At her studio in Harold’s Cross in Dublin, Aisling Phelan’s easygoing, down-to-earth manner surely belies what’s going on in her mind. The young artist, who works across 3D animation, video, virtual reality, photography and more, is interested in concepts around the digital self and identity. She is on a fascinating trajectory, creating compelling work that has just hit a new apex with an incredible music video for the track Brand New, by the Irish producer and musician Sloucho, whose debut album, NPC, is released next week.
Phelan’s plan was always to study music. She took her Grade 8 in piano at the age of 16, intending to complete a diploma and enrol at Bimm Music Institute in Dublin. But when a friend took a portfolio course for students applying to art college, Phelan went along, and the teacher, Siobhán Conway – “the most amazing woman ever; she completely changed the course of my life” – encouraged her to return the following week.
“The reason I never thought I was good at art is because I’m not very good at drawing or traditional styles of painting,” Phelan says. “I thought because I wasn’t a photorealistic painter, that meant I wasn’t artistic. She broke that open for me. She showed an interest in the fact I was thinking about the world, concepts, ideas, and really helped me understand that’s artistic, too, that I just hadn’t found my medium.”
Conway pointed Phelan in the direction of the National College of Art and Design, where Phelan enrolled after working on her portfolio during her Leaving Certificate year. During the first six weeks, when students are encouraged to experiment across mediums, Phelan gravitated towards technology. “I just found myself back on my laptop, getting into 3D things, and totally fascinated by things I didn’t know.”
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She realised that, although music was always going to be in her life, other forms of art were more of a mystery, and so moved towards the unknown. “My parents were extremely supportive, and were all on for me doing what I wanted, but with a general understanding that it’s difficult to have a career in the arts. But I think I’m a very driven person. I’m very competitive, constantly in competition with myself. It’s, like, ‘People say that’s hard? Let’s give it a go!’”
When Phelan began to explore 3D digital art, “there was just a spark. The learning curve is so steep, but I’m also quite patient with things. That probably comes from piano. Especially at Grade 8, you pull out this Beethoven piece and you’re, like, ‘Obviously I’m never going to learn this!’ Then, week in, week out, you go to a class, you do your two hours a day, and a couple of months later you’re playing something. I think I understood that attention, commitment and repetition works.”
Her degree show, in 2022, featured her “real” voice having a conversation with an AI version of her voice, “fighting over who knew me better”. In 2019 she showed a work at an Open Studio project at the Irish Museum of Modern Art that was inspired by Marina Abramovic’s The Artist Is Present. Called The Body Is Present, it involved the viewer putting on a virtual-reality headset to became a digital version of Phelan, who interacted with them from another room, also embodying a digital version of herself.
As for that remarkable Sloucho video, “It was a very long process,” Phelan says. “There are two rappers, Emby and K-caz. I 3D-scanned them, using a process called photogrammetry. You turn the video into frames, then the frames back into virtual cameras, and it projects every single image back and creates the image of the head. So a video of a 3D head into a virtual 3D head.
“It was also an opportunity to get my teeth into a lot of the new advancements in technology. MetaHuman had just been released for [the 3D software] Unreal Engine, which is a way of creating and customising your own virtual characters. I had made them where you could change their parameters, a basic digital human, but there was a new thing out where you could merge the process I was doing with photogrammetry with one of the digital humans.
“That was really exciting for me. So I made digital versions of themselves, and had them in a full motion-capture [Rokoko] suit, like a wetsuit, that has up to 20 sensors. So they perform the facial and body movements that are happening in the video. They’re not things I made them do. It’s animation that is run from their movements.
“A lot of the 3D scans were done on a family holiday in Greece. I love that idea that they’re performing in places they’ve never been, on the back of a truck on some random island. For [3D scans of] environments, I used my iPad. It has a lidar scanner, which is laser image detection. It’s the same technology on self-driving cars, which have lidar all around them, which shoots out lasers and what comes back helps it know the distance from things. I have 3D software on my iPad to do the 3D scanning, so I scanned 35 environments, brought them into Unreal Engine, and rebuilt the world. It was a culmination of different processes I had done.”
The process was painstaking. Phelan had her initial meeting with Sloucho in October 2022, at the start of an 18-month process. “I was reading forums for hours every single day: ‘Does anyone know how to get their MetaHuman out of the splits?’” One of the digital characters had his feet stuck behind his head for two weeks.
Phelan was recently accepted on to Interactive Berlin, a summer programme at the city’s School of Machines, Making & Make Believe that is focused on designing interactive artworks for public space. Artists she admires include Rachel Rossin, Sophie Kahn, Ed Atkins and John Gerrard. “I’m very inspired by musicians and the worlds they build for themselves,” she says, citing the work with other artists of Peaches, FKA twigs and Flume as particularly inspiring. She also cites the Irish artists Elaine Hoey and Aoife Dunne as hugely influential.
“As an Irish female artist working with tech, seeing people around the world doing things is amazing, but it hits different when it’s someone you can have a coffee with. Their drive is unmatched. That’s such an inspiring thing, seeing how hard they work to make what they do.”
