1iing

Pronouns: They/Them

Medium: Computer-generated imagery (CGI), 3D scanning and animation

Overview: 1iing Heaney is an Irish digital and visual artist whose practice uses CGI, 3D scanning, animation, sound and sculpture to explore the liminal spaces between data, technology and the geological world. Their work probes how nature and digital mediation intersect; examining disconnection from the physical earth while imagining speculative forms of “uncanny nature” within virtual environments. 

Notable Commissions/Projects: Mermaid Arts Centre, Pallas Projects, Ballina Arts Centre, iCRAG (Science Foundation Ireland)

About the work: As part of the Beta Festival 2026, Liing will be presenting a new body of work that is currently in development as part of their practice-led Masters by Research study in IADT. Focusing on the Bog of Allen in the Midlands, Liing is considering this post-industrial landscape as a site where multiple energies converge through human, animal, plant, cosmic, and technologic interactions. This research has been developed through fieldwork, 3D scanning and CGI studies, and framed through the lens of experimental geography, new materialism, and a critique of eco-modernity.

Currently, Liing is working with a 3D scanned Irish Elk from the Vienna Museum of Natural History found online. Inspired by Barrie Cooke’s painting Megaceros Hibernicus depicting an Irish Elk emerging from fog, its antlers as ‘massive antennae transmitting… a message from the past’, Liing asked the question ‘how does this transmission from the past manifest in its new digital environment?’ Using 3D animation combined with Machine & Reinforcement Learning in the robotics software Isaac Lab, Liing has been teaching this 3D scan how to walk, with the aim of it learning how to navigate in the digital space it exists in. 

Though this work is still in its development phase, Liing is aiming to display the live Reinforcement Learning of this 3D scan as part of the festival.