Martin Casey is 26 years old South African Irishman. Martin was born in South Africa but moved to Ireland as soon as he completed School in 1990. He has lived in Dublin since. He completed his MA this in 1998, and has been working at the Digital Media Centre at Dublin Institute of Technology as a multimedia designer/research/lecturer.
Prior to starting his MA he worked for several design/advertising companies in Ireland. There he was involved in creating advertisements and promotional materials across a broad range of media types for some of the best known companies in Ireland, including Guinness and Lyons Tea. His MA piece "Born with a Broken Tongue" has received critical acclaim throughout Europe and has won an EuroPrix MultimediaArt 98 Award and was showcased at Milia 1999. Find out more about Martin at www.dmc.dit.ie/martin
Conceptual Description:
With a background in graphic design, I have always been captivated by the power of the image, born and living in South Africa for 18 years, I have been very fortunate to see how powerful these images can be. However I always though that if these images could suddenly come alive and tell you their story, no medium would be able to compete with this.
My great attraction to multimedia is that it can get the user emotionally attached. I want to get a reaction from the user. I want to get the user to confront themselves, to question their actions and reflect on what they have done in the past. If I am successful in getting an emotional response from the user I will have achieved a great deal. For past three years I have been collecting CD-ROMs, the one downfall of this medium that I have noticed is that it seems to lack emotion. With this in mind, I started the MA with the aim of doing a piece, which was loaded with emotion. A piece that would educate an individual on an emotional level.
I find it very interesting how people have accepted the limitations of multimedia, from slow downloading speeds on the Internet to slow processor on personal computers. I realised that this acceptance could be exploited to test an individuals acceptance of a piece that explores stuttering. This piece would test how accommodating the user is towards a piece, which exploits the limitations of multimedia to depict stuttering.
I am a stutterer, I live with it everyday do not have the freedom to walk into a shop and ask for a packet of sweets, for fear of not being able to say the words. I do not have the freedom to tell my girlfriend that I love her for fear of blocking on those famous words.
Through my experience of being a stutterer, I have had to cope with abuse and insult from people who think that stuttering is a form of stupidity. The content is all personally drive. I wanted to depict stuttering through image rather than showing medical charts and fancy 3D animation's of possible effected areas of the brain etc. I have used my own voice and childhood pictures to keep the piece entirely personal. All of the sound bites are all my own experience and the sound files have not been modified to increase the effect of stuttering.