Aisling Phelan
Multi-Disciplinary Artist
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Aisling Phelan is an Irish multidisciplinary artist working across 3D animation, AI, video, sculpture, and live interactive technologies. Her work explores what it means to be human in an era of rapid technological advancement and pervasive algorithmic influence.
Deeply concerned with the body, particularly the face, she uses digital doubles to question the abstraction, fragmentation, and fluidity of identity in virtual spaces. Her installations often invite viewers to directly interact with her virtual self, implicating them in the dynamics of surveillance, reproduction, and control that underpin digital culture. Drawing from a transhumanist and speculative fiction perspective, Phelan explores how far we are willing to go in the pursuit of self-optimisation and the potential costs of such advances. Fusing the intimate with the artificial, her practice confronts the seductive promise of transcendence and enhancement, creating space for reflection on the role of current digital infrastructures in shaping how we understand ourselves and others.
Goodbye Body was recently screened on the Living Canvas, Europe’s largest outdoor digital art screen, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Her latest work, Surrogate Bodies, was commissioned by and exhibited at BETA Arts & Technology Festival in Dublin in November 2024. Her degree show, Dual Reality, was shortlisted for the Royal Dublin Society Visual Art Awards and included in their annual exhibition and was exhibited at 126 Gallery for the Galway International Arts Festival in 2022.
Phelan was awarded the Dublin City Council Incubation Space Award in 2024. In previous years, she has been funded by the Arts Council Agility Award and the Wicklow County Council Artists Award Scheme and the recipient of the Staff Prize Award from the National College of Art and Design. She has been interviewed by RTE, The Irish Times, Dublin Inquirer, District Magazine and Totally Dublin, and her work has been selected for publications in Vice, Gallery of Photography, Dublin Art Book Fair, Douglas Hyde Gallery, and other international publications.
She is the founder of the Digital Artists Ireland (DAI) Discord Community, co-curator of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA) and co-producer of Base Arts Space.
Multi-Disciplinary Artist
︎ ︎ ︎
Aisling Phelan is an Irish multidisciplinary artist working across 3D animation, AI, video, sculpture, and live interactive technologies. Her work explores what it means to be human in an era of rapid technological advancement and pervasive algorithmic influence.
Deeply concerned with the body, particularly the face, she uses digital doubles to question the abstraction, fragmentation, and fluidity of identity in virtual spaces. Her installations often invite viewers to directly interact with her virtual self, implicating them in the dynamics of surveillance, reproduction, and control that underpin digital culture. Drawing from a transhumanist and speculative fiction perspective, Phelan explores how far we are willing to go in the pursuit of self-optimisation and the potential costs of such advances. Fusing the intimate with the artificial, her practice confronts the seductive promise of transcendence and enhancement, creating space for reflection on the role of current digital infrastructures in shaping how we understand ourselves and others.
Goodbye Body was recently screened on the Living Canvas, Europe’s largest outdoor digital art screen, at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Her latest work, Surrogate Bodies, was commissioned by and exhibited at BETA Arts & Technology Festival in Dublin in November 2024. Her degree show, Dual Reality, was shortlisted for the Royal Dublin Society Visual Art Awards and included in their annual exhibition and was exhibited at 126 Gallery for the Galway International Arts Festival in 2022.
Phelan was awarded the Dublin City Council Incubation Space Award in 2024. In previous years, she has been funded by the Arts Council Agility Award and the Wicklow County Council Artists Award Scheme and the recipient of the Staff Prize Award from the National College of Art and Design. She has been interviewed by RTE, The Irish Times, Dublin Inquirer, District Magazine and Totally Dublin, and her work has been selected for publications in Vice, Gallery of Photography, Dublin Art Book Fair, Douglas Hyde Gallery, and other international publications.
She is the founder of the Digital Artists Ireland (DAI) Discord Community, co-curator of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA) and co-producer of Base Arts Space.