Prototypes for Cyborgs – A Space Opera
Exhibition Presented at: Regional Cultural Centre (RCC), Letterkenny, 2025.
The exhibition is brought to life through the collaborative efforts of a diverse team of artists, composers, and digital innovators. Sculptures and installations are created by Mark Cullen, with sound and technological interventions by composer and sound artist Tadhg Kinsella. Digital rendering of the models was developed by Tadhg Ó Cuirrín, expanding the sculptural realm into a digital dimension. Paul Green programmes and controls VR & interactive video, while Mick Murray designed the interactive lighting for YURT. Together, this collective of makers crafts an experience that bridges material and immaterial worlds, questioning the limits of identity, embodiment, and the future of artistic practice.
Spanning physical and virtual realms, the exhibition features seven sculptures, three video displays, a VR experience, and an immersive sound system. Opening night, was launched with a live 40–50 minute performance activation work, blurring the boundaries between audience and artwork, presence and projection, ritual and rebellion. Performed by artists Mark Cullen & Tadhg Kinsella with contemporary dancers Rosie Mullin & Nick Nikolaou.
Through sculptural intervention, speculative fiction, and sonic experimentation, Prototypes for Cyborgs – A Space Opera asks: what futures do we build when the lines between human, machine, and myth dissolve? And who—or what—will inherit the stars?
Enter a realm where machine, myth, and flesh entwine—a speculative zone where transhumanist dreams and posthumanist critiques clash in a ritual of light, sound, and sculptural assemblage. Prototypes for Cyborgs – A Space Opera is an immersive exhibition that transforms the gallery into a hybrid landscape of playable sculptures, video works, Virtual Reality and interactive installations, commencing in a one-night-only performance.
At its core, The Nowhere Belly emerges as a cybernetic infrastructural worm deity, a reimagining of the mysterious subterranean Crom Cruach infused with the radical philosophies of Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway. This chthonic entity pulses with sound and touch-responsive elements, creating an interactive threshold for audience engagement. Opposing it is The Everything Vault, an imperial force represented through its sub-nodes and fragmented avatars—YURT, Metal Slug Seer, and Towards Super-Connection—manifesting the allure and dread of techno-capitalist immortality.