Aisling Phelan
Multi-Disciplinary Artist
CV
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Aisling Phelan is an Irish multidisciplinary artist exploring digital doubles, speculative futures and human-machine interactions and entanglements. Through 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 has been funded by the Arts Council, Dublin City Council, and the Wicklow County Council and was the recipient of the Staff Prize Award from the National College of Art and Design. She has been interviewed by ArtMonthly, 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 holds a BA in Fine Art Media from the National College of Art & Design Dublin, Ireland, and is currently undertaking an MA in Interface Cultures at the University of Art and Design Linz, Austria. She is co-curator of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA), founder of the Digital Artists Ireland (DAI) Discord Community and co-producer of BASE Community Arts Space.
Multi-Disciplinary Artist
CV
︎ ︎ ︎
Aisling Phelan is an Irish multidisciplinary artist exploring digital doubles, speculative futures and human-machine interactions and entanglements. Through 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 has been funded by the Arts Council, Dublin City Council, and the Wicklow County Council and was the recipient of the Staff Prize Award from the National College of Art and Design. She has been interviewed by ArtMonthly, 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 holds a BA in Fine Art Media from the National College of Art & Design Dublin, Ireland, and is currently undertaking an MA in Interface Cultures at the University of Art and Design Linz, Austria. She is co-curator of the Dublin Art and Technology Association (DATA), founder of the Digital Artists Ireland (DAI) Discord Community and co-producer of BASE Community Arts Space.