The Thursday Post: Loch Computer

Scientists, writers and visual artists have collaborated on an exhibition, Loch Computer, that will be hosted by the Edinburgh College of Art between 28 March until 8 April to coincide with the 2016 Edinburgh International Science Festival. The exhibition will feature new work by photographer Norman McBeath, T.S. Eliot Prize-winning poet Jen Hadfield, computer scientist Al Dearle and many more.

The exhibition, which explores themes of ‘remoteness’ and ‘connectedness’ in the digital era, focuses on the Hebridean island of Iona. At the exhibition’s centre is an installation created by McBeath and print-maker Leena Nammari. De Locis Sanctis (On Sacred Places) is inspired by an account of Jerusalem given to a seventh-century abbot of Iona by a traveller shipwrecked on the island. McBeath and Nammari’s unsettling installation ‘rhymes’ sites on Iona with technologically fortified sites in present-day Jerusalem.

Loch Computer also features ‘The Iona Machine’, invented by computer scientist Al Dearle to deliver ‘puddles of internet’ to remote places that lack broadband access. In the exhibition, the Machine is programmed to provide through QR codes new poems in Gaelic and English by poets Meg Bateman, Peter Mackay and Robert Crawford.

Loch Computer is the brainchild of poet, biographer and professor of English at the University of St Andrews Robert Crawford: ‘Loch Computer has been rewarding not least because it’s been unpredictable – it’s burst its banks and overflowed in directions none of us quite imagined. The Loch Computer exhibition is just one of the proofs of that.’

Other participants in Loch Computer include the writers Candia McWilliam, Alice Thompson, Meaghan Delahunt and Ruth Thomas and computer scientist Dave Robertson. An anthology featuring new work by Loch Computer’s participants, The Book of Iona, will be published by Polygon in July. A collectors’ edition artist’s box is also available. The project has a website featuring further information: click here for more information.

Loch Computer can be seen at Edinburgh College of Art’s Tent Gallery, Evolution House, 78 West Port, Edinburgh EH1 2LE from Monday 28 March 2 to Friday 8 April, Monday to Saturday, 2pm-5pm.