GIRLHERO (2025)

Digital composition, ongoing visual research for GIRLHERO (2025-).

In pursuit of the quantum imaginary, the GIRLHERO astral projects between the material and spiritual world to find classical cracks through which to slip. The phenomena in this room are imaginaries through which the GIRLHERO’s personal universe takes shape: from thought, to energy, to matter.

The GIRLHERO embodies quantum principles and phenomenon: her mode of investigation is interference, her rejection of the binary logic is mirrored by the state of superposition, her struggle is a path through decoherence to reach clarity, she is entangled in the social context of her endeavour to pursue the quantum imaginary and she embraces uncertainty, recognising it as the only pathway towards the future.

The future has an ancient heart, one that beats in the chest of the GIRLHERO.

Digital composition from the GIRLHERO arsenal of parafictional tools (2025).

GIRLHERO is a newly commissioned sculptural installation by Nadia J. Armstrong. It presents a parafictional, cyborg-feminist protagonist’s set of tools that resist the technofeudalist futures of technocratic invention. The work is borne out of Armstrong’s research at CONNECT, Research Ireland’s Centre for Future Networks and Communications.

Through an auto-ethnographic and cyborg feminist lens, the installation situates quantum communications within broader histories of science, technology, faith and culture - tracing the entanglements of bodies, machines, and knowledge systems to create what Armstrong refers to as the quantum imaginary.

GIRLHERO (2025-) is currently on exhibition at the Luan Gallery in Athlone till November 16th, 2025 for the exhibition SYSTEM ARMING, curated by Aoife Banks.

More information available here.