Tim O’Riley has published numerous articles and essays exploring the relations between art and research, science, digital media, and the role of speculation, narrative and serendipity in art practice. He has developed an eclectic working practice that is rooted in the overlapping spaces between art, science and literature. It has centred on digital technology – specifically modelling and animation – but is informed by a range of media and explores relationships between technology and subjectivity, fact and fiction, and the still and the moving image. Recent projects have been spurred on by a chance encounter with a memento from the Apollo 11 lunar mission, a small Irish flag which had travelled aboard the historic spacecraft and which resides at an observatory in Dublin. In the light of this serendipity, a recent book Accidental Journey brings together some of his associated research into science, literature, lunar exploration and narratives.
Over the years O'Riley has been involved in various collaborations with scientists. He is interested in the scales and timescales of science, which are often far beyond human experience yet are embedded in every aspect of contemporary life, practically and philosophically. Through accident or invention, he has looked at science almost as a subject, its impenetrability often leading him to focus on its human aspects.
A key project was based at CERN in 2000–1, with resulting works exhibited at venues including Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève and PS1, New York. Here he became less interested in the practicalities and the scale of the experiments than in the ambition of thinking that enabled such things: the foundations of quantum mechanics and how perceptions or conceptions of reality flow from thinking about matter at a minute level. He is struck by the imagination required to conceive of something that is beyond the realm of everyday experience but exists in a tangible sense. O'Riley has since continued to visit the experiments at CERN, most recently in early 2008, just before the much heralded switch-on of the Large Hadron Collider or LHC.
More recently he has been visiting astronomical observatories around the world. These sites intrigue him in both a cultural sense (e.g. the life that surrounds them, what they seem to embody) and for what they signify in terms of theoretical and practical approaches to reality. Experiences like this have remained a touchstone for his thinking and generating ideas about the world and artworks: the connectedness of the large and small, inner space, incompleteness, serendipity as a means to develop or generate work.