that can both score the city and be scored by it. The programme will feature live performances, broadcasts, workshops, and artistic interventions, inviting artists to interpret Dublin City—and cities at large—through a sonic lens. Taking place from May 1st to 4th, 2025, Alternating Current will be hosted across multiple venues for the first time arriving, at The Complex on Saturday and Sunday. The public is invited to a free programme of broadcasts, workshops, and interventions at Flux Studios & Gallery on May 1st.
🎪 Events
PhD Open Studio
Organiser/s: Centre for Creative Technologies
Location: Studio 3, O'Donoghue Centre, University of Galway
Date: 17-04-2025
PhD researchers from the Centre for Creative Technologies invite you to their first Open Studio exhibition. The Open Studio offers visitors an opportunity to view and engage with the practice-based experiments that underpin their work. Using VR, AI, and other emerging technologies in a critical and exploratory fashion, the works invite the public to reimagine our relationship with technology. Join us in this collaborative space for a behind-the-scenes look at technological artworks-in-progress—where ideas, technology, and play intertwine as a medium for creative exploration and social inquiry. Opening April 17 at 1-4PM.
Trevor Wishart in concert
Organiser/s: Digital Media & Arts Research Centre
Location: Dance Limerick
Date: 22-04-2025
DMARC is proud to present the final major composition from noted composer Trevor Wishart. The Garden of Earthly Delights re-envisions Hieronymus Bosch’s phantasmagorical painting as a multichannel sonic wonder. This unique concert also showcases Limerick’s important contributions to electronic and electroacoustic music. Performers include Paddy Mulcahy (Sony Music), Neil O Connor (Ordnance Survey), Hugh Clery Ward, and Robin Parmar (Silent Records). Join us Tuesday 22 April at Dance Limerick Performance Space. Doors open at 7pm and admission is only €10 (€5 concession). Please note that seating is limited to ensure perfect sound for every listener!
Correspondences at The Cooler
Organiser/s: The Complex
Location: The Complex, Dublin
Date: 25-04-2025
Virtuoso pianist, composer and improviser Xenia Pestova Bennett joins forces with acclaimed visual artist Joe Hanly to present a striking interdisciplinary project. Correspondences combines pre-recorded digital audio with live performance featuring piano and toy piano alongside visual elements.
Signal Flow
Organiser/s: Northern Lights Project
Location: Playhouse, Derry
Date: 27-04-2025
Experience four concerts and five pop-up performances, including a brunch session from 11am to 1pm, featuring music by Ailis Ni Riain, Amble Skuse, Brona Martin, Linda O’Keeffe, Anderinna Gooch, John McLachlan, Francis Dhomont, Annette vande Gorne, and Peter O’Doherty. Enjoy live sets from Adam Denton, Vincent O’Callaghan, Gavin McCarron, Brian Bridges, INK, Rob Casey, People That Listen To The Sky, Daryl Martin, and more.
🛠️ Workshops
Politics of gameplay: Power, Agency and Narratives in Online Games
Date: 22-04-2025
Organiser/s: Goethe Institut
Location: Online
In this online workshop, multimedia artist and game designer Stella Jacob explores how digital games can go beyond pure entertainment. Participants will discover how games can serve as micro-worlds to experiment with ideas like power, justice, and community. Through rules and mechanics, games reflect, question, or critique social structures—examining who holds power, how decisions are made, and how inequality operates. Using accessible tools like Twine, Bitsy, Godot, and Decker, attendees will create their own experimental games and interactive storytelling systems. The workshop is open to anyone interested in games, storytelling, digital design, or exploring how technology can challenge and reimagine social models.
📖 Articles
Visual artists' workspace organisational survey
Visual Artists' Ireland
The Arts Council, in partnership with Visual Artists Ireland, is conducting a nationwide survey to assess the availability, demand, and distribution of workspaces for visual artists. This research aims to build a detailed picture of specialist workspace needs across the country and improve infrastructure for artists. All studio and workspace providers — public or private — are encouraged to participate and share their insights. The data collected will help shape future support and policy by mapping current provision and capacity. This is the first of three surveys planned, with follow-ups scheduled to track changes and developments over time.
Creative Coding in Blender 2.92: A Primer
Jeremy Behreandt
This updated tutorial invites creative coders to explore Blender as a platform for procedural artwork. While a little outdated by now, it is aimed at those with some coding experience, it introduces Blender’s capabilities through Python scripting—covering animated geometry, modifiers, constraints, and material creation using Open Shading Language (OSL). It also touches on the grease pencil tool for 2D effects. Blender is free and open-source, making it a flexible option for digital artists looking to expand their toolkit.
EX.751 Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst
RA Exchange
The global conversation around AI is intensifying, touching everything from religion to politics to creativity. Artists and academics Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst — longtime voices in AI ethics — offer a grounded perspective shaped by two decades of research and activism. In a new RA Exchange, they reflect on their recent exhibitions at The Whitney and Serpentine, pushing beyond fear-driven narratives to explore how AI can expand artistic boundaries, while navigating questions of ownership, governance, and raising a child in a tech-saturated world.
📯 Open Calls
Fondation Etrillard - Digital Arts Prize
Deadline: 30-04-2025
Organiser/s: Fondation Etrillard
Location: Europe
The Prix Arts numériques is a new €20,000 annual award for a digital artwork created between 2021 and 2024 and publicly exhibited. Open to artists of any nationality living in Europe, the prize highlights digital works—AI, VR, generative art, robotics, and more—that resonate with traditional disciplines like painting, music, architecture, or dance. Emphasizing dialogue between classic and contemporary media, the prize aims to position digital art as a key artistic practice. Following an open call, three finalists will be selected, with one winning work chosen by a jury.
The Cosmos, The Earth & Us
Deadline: 29-04-2025
Organiser/s: A4 Sounds
Location: Dublin
A4 Sounds invites artists to propose work for our upcoming exhibition The Cosmos, The Earth & Us as part of our We Only Want the Earth Programme in July 2025. We Only Want the Earth is a programme of politically and socially engaged arts activities, and is intended as a broad conversation about the goals and strategies of social change: what kind of society do we want and how should we get there?
Residency at the Astronomical Observatory of Unamur
Deadline: 28-04-2025
Organiser/s: Kikk Galaxy
Location: Namur
Two artists and/or collectives will be welcomed in residence (one international and one from the Wallonia-Brussels Federation – resident in Brussels or in Wallonia) in the beautiful residency studios (2 apartments that can each accommodate up to 4 people) located on the rooftop of the Delta in Namur, Belgium. Each artist (or collective) will receive a grant of €5,000 to develop a new media art or art & science project on the theme of astronomy, along with curatorial and scientific support.
Outburst Queer Arts Festival Open Call
Deadline: 09-05-2025
Organiser/s: Outburst Arts
Location: Belfast
The festival is responsive each year to what’s happening in the world around us and for queer art and artists. The artforms, platforms and spaces can vary too, with some years being more heavily performance-led and other years focusing more on writing, taking spaces or visual arts. Our programming is all about queer art and liberatory ideas that take risks in form or content and create generous space for us as queer people (and friends) to share, talk and imagine together. How that presents is always changing and that’s exciting.
Summer Sessions 2025
Deadline: 07-05-2025
Organiser/s: V2
Location: Europe
The Summer Sessions are short-term international art and technology residencies for emerging artists and designers. A network of cultural organizations all over the world sponsors and hosts the residencies. Every summer we offer early-career artists and designers support so they can take part in production residencies abroad. If selected, you will receive access to the facilities of the host institution, expert support and an opportunity to present the resulting work at a public event. A budget will be provided to cover travel, accommodation, materials and a stipend.
🏠 Residencies
Cavendish Arts Science Fellowship at Girton College
Deadline: 10-05-2025
Organiser/s: Cavendish Arts Science
Location: Cambridge
The Fellowship supports the Cavendish Arts Science ethos of experimenting, decentring and re-imagining. It is designed for artists to develop thought-provoking ideas through engagement with physicists and those in other fields, and to experiment with new approaches to their practice that are transformative and push boundaries.
💰 Funding
Agility Award
Deadline: 24-04-2025
Organiser/s: Arts Council Ireland
Location: Ireland
The Agility Award supports individual professional artists and arts practitioners who have not been previously funded as an individual by the Arts Council. It focuses on enabling artists to develop their practice, develop their work and develop their skills. Max award: €5000
Arts and Disability Connect Funding
Deadline: 07-05-2025
Organiser/s: Arts and Disability Ireland
Location: Ireland
The Arts and Disability Connect scheme is designed to support artists with disabilities to be ambitious, to develop their practice and to connect with arts organisations and arts professionals in the Republic of Ireland.
That’s it for now! The newsletter gets sent out 1st and 15th of every month and we post open calls and events as they come in on our Instagram so be sure to follow us there.
Again, thank you for all of your support as we continue to grow our project with the help of a great community and, as we always say, we would love to hear your thoughts, projects, events or other open opportunities so drop us an email.
Chat soon, Concept NULL
[conceptnullofficial@gmail.com]