Cailean Fin

Cailean Fin

Bio: Cailean Finn is a media artist, creative technologist, and researcher from Waterford, Ireland. His practice investigates the idiosyncratic nature of human–machine relationships, drawing from computational histories, digital cultures, and engaging with technologies and practices such as creative coding, artificial intelligence/life, game/web design, and electronics. 

Title: For the Republic?

Project Description: ‘For the Republic?’ will interrogate the intersection of Ireland’s energy landscapes and the burgeoning demands of AI-driven technological infrastructure. Through this lens, the work aims to demystify the “Cloud”; materialised as a resource-intensive entity supported by an exponential requirement for energy, water, labour, and other finite resources.
From early GOFAI to modern LLMs, these systems are revealed as vast engines of knowledge extraction, that are fundamentally reliant on human-generated symbols, categories, and labour. In materialising these hidden pipelines, the work connects historical colonial “improvements” of the boglands to the contemporary enclosure of the digital commons, highlighting a persistent legacy of ecological and intellectual dispossession.