SIGNAL SONG
Leon Butler is an artist and academic working at the intersection of art and technology. He has worked with and received plaudits along the way from Ars Electronica, The Arts Council, Snapchat, Adobe, 72andSunny, The Type Directors Club, 100 Archive, the Future Makers awards, Digital Media awards, Young Directors Awards and the Irish Design Awards. Recent projects include Foolish Flame, Imagined Islands, Dwelling, Performance Surveillance, and Emperor 101 (SxSW, Dublin Theatre Festival, Boca Del Lupo, Vancouver). He has completed residencies with SVA New York, 72andSunny, Adobe, SnapChat, and Science Gallery. Leon has served as Research Fellow at University of Galway, Designer in Residence at Otis College of Art, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
He has exhibited nationally and internationally, receiving commissions and funding from the Arts Council, Ars Electronica, European Media Arts Platform, Enterprise Ireland, National Sculpture Factory, Digital Hub, and Science Gallery. In 2022, he was a Selected Artist of the European Media Arts Platform, showing Performance Surveillance in Latvia, Cyprus, and Poland. Dwelling, an XR dance performance, featured in Beta Festival Dublin and Galway Film Fleadh. Imagined Islands, developed during a UNESCO residency and shown at Viborg Animation Festival 2024 as well as touring to Poland and Romania. Foolish Flame was commissioned by Ars Electronica and premiered at the Festival in Linz 2025 before showing in Beta Festival Dublin in November. Phosphene, a commission for The Air We Share, was exhibited at the Galway Arts Centre in August and September 2025.
Signal Song is a speculative installation that interrogates the hidden architectures of surveillance embedded within our shared public spaces. As Bluetooth, WiFi and device-tracking technologies are increasingly deployed by commercial and state actors to commodify the public realm, movement, measure productivity and profile populations without consent.
The installation subverts the seemly innocuous aesthetic and physical form of a signal mast the ubiquitous infrastructure while turning its gaze back on the public. Visitors will encounter a structure that actively listens to the digital signals they unknowingly emit, translating this harvested data into an immersive soundscape through contact speakers embedded across the installation. The result is an sonic portrait of collective presence, a song composed from the signals we all broadcast simply by existing in space.
Signal Song invites audiences to reflect on their unwitting participation in pervasive data ecosystems and to ask whose interests these architectures of surveillance truly serve. By making the invisible audible, the work opens a democratic conversation about spatial justice, the right to anonymity, and what it truly means to belong and to be tracked in public life. The installation means to reclaim the tools and aesthetic of oppression for expression.