INDUSTRY:
Art & Design
PROJECT:
Master's Degree
YEAR:
2025
EXPERIENCE:
speculative spatial design
Future Alternative Worlds
Overview.
Grounded in practices of speculative fiction, speculative design and world-building, this final outcome of my Master's Programme in Interior Design - a short experimental film and a speculative artefact - aims to be a poetic provocation for spatial inclusion, social and environmental care.
Set in 2050, a far-right theocracy in Ireland echoes early Christian colonialism and conservative Catholic traditional values. A sensor-driven cyborg network polices water bodies deemed ‘deviant’—queer, feminist, or folkloric—extending state control into nature. Centering the River Shannon, it asks: what happens when the more-than-human is ‘othered’ and targeted by doctrine?
Original track composed by Calvin Calica.
The Cyborg Seahorses
The cyborg seahorse artefact acts as a solitary device, as well as a character in the film, and helps imagine a world in which cybernetic organisms are used as an extension of surveillance networks - camouflaging and immersing themselves amongst communities and environments. Built through a process both hand-crafted and digital, using organic and synthetic materials, this cyborg is equipped with LED eyes that light up after sensing movement nearby.
Selected for exhibitions:
Future Days conference, Lisbon
‘Currents of Change’ with ASRA, hosted by the UN Foundation, Les Fontaines, Paris
Cyborg Artefact II in the film
Process and materials.
Silicon cyborg seahorses: Clay and wire model > 3D scanned > inverse Rhino > 3D printed > silicon cast in mould > silicon thread pinning > Arduino programming via Chat GPT/DeepSeek for microcontroller, sensor + LEDs.
Underwater Shannon river estuary set: Re-used, discarded materials, dyed, cut and painted fabrics and natural fibres, aluminium mesh, rotating steel 'seaweed tree' fabrication.
Laboratory sets: Re-used, discarded materials such as wires, washing machine pipes, glass jars, latex forms, 3D printed seahorses.
Creative process: Research, concepting, sketching, material & form testing, AI visualisation, Photoshop, Procreate, SketchUp, fabrication, studio filming, post-production in Premiere Pro.
Lab excerpt from 'Spring to Mouth and All Between', 2025:
