Imagined Islands
Viborg Animation Festival 2024, AI Art Festival, Warsaw 2024, Simultan Festival, Timișoara, Romania 2024, Forum des images, Paris 2025, Future Frames Exhibition University of Maryland, Herman Maril Gallery 2025, Synthetic Narratives Conference, New Jersey 2025.
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Imagined Islands is a digital art sculpture that explores the unique topology of small outcrops on the coasts of Europe. The project examines the ever changing landscape in these communities and the challenges they face from coastal erosion and climate change.
A durational audio-visual projection work that changes and reacts to the presence of people, the installation immerses the audience and gives them a sense of agency while viewing the work.
It aims to create an interactive experience that invites the public to imagine a new set of landscapes and alternative paths that could have formed. The work is a restless panorama, combining animation, machine learning explorations, soundscapes, and dreaming.
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Created By
Leon Butler
Creative Technologist
Mads Vadsholt
Produced by
Leon Butler & PLASTIC Collective (Lana Tankosa Nikolic & Martina Scarpelli)
Supported by PLASTIC Collective, Viborg UNESCO Creative City, The Animation Workshop, Viborg Animation Festival.
Foolish Flame
Ars Electronica Festival, Austria — 2025
Foolish Flame is a trans-disciplinary piece that explores the fraught frontiers of climate change and our inherited cultural trauma. Through collective experience and real-time generative technology, visitors witness an evolving landscape of environmental narratives. Traversing between the liminal space of the bog and a realm beyond, Foolish Flame unfolds as a dynamic storytelling system, conjuring new digital rituals of connection, synchronicity, and ecological reflection.
Commissioned through Ars Electronica and the SHARESPACE programme and explores the fraught frontiers of climate change and inherited cultural trauma through a unique convergence of performance, machine learning, interactive avatars, and immersive spatial design. It merges live audience agency into a dynamic storytelling system, creating new digital rituals of connection, synchronicity, and ecological reflection.
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Head Creative Technologist: Cailean Finn
Artistic & Technical Collaborator: Aisling Phelan
Digital Asset Design: Neonatus
Choreographer: Robyn Byrne
Uilleann Pipe and Voice: Muireann Ní Shé
Executive Producer: Maura O'Keeffe
Creative Producer: Aisling Murray
Line Producer: Miles Harrigan
This Artwork is realised by Leon Butler and Peter Powerand co-commissioned by Ars Electronica and the
SHARESPACE project.
Partners: Beta Festival, Culture Ireland,
The Digital Hub, Project Arts Centre
Phosphene
Galway Arts Centre — 2025
Phosphene is an innovative visual art project that explores atmospheric ambience, using air quality data from sensors. Phosphene combines art and technology to form an immersive light and data sculpture that illuminates both the built environment and the live experiences of the community.
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A durational installation that reacts and evolves in response to the presence of people. The audienc is an active participant, reflecting on the environmental impact of human behaviour.
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By translating complex data into experience, the project empowers the public to engage meaningfull with environmental changes and acts as a catalyst for dialogue in urban residential environments that are increasing in density.
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Lead Artist: Leon Butler
Creative Technologist: David Mathuna
The Air We Share’ is a recipient of the Creative Climate Action Fund, an initiative of the Creative Ireland Programme, funded by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport in collaboration with the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment. The fund supports creative, cultural and artistic projects that build awareness around climate change and empower citizens to make meaningful behavioural transformations.
Partners: Center For Creative Technolgies University of Galway.
Photography by Tom Flanagan and Mark Steadman
Dwelling
Beta Festival , Project Arts Center Dublin, November 2023.
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Dwelling is a live performance theatre installation that is performed across a range of art forms. Dwelling focuses on dance/theatre as a dramaturgical language, framed by digital and visual art works and elements that operate to create a live immersive theater performance. This work can also, between live shows, function as an interactive installation for audiences to explore.
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Taking place in the fragments of a home with dance performances by Robyn Byrne and Rosie Stebbing, we bear witness to a life lived in and across the boundaries of the digital divide. Dwelling offers an opportunity to avatar our individual experiences of disconnection and loss through the poetic portal of the everyday.
