Mark Cullen in Collaboration with Tadhg Kinsella, Tadhg Ó Cuirín, Paul Green & Mick Murray
Prototypes for Cyborgs – A Space Opera is a sensory and philosophical encounter. Occupying a liminal space between performance, installation, and science fiction, it immerses audiences in a network of sculptural entities, digital systems, and sonic interventions. It proposes a world already in transition—where the binaries of human and machine, organic and synthetic, are no longer opposites but collaborators in the redefinition of subjectivity and agency. This is a site where poiesis meets circuitry, where sculpture and systems—both mythic and digital—converge.
The multidisciplinary artist Mark Cullen—whose practice has long been attuned to cosmic architectures, symbolic geometries, and speculative materialities—collaborates here with sound artist Tadhg Kinsella, digital modeller Tadhg Ó Cuirín, VR and video artist Paul Green, and lighting designer Mick Murray. Together, they have engineered an environment—a space opera—in which the interactive components must be experienced bodily, intuitively, and reflectively.
As Donna Haraway reminds us, we are never merely observers in a world of stable categories. We are entangled. We are already cyborgs—creatures of boundary breakdowns, hybridities, and contested kinships. Within this exhibition, those entanglements become tactile, audible, and spatial. They resonate in the cybernetic belly of a worm-deity, pulse through the modular veins of PAT, and flicker in the fluorescence of the YURT.
The Everything Vault, an expansive system of control, accumulation, and techno-capitalist transcendence, stands in tension with The Nowhere Belly, a pulsing, posthuman counter-force drawn from the mythic and subterranean—invoking Crom Cruach as well as the speculative theories of Haraway and Rosi Braidotti. Between these poles, we navigate a constellation of sculptural forms—avatars, totems, and interfaces.
The YURT, with its skeletal geometry and ritualistic ambience, becomes both sanctuary and transmitter—a techno-temple where performances unfold. Metal Slug Seer delivers esoteric transmissions, while A Portrait of the Artist as a Transhumanist (PAT) emerges as a modular, post-biological entity, blurring the boundaries between selfhood, artwork, and data.
Other figures, such as Cephalon—a drifting, half-conscious head—evoke questions of memory, digital afterlife, and the politics of embodiment. Meanwhile, Stargate Sheila, a techno-mythic rendering of the Sheela-na-Gig, functions as an interdimensional gate, pointing towards a speculative cosmology where ancient ritual collides with future architectures.
These entities might be called, in Haraway’s philosophy, “composted” presences—alive with decay, potential, and transmutation. They are animated and activated by the viewer, prompting us to consider what it means to construct futures in which the human form is no longer central, and where control systems are both externalised and internalised through technological mediation.
Cullen’s vision is inseparable from cosmological thinking—from the alchemical and quantum logics that inform both his material choices and structural compositions. He builds systems that are materially precise and symbolically expansive. Each sculpture, light form, and sonic field is a carrier of encoded meaning—transmissions from what lies beyond the known.
This exhibition is not a closed narrative but an open system. We are invited not to solve, but to sit with complexity. Not to master, but to commune. To listen, to touch, and perhaps, to imagine new relations, new mythologies, and new ways of becoming.
RCC – Regional Cultural Centre, Letterkenny, Ireland
Dates: 12th April – 14th June 2025
Opening Reception: 12th April 2025, 6 – 8pm
Performance: 7pm. Admission Free
Location: RCC, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, Ireland
