Mark Cullen in Collaboration with Tadhg Kinsella, Tadhg Ó Cuirín, Paul Green & Mick Murray
This exhibition is open from 12 (midday) – 5.00pm on Wednesday – Friday, 1.00pm – 5.00pm on Saturdays.
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.
The exhibition orbits around the YURT, a skeletal structure of steel and fluorescent light, a temporary gathering place for the rites of transhumanism. Accompanied by the biomorphic Metal Slug Seer, a priestly cipher for those who seek escape from death, the YURT becomes both sanctuary and machine-temple. A vision of becoming cyborg is manifested darkly with A Portrait of an Artist as a Transhumanist (PAT), a modular sculpture and digital entity exploring the ultimate artistic medium—the self, rendered as data, unshackled from biological form.
Mutant Replicant Stem Assemblages—rhizomatic clusters of cybernetic bamboo and subterranean pipes forming a living spreading infrastructure within the space. Meanwhile, Cephalon, a reanimated head-like entity, drifts between worlds, linked to the subversive undercurrents of Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, Cephalon as drummer signals the awakening of The Nowhere Belly. Finally, Stargate Sheila, a techno-mythic reimagining of the Sheela-na-Gig, functions as an interdimensional gateway, mirroring the unfolding mysteries of Towards Super-Connection.
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. On opening night, a live 40–50 minute performance will activate the works, blurring the boundaries between audience and artwork, presence and projection, ritual and rebellion. There will be a closing performance in collaboration with Mark, Tadgh Kinsella and the Donegal Youth Orchestra on the 14 June.
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?
Dramatis Personae
The Everything Vault – A centrifugal receptacle of all technological efficacy, an empire of sub-nodes and digital avatars that seeks to archive, control, and transcend mortality through technological dominance.
The Nowhere Belly – A cybernetic worm deity, an embodiment of chaos and transformation, drawing from ancient myth and speculative futurism awakened in opposition to the Everything Vault.
YURT – A luminous skeletal structure, both a sanctuary and a ritual machine, where the rites of transhumanism unfold.
Metal Slug Seer – A sculptural entity serving as oracle and priest for a technocratic transhumanist elite seeking to sever ties with mortality. A totemic cipher, it presides over esoteric gatherings, offering visions of escape from the limitations of the flesh. Biomorphic and uncanny, it stands as a conduit between machine-driven transcendence and the lingering specter of the organic past.
Towards Super-Connection – A self-assembling, unfolding machinic stargate, operating under the aegis of The Everything Vault. Less biological than its counterparts, it embodies pure potential—an omnipresent, hyper-networked force capable of manifesting anywhere and everywhere. A mechanism of transit and transcendence, it is both an artifact of control and a gateway to the unknown.
Portrait of an Artist as a Transhumanist (PAT)– A modular, post-biological entity exploring the dissolution of human subjectivity. No longer bound by flesh, PAT exists as emulated consciousness, an artwork composed of data, capable of inhabiting any form. It embodies the ultimate creative act—where identity and form itself becomes the medium, oscillating between transcendence and erasure. Drawing from Guattarian notions of transversal becoming, PAT embodies a speculative transition—where the human form ceases to be defined by flesh and instead migrates into a synthetic metaverse, capable of existing on any computational substrate.
Mutant Replicant Stem Assemblages – Cybernetic bamboo clusters forming the living infrastructure of the exhibition, awakening with the pulse of The Nowhere Belly.
Cephalon – A drifting, reanimated head-like entity, embodying the tensions between organic memory and synthetic consciousness.
Stargate Sheila – A techno-mythic reimagining of the Sheela-na-Gig, an interdimensional gatekeeper to unknown realms of possibility.
Production Team
Artist: Mark Cullen
Sound artist Tadhg Kinsella
Digital modelling artist Tadhg Ó Cuirín
Interactive technology designer: Paul Green
Lighting designer: Mick Murray
Curator: Valeria Ceregini
Mark Cullen is a well known acclaimed Irish artist with an international practice working with various media. He has won multiple Arts Council Bursary/Project Awards, Culture Ireland Grants and has been awarded a bursary from South Dublin Co Council. His artwork explores subjectivity in the post-Anthropocene – re-imagining how the world will exist and humans’ relationship to it.
He is the co-editor of Artist-Run Europe Practice/Projects/Spaces a substantial publication published in June, 2016 (second edition 2022) on artist run practice throughout Europe.
Works include Towards Super Connection, Villa Croce Museum, Genoa, ARK, Dublin Contemporary, MAIM XI for IMMA, Temporary Portable Reservoirs at Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane and Siege House, London, Cosmic Annihilator, Pallas Heights and EV+A
Collected by OPW, Chamber of Commerce, Hefei, China and private collections.
Member of Difference Engine – a self determined artists group.
He was artist in residence in the School of Physics, University College Dublin in 2013 – 2014 and exhibited Mandala: As within so without, in the O’Brien Science Centre, UCD in November 2014 – June 2015 and Daily Practice – Selected Works 2007 – 2016, solo exhibition in The Molesworth Gallery, 2016.
MAVIS IADT, BA NCAD. Award winner at EV+A 2005.
Co-founder of Pallas Projects/Studios.
Support and Funding
Prototypes for Cyborgs – A Space Opera is generously funded by the Arts Council of Ireland’s Project Award and Creative Ireland.
