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Leon Butler
email: leon[at]bold.ie
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Foolish Flame
Ars Electronica Festival, Austria — 2025, Beta Festival, Ireland — 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.
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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