The Taoiseach and Michael Noonan may be making an extra effort to woo investors this year at the World Economic Forum, but there are fewer Irish faces than usual around the snowy streets of Davos.
U2 frontman Bono is not in attendance this year, while businessman Denis O’Brien, a regular Davos-goer, has also given the annual gathering a miss.
However, Web Summit founder Paddy Cosgrave is attending the event.
Outside the sphere of politics and business, the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin is making an impact.
It is exhibiting two pieces that have been recently shown at the Gallery in Dublin – Portraits by 3 RNP is an interactive piece by French artist Patrick Tresst in which three robots, controlled by the artist through a computer, sketch portraits of sitting individuals.
Peeping Hole, a piece devised by Japanese artists Kenichi Okada and Naoaki Fujimoto, projects images onto a screen by tracking the movement of the observer’s eye, an installation that explores questions of privacy and technological control in the modern age.
The installations are part of a broad range of exhibitions and interactive installations running all week at The Loft, just across from the main Congress Centre in Davos.
At lunchtime on Wednesday, Sarah Durcan, global operations manager at Science Gallery International, was busy showing besuited corporate types around the exhibits. The aim of the installations, she said, was to encourage people to “engage, pose questions and have conversations” and tap into their “full spectrums of creativity.”
