PRESENTATIONS
Academic presentations, industry symposia & technical demonstrations
DIGITAL GOTHIC
The Techno-cultural Narrative of Bruce Sterling’s Dark Euphoria
.
(Sydney, Australia) In 2009 at the Reboot 11 conference in Copenhagen, Bruce Sterling delivered one of his signature “closing rants” in which he characterised the coming decade as being overwhelmed by a sense of dark euphoria. The primary image he conjured was of a generation “afraid of the sky”, a state of endless freefall – between the duality of shiny techno-futurism and its dark gothic underbelly. A black silhouette spiralling out of control is an image imprint that runs from Vertigo to Mad Men to Gravity and of course most explicitly, to the eerie repose of the falling man on 9/11.
This paper will seek to unpack not only the nature and texture of the fall but the accumulative image bank upon which this this scene is etched. Game worlds, Hollywood cinema and television all prophesize the post-millennial technological catastrophe in a variety of lusty visual forms. What however, does the end actually look like? Down in the weeds as it were; what are the signature tropes of such mediated ecologies – of networks, precious metals, silicon and liquid colour. The tangible stuff that give an aesthetics of darkness its permanent and enduring form?
Is the Dark Eden a Counter-Enlightenment? Is it a shadow zone, a spectral landscape, a cemetery or a zombieland? Is it the debris of an image culture, or does it provide the material for a new culture?
Presentation: Video (18min)
Refereed paper: PDF download
Conference proceedings: Amazon
.
EDI, AI & THE ARTS
In Practice and into the Future
Supercomputing Asia, 2024
.
(Sydney, Australia) I was very honoured to be invited to deliver a keynote presentation at Supercomputing Asia as a part of the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion session, ‘How can engagement with arts and popular culture help to overcome lack of diversity in the industry?’
With my colleagues, Dr Claudia Sandberg from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Melbourne and Dr Ethel Villafranca from the Melbourne Science Gallery we attempted to demonstrate how our respective experiences in the arts and cultural sectors might inform EDI practices in the technology sector.
Our message: as we look to the future, it is vital that we explore the symbiotic relationship between technological innovation and its socio-cultural impact.
Pre-conference interview: Video (11min)
Presentation slides (extract): PDF download
Conference Schedule: PDF download
.
THE PROMPT WRANGLER
AI text-to-image generation as curatorial practice
.
(Berlin, Germany) The Slow Down Time project is an aesthetic and technical investigation of the procedural outcomes of generative AI algorithmic routines as both standalone works of visual culture and mechanical biproducts of large language models (LLM). As an exercise in new media curation, the assemblage operates as both a performative and conceptual response to LLM black-box processes in the form of a slow-media / slow-synthesis art intervention.
The dialogue between the text-to-image service Midjourney, a network of twenty-three prompt authors and the curator, Mitch Goodwin (aka The Prompt Wrangler) is intentionally meditative. Cataloguing the iterative output of generative AI as a collation of dialogue fragments – via email, cloud storage, the written word and printed copies (sent by global postal systems) – makes possible “human-time” contemplation of the machine-speed operations of latent diffusion spaces.
Capturing and preserving the stylistic and technical developments of the Midjourney “house style” over a specific period of time (July 2022 - May 2023) was also an important goal of the project.
Conference paper: PDF download
Conference slides: PDF download
Conference proceedings: PDF download
.
THE SWARM
Drone as composite technology
.
(Sydney, Australia) The military drone, beyond regulation and oversight and seemingly impervious to moral scrutiny represents the apex of military and corporate endeavour - the coalescing of political doctrine, advanced engineering, computational intelligence and human labour. Through a post-Snowden prism, we now have a better understanding of how governments and the military industrialists they serve might operationalise the possibilities of fully autonomous weapon systems. This in turn will help define what full automation might entail in a grouped setting: the swarm.
Our cultural understanding of the swarm – the hive, the rogue code, the rampant A.I., the replicant, the clone, the viral - presupposes a dystopic vision of not only the battlespace, but also in the domains of disease management, virtual policing, space exploration, commercial transport, migration control and mass surveillance.
Drones singular are riddled with ethical and moral conundrums. For the most part, these are playing out in our fictitious dramatizations of technology – in the cinema, in the gallery and in the literature – making the drone one of the 21st Century’s most provocative cultural icons. To understand the drone then is to prepare for the swarm.
Presentation: Video (10min)
Conference paper: PDF download
.
TIN CAN BLUES
Moonage, Earthrise & Bowie
.
(Melbourne, Australia) David Bowie emerged during a period of intense space dreaming, the late 1960s. His shifting personas and genre hopping musical constructions at times took this on directly. His lyrical observation that "planet Earth is blue and there is nothing that I can do" and the NASA Earthrise image were iconic cultural objects of the early environmental movement. This sense of beauty and fragility and helplessness is something we still feel today as the Earth as cultural icon becomes a virtual icon of network culture.
In recent years our relationship with space has changed, as indeed has our relationship with Bowie. Both have been elusive and curious for some time - Bowie it would seem disappeared along with the Space Shuttle. Today however, the romance has re-emerged as we chase asteroids in slickly produced NASA animations and put robots on Mars. The virtuality of contemporary space exploration mirrors the virtuality of Bowie. Both exist most predominately online, both fulfil a strong nostalgic turn and now Bowie and Apollo and Endeavour are finding a new type of cultural immortality in the exhibition space.
Presentation slides (w/ notes): PDF download
Conference program: PDF download
.
MINERAL MACHINE MUSIC
An Interdisciplinary Collaboration
IEEE - Metamorphoses VISAP, 2016
with Clement Fay
.
Mineral Machine Music is an audio visual collaboration between geologist Clement Fay and media artist Mitch Goodwin. The project is an aesthetic exploration of the fabric of the earth as seen from the stage of the microscope and the lens of the industrialized city. The work juxtaposes the man-made structural textures of the New York cityscape with the geological mineral formations from the South Australian outback. Blending cityscape with substrate Fay & Goodwin compliment the imagery with layers of sonic noise – musical representations of tectonic activity, echoes of the universe from deep space and the groans of the restless earth all juxtaposed against the industrial machine ambiance of a New York City subway.
Mineral Machine Music was featured in its original installation configuration at the Synthesis Science/Art Exhibition at Umbrella Studios in Townsville January14 2014). This was followed by its installation during Prism 16 at Sheffield in the UK (July 2014). Mineral Machine Music was shortlisted for the prestigious Lumen Prize in Cardiff (Sep 2014) and toured internationaly to Athens, London and New York. In December 2014 it was short listed for MADATAC06 in Madrid and was selected for the 16th WRO Media Arts Biennale in Wroclaw, Poland for the European Union’s 2015 City of Culture program.
Technical notes: PDF download
Presentation slides (w/ notes): PDF download
Project journal: Online archive
.
TOWARDS A NEW MEDIA LITERACY Resisting the urban space as a 404 page
6th annual International Symposium on Media Innovations, 2017
.
(Tallinn, Estonia) The intervention of media content in the public life of the city comes in many guises – the mobile screen / the corner store TV / the street projection / the media façade / the laneway love letter / the street art augmentation / the VR breakout space. Supported by commercial, cultural and civic media infrastructure the city is increasingly playing host to new forms of media content at various levels of complexity - from discrete media objects to temporary works of media art to components of a larger transmedia narrative.
These projects are often built upon the convergence of personal, civic and corporate data generated from an individual’s online persona. This interplay – previously private, mostly invisible – is morphing however, from screen space to public space, from surface representation to spatial replication. This transformation is so compelling and perceptually seductive that it can become something that we simply “fall into” (Turkle 2009) unawares of the exploitation occurring beneath the “subface” (Nake 2016). Willing or not, as we move and interact in the urban publics we are participating in new forms of cultural and economic seduction.
Both the city and the university in the 21st Century are plagued with usability issues and both have limitations in terms of our perception of their traditional function and the permanence of their physical design. As media innovates so too must its audience. We must see the value of creativity and cultural production beyond simple economics and only a media literate community can provide such an assessment.
Extended abstract: PDF download
Pictorial slides: PDF download
Presentation slides (w/ notes): PDF download
Conference program: PDF download
.
THE VIOLENT BODY
A History of Forgetting
Image Space Body, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand, 2015
.
(Brisbane, Australia) Paul Virilio has noted the lowering of the horizon line in contemporary culture as the vision machine steps into the breach scouting the skies for suspicious vectors and surveying the Earth’s crust for glacial imperfections. At the same time our animal eyes turn away from the skies. We recoil at the violence of the heavens and bend our heads toward the safe glowing virtuality of the black mirror. As the millennium ticks over we are caught in an image loop defined by the vague outlines of the future. It was always a fabricated space, this technological promise, where the image of the body was defined by clean pale fabrics, glistening walls of chrome and pine amidst luminous trails of data. Always on the ground, always safe in the glass vestibule of progress.
Our common shared reality is far different however, here the human form is rendered in a more vulnerable state of flux. On the mediated horizon line between the Earth and the atmosphere exists the figure of the falling man. The victim of our romance with vertiginous space and with our technological rush to colonize the air. This redrawing of the human form as an anonymous accomplice of the historical narrative is burnt into the infrastructure of the global network whose very survival is dependent on the repetition and repatriation of the image.
Presentation text: PDF download
Pictorial slides: PDF download
Conference abstracts: PDF download
.
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
Our Liquid Ambient Future
SXSW Interactive, 2015
.
(Austin, Texas) This was my second appearance at SXSW Interactive after being a guest speaker on the Warhol Goes Social panel session in 2013. My spot this particular year was a solo presentation which was sold out on the morning of the event.
See like a camera / listen like a microphone / track like a satellite. Big beautiful data is everywhere. The sound is constant. The image bank immense. The network sends and receives everything. We remix our environment by just being present in it. We capture, post, follow, share and archive. Data becomes us. This new aesthetic of machine ambiance is at once an embodiment of our private present selves but also an ambient beautification of what lies in our wake. The machine sees the machine knows but the mechanics are invisible. How will artists, designers and film makers depict A.I. in the crowded vision streams of the future? The notion of the liquid electric is embedded in our popular cultural fictions and scientific explorations. It operates at the foundation of our interpretation of the farthermost reaches of space and the inner most structures of matter. But it also colors the wider vistas of our future networked selves and the imaginings of content designers and artists alike.
Presentation slides: PDF download
Presentation text: PDF download
.
WARHOL GOES SOCIAL
Creativity in the Tech Age
SXSW Interactive 2013
.
(Austin, Texas) I was invited to speak on the this panel session by David Jones, VP of Social Media at Critical Mass (Canada). The other panel wmembers included artist Laurie Fricke, and Associate Creative Director at Critical Mass Christiaan Welzel.
Panel Abstract: Today, everyone is a “Creative.” With the boom of visually-based social platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, technology has leveled the playing field. Does this really change how we define art and creativity? Artistic purists believe these tools cheapen the creative output with seventeen standard filters available to every untrained eye. But in true entrepreneurial spirit, those apps encourage a more democrative view of creativity, allowing user to share their inspiration with their friends and create beauty where it previously would have been impossible. Is there a difference between high-brow and low-brow art in relation to what social media enables everyone to create?
This panel will begin to tackle this debate, considering the very latest tools and trends, and arguing the new definition of creativity in the tech age.
.
MECHANISED ECOLOGIES
The atmospherics of automation and emergent systems of control
.
(Riga, Latvia) The machine sees the machine knows but the mechanics are invisible. Algorithms lean into human spaces, mimic conscious thought, adapt modes of seeing and render virtual replications.
Technologies of deep learning, machine vision, automation are no less tools of science as gateways to a new global order of things. The stakes have never been higher, as increasingly convergent interests, via a clever act of subterfuge, impose a new reality of automation and algorithmic determinism. Concepts such as spidergrams and kill lists, drone swarms and pre-crime, bot-nets and A.I. avatars, gait recognition and geospatial oversight are riddled with ethical conundrums that are rarely discussed in mainstream media discourse yet haunt the background atmosphere of the contemporary experience.
This paper will seek to unravel this a double-image game of virtuality by unpacking these competing and often messy ecologies that define our emergent datafied society. A society that is seemingly at the mercy of a surveillance apparatus that has become emboldened by a confluence of technical innovation and political instability.
Presentation slides: PDF download
Presentation notes: PDF download
.