Suspended Protocols reconstructs a moment in Irish history through augmented reality: the 1948 removal of Queen Victoria’s statue from Leinster House. In the original archival photograph, the monument is being lifted on thick ropes; in this virtual reconstruction, the ropes are replaced with data cables. The substitution transforms a historical act of dismantling into a meditation on continuity, how power does not simply disappear but migrates into new infrastructures.
The cables symbolise the flows of information, networks, and digital protocols that shape contemporary life, evoking the shift from colonial empire to the hidden architectures of capitalism and techno-colonialism. Suspended in mid-air, the statue is caught between presence and absence, never fully restored yet never entirely gone—a virtual ghost, hovering in the unstable space between past and present.
By employing AR, the work unsettles the traditional authority of monumental form. No longer fixed in bronze or anchored on a pedestal, the monument exists only through devices, visible as an apparition tethered by strands of data. This transformation reframes the act of removal as an ongoing transfer of power, asking what rises after empire, and how invisible systems continue to bind and shape collective memory in the digital age.
István László is a Dublin-based interdisciplinary artist working across images, moving image, sculpture, and XR to investigate historical erasure, reconstruction, and the politics of iconography. His practice integrates archival research with participatory methods, transforming visual records into “data-sculptures”—virtual objects embedded in urban space that invite audiences to confront contested histories and cultural ecologies.
Exhibitions include The Tides of Monumental Gesture (Luan Gallery, 2024), Self-Determination: A Global Perspective (IMMA, 2023), as well as international presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; Kunsthalle, and Plan-B, Berlin. Trained in sculpture (UAD Cluj) with an MFA in Digital Art (NCAD Dublin) and a practice-based PhD (DCU), László mobilises XR as a critical tool to interrogate iconoclasm, memory, and collective urban experience. His current projects expand AR “ghost” reconstructions into participatory platforms where public engagement reshapes virtual monuments—proposing a living, shared authorship of cultural memory within complex networked urban ecologies.
Image credit: Courtesy of the artist
