Designing Ritual: The Oracle as Embodied Artistic Research in Diasporic Context
🗓️ Sunday, 14 June — 5:10pm
- 6:30pm
(80 mins)
Presenters
Image
Abstract
This presentation introduces An Fios Dorcha: The Dark Knowing, a 90-card oracle deck and guidebook, structured as a ritualised card-based interpretive system, developed through practice-led doctoral research.
The work functions as a design system grounded in folkloric epistemologies for activating fragmentary cultural knowledges within the Irish diaspora. Emerging from conditions of genealogical rupture and archival absence, the project treats minoritised language (Gaeilge) and folklore as endangered conceptual worlds best engaged through co-participatory enactment, not static documentation.
Drawing on the National Folklore Collection (Dúchas.ie), site-based field research in Ireland (2024), iterative design prototyping, reflexive journaling, and experimental AI-assisted visualisation, the project reframes archival fragments as mobilised epistemic resources. The oracle operates as a performative research apparatus. Through structured ritual encounters (drawing, sequencing, relational interpretation) knowledge is co-produced, embodied and situated, rather than merely represented.
Operating at the intersection of language, rituality and artistic intelligence, the project reconnects minoritised linguistic worlds to embodied experience and creative agency. Privileging Gaeilge in card naming and conceptual framing, while engaging ritual as method, it responds to extractivist and algorithmic homogenisation by staging participatory systems of meaning-making.
The project proposes that artistic research can enact endangered knowledges by re-activating archival folkloric inscriptions through creative writing, reflexive practice, and machine-assisted visual ideation, through a ritualised design methodology. Rather than reproducing folklore as representation or romanticism, the work stages fragmentary materials as participatory, embodied events in contemporary transnational contexts.
The work functions as a design system grounded in folkloric epistemologies for activating fragmentary cultural knowledges within the Irish diaspora. Emerging from conditions of genealogical rupture and archival absence, the project treats minoritised language (Gaeilge) and folklore as endangered conceptual worlds best engaged through co-participatory enactment, not static documentation.
Drawing on the National Folklore Collection (Dúchas.ie), site-based field research in Ireland (2024), iterative design prototyping, reflexive journaling, and experimental AI-assisted visualisation, the project reframes archival fragments as mobilised epistemic resources. The oracle operates as a performative research apparatus. Through structured ritual encounters (drawing, sequencing, relational interpretation) knowledge is co-produced, embodied and situated, rather than merely represented.
Operating at the intersection of language, rituality and artistic intelligence, the project reconnects minoritised linguistic worlds to embodied experience and creative agency. Privileging Gaeilge in card naming and conceptual framing, while engaging ritual as method, it responds to extractivist and algorithmic homogenisation by staging participatory systems of meaning-making.
The project proposes that artistic research can enact endangered knowledges by re-activating archival folkloric inscriptions through creative writing, reflexive practice, and machine-assisted visual ideation, through a ritualised design methodology. Rather than reproducing folklore as representation or romanticism, the work stages fragmentary materials as participatory, embodied events in contemporary transnational contexts.
Biography
Din Heagney is a practice-led PhD candidate in Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, where his research engages folklore, archives, and diaspora through publication design and ritual methodologies. With two decades’ experience across publishing, writing, curatorial projects and creative research, Din’s work spans interdisciplinary collaborations in Australia, the USA, Europe and Asia. He lives and works around Narrm (Melbourne) on the unceded lands of the Dja Dja Wurrung, Wadawurrung, Woi Wurrung Wurundjeri and Bunurong Peoples. Website: www.dinheagney.com