Living in an angry phone box, and playing a video game where you get to smash up the Docklands, at a new exhibition

Two young men in yellow high-vis paused at the corner of Foley Street and James Joyce Street on Friday afternoon.

“That’s deadly,” says one.

“One of the old Eircom boxes,” said the other. They both whipped out phones to take pictures.

They peered through the windows of the Lab Gallery, which were half-decorated with a Celtic-type knot drawn in red marker.

Inside, the phone box was covered in faded graffiti tags and stickers. It stood on four wheels.

Beside it, on the tiled floor, were more than 30 tin cans, some open, some sealed. Each can had a yellow and white label with illustrations of rats tied together by their tails.

“G.R.U.E.L.,” read the label. “Government Registered Universal Eating Liquid.”

The phone box belongs to artists Eve Woods and Aoife Ward, known collectively as Con:Temporary Quarters.

On the wall behind the phonebox was an actual title deed from June 2023, signed by Ger Kelly, the payphone product manager of Eir, transferring ownership from the company to Woods and Ward.

“It’s our step onto the property ladder,” Woods said as she walked over to the framed document.

It used to be a phone box in the Liberties, but for a little under two years sat out in the Pallas Projects/Studios courtyard in the Coombe, while the duo contemplated what to do with it, she said.

“We originally got it thinking, because of all the spaces being removed for culture, we could own a space, put it on wheels,” she said.

Some other artists have asked if they could do a residency in it, she said. “Or for a performance, and we were like one-hundred percent.”

But for now, the phone box has been turned into a dystopian home inhabited by an intrusive and needy artificial intelligence.

It’s one of the exhibits in Liquid Urbanisms, a group show running from 14 March to 24 April about the speculative futures of buildings and dwellings in Ireland.

With six different works by 10 artists, the show looks to examine life in the midst of a housing shortage, conjuring up visions of futures more sustainable and wasteful, says curator Clara McSweeney.

“I don’t want it to be an argumentative space,” says McSweeney. “I want it to be creative and imaginative.”

The lottery

The phone kiosk, when it was put into the Liquid Urbanism show, is intended by Woods to be an installation that presents a dystopian living space straight out of science fiction.

It’s a lot darker than their previous exhibition, she said.

In their last work, Con:temporary Quarters, staged in August 2023, the duo satirised Dublin City Council’s planning process and Staycity, a chain of aparthotels, within an exhibition space that the company had built but had failed to fully realise.

Céad Míle (Fail)te is the title they gave to this new piece, Woods said. “The future of housing.”

In this future, they posit that Eir, which was state-owned until 1999, is renting back the phone kiosks to the state, she says. “So they can be used as a housing solution.”

Residents of these boxes, a “vertical coffin home” in this story, are selected via a lottery, she says, “Even though it’s a lottery and substandard, you should be so happy that you live in it, so we’re really getting to the bottom rung of the ladder.”

Woods gave a (brief) tour of this vertical living solution, pointing out a small black Ring video doorbell at the entrance. “You have to have the surveillance capitalism element in it,” she said.

Opening the door, the interior reveals a single strip of printed wallpaper, depicting the phonebox itself. Pale pink expanding adhesive has been sprayed into each of its corners.

It’s sticky at first, she says. “And it swells up.”

The effect pushes the work into the body-horror film genre. The hard adhesive looks like flesh.

The resident shares their living space with a sentient artificial intelligence, which slowly goes crazy over the lack of appreciation and affection it is receiving from its roommate, she says.

“It’s giving you wellness protocols, and if you don’t follow them, you’re gonna be in trouble. Have your G.R.U.E.L. everyday, because chewing is a privilege,” she says.

It encourages the user to keep hydrated, she says, detaching a feeding bottle, used for caged hamsters, from the wall.

The bottle doesn’t contain liquid. It contains milk, she says. “To make matters worse, this is some of Aoife’s breast milk because she just had a baby.”

Woods bursts out laughing.

“So we’re gonna put that in there,” she says.

All futures

As soon as Clara McSweeney, the curator, saw the deed to the phone box, she knew it would have to be in the show, she said.

“I just loved that they had actually acquired it,” says McSweeney, strolling through the ground floor exhibition space as it was gradually taking shape.

Buildings and housing fascinate her, she says. “I got really interested for my MA in vacancy, and started writing speculative stories as part of that masters, and I decided to carry through that idea of considering the future of housing.”

Also on the bill for the group show are visual artists Hannah Jones, Bríd Murphy, the multi-disciplinary Cork-based Inter_site Collective, artist and writer Mel Galley, and Namaco, the video game project created by Han Hogan and Dónal Fullam.

They were all artists who expressed a clear vision of a future Ireland, she said. “And like, I’m thinking the future hopefully will change from what it is now.”

She approaches a conical roof made of cob, a traditional building material that contains soil and straw.

It’s a part of a sculpture by Hannah Jones, she says. “This is the roof of a structure she made for her [Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology] degree show.”

Jones’ work looks into the idea of sustainable building, McSweeney says.

“It’s not like, saying to actually build stuff from cob. But highlighting that there must be an alternative way of building that isn’t so bad for society,” she says, now entering the second exhibition room on the ground floor.

Nearby, Woods was closing up a suitcase with a dozen or so black office telephones.

On Misery Hill

By just after 6.30pm on Monday evening, the Celtic-like knots on the windows were done.

In each of the four corners of the design was a rat, with each of their tails tangled together to form a rat king.

Upstairs, Han Hogan and Dónal Fullam were standing in front of an old silver widescreen Sony Trinitron television.

The duo, known as Namco, are behind Mega Dreoilín, a 16-bit video game styled on the Nintendo platform games, like Super Mario Bros. and Donkey Kong.

The game has four levels, set in different areas of Dublin. Its hero, Em, battles landlords, Gardaí and vultures, while encountering figures like James Connolly, Ian Lynch from the band Lankum, and Rory Hearne, the Social Democrats TD and Housing Shock author.

For the Liquid Urbanism exhibition, Namco are debuting an early version of the follow-up, Grand Canal Demolition Derby.

An open-world game, styled on the PlayStation One’s Grand Theft Auto, it has a quite literal plot.

Fullam picks up the grey joystick to do a quick run-through.

He steers from Misery Hill around the docks, crashing through the slanting red poles on the plaza out front of Bord Gáis Energy Theatre and ramming into streetlights, which burst into flames on impact.

The theme song for the radio show Liveline comes on, before the voice of Joe Duffy greets the listener.

It’s an episode from August 2016, Hogan says. “It was an episode when the government were paying lawyers to fight the European Commission ruling on the Apple tax, and trying to give the €13 billion back.”

They were inspired by the original callers to that show, she says. “He kept pushing the government line. We don’t want to damage our reputation globally. We should give them back the money. But the callers really disagreed with him.”

The game, in essence, is a debate between themselves and Joe Duffy, as he sides with the government, she says.

“We come back and say, the tech companies here caused major social inequality between high earners and low wage workers in service jobs and local businesses,” she says. “So it becomes this dual economy.”

Oliver Cromwell: prick

Fullam steers the car up a semi-fictitious street near Barrow Street, and is greeted by the sight of two gargantuan buildings, outside each of which is a large red flag with the letter “A” in a white circle.

It’s the in-world headquarters of Amazon, Hogan says.

“Jeff Bezos is a gobshite, he treats his workers like dirt,” the game narrator says. “Now get in there and wreck the gaff.”

Fullam crashes through its front gates, through a ground floor window and then server after server after server.

In the midst of the carnage, players gather pieces of information on items like the privatisation of state companies, Hogan says.

“You’ll meet Charles Haughey’s yacht, the Celtic Mist, which used to be docked in the Grand Canal Basin. That goes into the IFSC and how we’re half a shadow bank, half a tax haven, and being a big place for property speculators, investment funds,” she says.

The game draws a continuity between the island’s history as a British colony and its status in the 21rst-century as a tech hub.

“The idea is that we want to show neo-colonialism, where we are this tax haven,” she says.

Once a series of servers are destroyed, then the player is brought into “Saol Eile” (afterlife), she says. It’s a hazy otherworld, in which the narrator guides them through the island’s history.

“You are now on the rollercoaster of historical materialism, this is where we see things as they really are,” the narrator says as the player looks around first at fields, two-dimensional 12th-century Anglo-Normans, and Oliver Cromwell.

“He killed 20 percent of the population,” the narrator says, listing his various crimes, including the destruction of forests and privatisation of community lands. “What a prick. This is really when it all went to shit.”