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Speculative Objects - Artworks

Speculative Objects is a series of artworks that incorporate text and object. With 12 works to date – all with the same title – featuring objects such as a compass, set square or spirit level, the unfinished nature of this series is integral to O’Riley’s conceptualisation of the open-ended art object and its temporal contingencies. These works feature associative inscriptions determined by an object’s function or purpose, For example, one such ‘speculative object’ was a bench that was used to seat viewers of a two-hour animation of an orbit around the moon. The animation of the moon’s surface was created using data collected in 1994 by a spacecraft called Clementine, named after the folk song, ‘Oh My Darling Clementine!’ O’Riley’s bench features the first words of the song engraved onto its surface. This work was also inspired by the Apollo 11 mission, during which Michael Collins orbited the moon alone, while Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the lunar surface for the first time.

The language of art is speculated on, scrutinised and extended by inscribing words onto particular things. Building on his projects involving printed matter, these objects embody O’Riley’s notion of a distributed work: they are ‘tools for thinking’ and for open-ended speculation or observation.

A work from the ‘Speculative Objects’ series – together with a text written by O’Riley – was included in a book dedicated to Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at University of Oxford: Assimina Kaniari and Marina Wallace (eds.), Acts of Seeing: Artists, Scientists and the History of the Visual (Zidane Press, 2009). A selection from ‘Speculative Objects’ were exhibited in Spring 2011 at the library of Chelsea College of Art & Design.