Press — Aisling Phelan

Maker Spotlight

Grand Garage Linz, 2026

‘Futures in the Making: Identity, Speculation, and Digital Representation‘
Masterclass, Centre for Creative Technologies, University of Galway, 2026

‘Art and Obsolescence’

Art Monthly, no 490. 2025

“The digital possibilities that may lie ahead, beyond the confines of the obsolescent body, are perhaps even more radical than the most ambitious plastic surgeon ever dared propose because, as Phelan explores, identity within the digital realm could one day transcend the limited nature of a flawed reality, including death.

Phelan’s recent work, Goodbye Body, 2025, was shown earlier this year on the Living Canvas screen outside IMMA, Dublin. In this work, the artist imagines herself on her ‘journey of becoming digital’, during which, as the mind uploads, the body degrades.

‘A lot of my work is about speculative fiction and trying to push past these ideas of “wouldn’t it be great if we could live forever?’”, Phelan tells me ‘And trying to make, in this case, an attempt to say “what would that world actually look like? And is it one that we really want?” There’s all this research going on into how to make us live longer, but not to let us live healthier! We could all be 150-year-old couch potatoes and we’d have no quality of life.”

Phelan’s works are more like proposals, or visualisations, of possible socio-biological developments, and for that reason they are also similarly disturbing in their ability to site these developments in a believable near-future.