Caroline McCarthy: Film , 2001, film stills; courtesy the artist

The eye of the critic can have cataracts caused by subjective prejudices, and this eye tends to focus on the painterly artists that exhibit in Ireland. However, it is increasingly difficult to turn a blind eye to artists who have opted to use lens-based media - and now sound art - as a means of communicating artistic ideas.

147 are a group of artists who state that they are trying to build a national and international network outside the gallery system, and this is exciting, especially as art can become way too safe in a structured environment confined by the dictates and tastes of the establishment. Until that Time was organised by 147 and brought together ten works by film makers/artists; some of the work originated as part of installation work, some stood alone as art films. Screened in the Irish Film Centre, they triggered a number of concerns.

As a greater number of artists are opting to use modern technology as their means of artistic expression, lines of distinction are sometimes distorted as to what constitutes an art film or art that uses film as a projection of conceptual ideas in a space which has been specifically chosen, either as part of an installation piece or independently. Students of film tend to produce what could be considered works of art for their degree shows, and it is noteworthy that a number of artists, who have started out at art college turning to film as their mode of expression, often employ film crews to realise their projects for them, akin to sculptors bringing in engineers to deliver their sculptural pieces. Likewise, many artists have applied their art-college learning to film, such as David Lynch and Peter Greenaway. Does an artist need to know the intricate technical workings of their chosen medium for the final work to have a soul? There is the argument that conceptual artists who use either photography/film/video to actualise their work do not have to be perfectionists; that the concept is what is important, the craftsmanship secondary. Yet it is difficult to feel a sense of wonderment from work that appears to be shoddy and lazy because the lighting isn't considered, the camera angles are naïve, the acoustics are wrong. If a naïve amateurism is the deliberate intent of the artist to kick the face of high-brow art and notions of taste, is that not more interesting than the technique? Is art only awe-inspiring when technical skill and ideas merge? Bill Viola and Rebecca Horn can make work that arouses the viewer because it is exceptionally well-considered and executed. That total creative leap of faith has to be achieved for this viewer to feel the same excitement as looking at good paintings.

From the ten works on offer the complexities mentioned above became apparent. Some of the work projected may have worked in the context of an art gallery, such as Dancing for St. Vitus by Susan Brind, but didn't work in a filmhouse. This artist was interested in exploring the connections between mind and body and the video began with a young woman in a virginal white slip absorbed in her own movements. She continued at a more frantic pace, slapping herself into a frenzied state of emotion, the camera static as the central object of the figure slipped into and out of the frame. This observer assumed it represented the fragility of the subconscious and our own ability to punish ourselves inside out. The idea was good but on screen it looked less than convincing, in part because the actor was a little self-conscious.

Caroline McCarthy: Found spirit ; video still; courtesy the artist

And unless you were aware of the very intelligent and quirky work that Caroline McCarthy has been producing for the last few years you could have left thinking that Found spirit was a very poorly made home video. Naturally this is a technique which McCarthy was deliberately employing, to transform something which is ordinary into something extraordinary and give it artistic meaning, where the bland and mundane became magical and intriguing. Here an anorak was on a washing line, blowing in the wind, but taking on a ghostly appearance, moving vertically in the air upwards, as though possessed by an invisible force. By objectifying clothing as Beverly Semmes, Louise Bourgeois, Kathy Prendergast et al. have done previously, McCarthy's choice of an androgynous item of clothing, an anorak, bore a contemporary twist and she firmly stamped her own style on the work, further developing her themes of deception, flight and identity. The visual illusion, that the object was imbued with meaning, worked, but the video itself wasn't particularly polished. McCarthy's work, when considered fully, is exceptionally good, but this fragment, out of context, and in a cinema again lost its impact to this viewer.

Some works tended to fit more conducively into the confines of the cinematic space; a space where the audience is passively seated expecting technical professionalism from the silver screen. Film by Mairead McClean was a particularly well-made piece that displayed the disciplines of film-making and art theory, and indeed this theme was addressed within the work. The camera was employed with dexterity, in a manner that deliberately controlled our gaze, suggesting the artist was in complete control of what she could achieve by means of lighting, sound and camera, and was therefore able to manipulate our emotions, and trick our subconscious mind. By concentrating on the simple domestic activity of sewing, McClean cleverly presented us with some particularly disturbing imagery - stitches and pins, tongues and texture - questioning our very notions of fantasy and reality.

The Great Escape, a video by Jeroen Offerman, managed a wonderful parody on the idea of Romantic painting using a contemporary sensibility and medium. The frame was centred on the horizon, holding an expansive view of the sea and sky; a perfect piece of lyrical Romantic landscape. As we continued to watch the frame, we heard the crashing of waves as the tide ebbed and flowed, creating a harmonious soundscape, but as we continued to look into the frame, an ominous black object appeared to be move closer to us. As the frame remained constant this abstract shape became more distinctive, emerging as a hovercraft, shattering our primary illusion of nature as perfection, till eventually it filled the whole frame and moved onto the land like a beached whale, and Offerman showed a humorous side as a figure ran from the side of the frame and entered the belly of the whale. All this happens in real time and was ten minutes of perfection; his Moby Dick-like depiction fully achieved a parody of Romanticism, as our conceptions of past ideals were shattered by contemporary realities as realised by twenty-first-century means of expression.

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Marks of Omission 's intention was to show the work of three installation artists who consider the idea of communication and territory in the digital age. Due to the events of the 11th of September 2001, the perceived questions this work aroused were particularly poignant. Conor McGarrigle is a Dublin-based net.artist who has been working exclusively on the internet since 1998. Spook , a work which he began in 1999, tracing a military computer server, seeking to track and log its activity, resulted in the accumulation of hundreds of sites that are monitored by the US military, but it was impossible to view, having been withdrawn due to recent world events. The artist's idea, as an idea, reverberated in absentia, since, though ironically omitted (as suggested by the title of the exhibition), it floated menacingly in the ether. In place of this work an earlier work, Play-lets , was on display.

In the future net art will become repetitive...in the future net art will become repetitive...in the future we will lose the ability to think. This message ran along the walls of the Arthouse, almost apologetically screened on a back wall. The message was strong, yet unlike other artists who use text-based messages, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jenny Holzer et al., McGarrigle's message wasn't as sophisticated in terms of the made object, but the meaning penetrated all the same. Here is work encompassing 'terribly' good ideas, questioning our increasingly technology-obsessed, monitored society. The art is the concept, the concept the art.

Brian Conley's Excerpt from War! Serbia vs United States , a radio-performance and sound-based installation, is an event of the imaginary conflict between Serbia and the United States fought with cartoon sound effects. The room consisted of earphones and resembled a crude shed-like space. In order to hear the piece you had to wait and toy with the technology which became annoying and perhaps due to the reality at the door, seemed something I'd rather not have engaged with.

Slavek Kwi: from Spectral Territories Pt 2 ; installation viewl; photo Dave McGinn; courtesy Arthouse

Increasingly artists are choosing sound as a means of expression and making us think about its affect on us in the same way as visuals. Artists seek to stimulating all our sensory glands. As we are becoming more technology-dependent artists appear to use more technology to arouse our muted senses, endeavouring to awaken our sensitivity. Slavek Kwi's Spectral Territories Pt 2 was another clever sound piece but by this time I was frustrated by the space and left thinking of the entire exhibition as saturated with ideas, but devoid of substance. Perhaps I craved something tangible to gaze at. Perhaps I felt that a colour could stun my eyes, a brush stroke probe ears and a composition my sensibilites in a far more subtle, complex and absorbing way.

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Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born film and photographic artist and her first Irish exhibition took place at a time when the whole world coincidentally became aware of Islam. For more than a decade Neshat has based her work on the radical transformations she observed when visiting her homeland in the 1990s, after an absence of sixteen years living in America, and she has always maintained that her work is observing, not judging, the differences. Therein lies her artistic sensibility, as she manages to question the quadruple standards and multi-layered meanings Western and Islamic cultures contain within themselves and in relation to each other.

In the New Galleries at IMMA the first European screenings of Passage and Pulse were being shown, together with photographs from other exhibitions and film works including those from the Rapture , Solliloquy and Fervor series. Also being screened was the video piece Turbulent , which I first saw at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh and which stunned me again. As with her photographic work, Neshat's main themes concern divisions and space, or as she describes, "a visual discourse on the subjects of feminism and contemporary Islam."

Turbulent was screened in a space where two screens face each other, addressing each other and yet separated. As viewers we were torn between looking at one screen or looking at the other, having to move our head or bodies to see what was happening, which suggested we never really saw the full picture, the complete story, the whole truth. On the left a man performed a traditional song to an all-male audience and oozed emotion which appeared to be an act to either arouse the male spectators' approval, or a plea to the figure on the opposite screen, a silent, motionless, traditionally clothed female. It is when this rendition stopped that the woman turned to face the man, and confronted him with sounds. These transfixed the viewer by their intensity and passion, as she unleashed her 'turbulence' of emotion; one that appeared to have been trapped within her, and in comparison his song appeared pathetic. The camera swirled in on the movements of her hands, as she became more and more impassioned and this primitive, primal scream crescendoed. Neshat made this film in response to a law in Iran which forbade women to sing. By juxtaposing the two screens and the two genders, she turns female voicelessness into a penetrating vocal plea for visibility and understanding which is awesome.

Passage was a collaborative film piece with composer Philip Glass that didn't quite hold the same impact. An all male chorus carried a corpse from the bluest sea to the yellowest desert as a group of chador-clad woman dug a grave and a small girl, on the outside of everything, made a circle of stones or was it another funeral pyre? Is she hopeful of the future as a creator or merely impersonating the events of the present? As the women dug, their hands became red raw as the dust rose, and a humming became louder. A repetitive sound rose from the black-clad grave diggers and a noise that sounded like 'lie, lie; lie' (could it have meant here one lies in rest or that all cultural rituals are person-made and therefore 'lies'?) became louder and all became engulfed in an arrow of fire except the little girl. This 'passage' from birth to death may chart Neshat's vision that the future may promise a new era which is woman-made, but as with all her work nothing is obvious.

Pulse. We are alive if we have a heartbeat. In this last brooding work, the focus concentrated on a lone woman dressed in Western clothes, captured in her spartan, cell-like bedroom. In the centre sat a radio and the deep, slow sound of a pulse continued in the background as the woman sang and worshiped this inanimate object. It appeared that this wireless/radio was her link to the outside world, the mechanism that kept her living, in touch with her inner and outer worlds. Apart from the layered textual meanings of the work, the transient beauty came from the technical precision of the sound effects, lighting, and a tracking shot that pulled us into and out of the claustrophobic womb of a room in a manner that Antonioni would envy. Here was an incredibly intense, driven work that in a short sequence communicated multifaceted meanings, with a soulful presence. In short, the calibre of this work could cure me of cataracts.

Until that Time , Irish Film Centre, July 28
Marks of Omission , Arthouse, September/October
Shirin Neshat, Irish Museum of Modern Art, September-December