Masterclass: Róisín Berg – Memory Machines & Unstable Instruments

This masterclass is part of a series run by the Centre for Creative Technologies at University of Galway. Further information about the series can be found at: https://universityofgalway.ie/creative-tech/training/masterclasses/ 

This session traces the through-line that connects Róisín Berg’s work across instruments, system design, sculpture, and performance. At the centre of their practice is the building and calibration of systems as a way of encountering questions materially rather than illustrating them. Moving through several projects, the masterclass reflects on process, uncertainty, and the decisions that accumulate over time across digital, material, and performative contexts. Berg discusses how repetition, tuning, and misalignment shape the work, and how systems begin to remember through use rather than intention.

The work is driven by an interest in relations — how behaviour shifts through contact, how prior interaction continues to shape response, and how instability can be felt rather than explained. Rather than aiming for control or resolution, Berg stays with systems as they form, drift, and fail to reset, allowing understanding to emerge over time.

Speaker Bio

Róisín Berg is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator based in Limerick. Their work explores how technological systems act as mediating agents in the construction of memory, perception, and relational experience. Working across instruments, code, electronics, and sculptural forms, they build and calibrate hybrid systems that shift through use, developing tendencies and forms of memory over time.

Berg teaches digital art and media at the University of Limerick and runs Concept NULL, a community-led organisation connecting new-media artists across Ireland.

Join online

To join via Zoom, you can register at: https://universityofgalway-ie.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qrjFSLC9RQqxMHe974pGtQ