Aasma Tulika is an artist based in Delhi. Her practice locates technological infrastructures as sites to unpack how power embeds, affects, and moves narrative making processes. Her work engages with moments that disturb belief systems through assemblages of video, zines, interactive text, writings and sound. Aasma was a fellow at the Home Workspace Program 2019-20, Ashkal Alwan, her work has appeared in Restricted Fixations, Abr_circle, Khoj Art+Science program, HH Art Space. She is a member of the collective -out-of-line-, and collaboratively maintains a home server hosting an internet radio station. She is currently teaching at Ambedkar University Delhi.
Ana Tiquia is the founder of All Tomorrow’s Futures. For over a decade Ana has worked across the arts, design, and technology in the UK and Australia. Her practice is transdisciplinary and includes curation, producing, art making and performance, foresight and future strategy. As a producer and curator, Ana has worked with leading cultural organisations such as Somerset House, the Barbican, Melbourne Museum and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra to produce digitally-driven exhibitions, installations, and interactive projects
Andrew Brooks is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at UNSW whose work investigates media and mediation, circulation struggles, infrastructure, Andrew Brooks is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at UNSW whose work investigates media and mediation, circulation struggles, infrastructure, race, policing, and aesthetics. He is a co-director of The Media Futures Hub, a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network, a co-editor of the publishing collective Rosa Press, a member of the UNSW Antiracism Collective, and an affiliate investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. With Astrid Lorange, he is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate. Their book of essays on art and politics, Homework, was published by Discipline in 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection, Inferno, published by Rosa Press in 2021.
Chris O’Neil is a Research Fellow at the Monash University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S). His doctoral research, completed in 2020, was in the analysis of body-sensing technologies, such as heart rate monitors and productivity sensors. He studied their historical development and contemporary impact in the workplace, the medical clinic, and the (smart) home. He has a particular interest in the development of biometric technologies such as facial recognition cameras, and what implications such technologies might have for conceptions of identity and governance.
James Parker is an Associate Professor and ARC DECRA fellow at Melbourne Law School. He is author of Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (OUP 2015) and co-curator of Eavesdropping, an exhibition and extensive public program staged at the Ian Potter Museum of Art in 2018 and City Gallery, Wellington in 2019. His current work, with Sean Dockray and Joel Stern, is on machine listening.
Jenny Kennedy is a research fellow in Media and Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne. Jenny’s projects currently focus on digital inclusion of low-income households, and the gendering of AI and automation in home environments. Jenny’s most recent publications are Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality and Home Life (Oxford University Press) and The Smart Wife (MIT Press). She presently holds an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) fellowship and is a core member of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC).
Joel Sherwood Spring is a Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist, who works collaboratively on projects that sit outside established notions of contemporary art and architecture attempting to transfigure spatial dynamics of power through discourse, pedagogies, art, design and architectural practice. Joel is focused on examining the contested narratives of Australia’s urban cultural and Indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation.
Joel Stern is a researcher, curator and artist and currently holds the position of Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in DSC|School – Media & Communication, RMIT. With a background in experimental music, Stern’s work focuses on practices of sound and listening and how these shape our contemporary worlds. He was Artistic Director of Australian sonic art organisation Liquid Architecture, 2013–2022, co-curator of Eavesdropping with James Parker, and is co-founder of Machine Listening with James Parker and Sean Dockray. In collaboration with the ACCA team, Joel is curator of the Data Relations Summer School.
Laura McLean is a Melbourne-based curator, writer, and researcher. She is Associate Curator at Liquid Architecture, curating Capture All; a member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S); and is currently completing a PhD in Curatorial Practice at MADA, Monash University. She teaches Art History and Fine Art at Monash and RMIT universities and holds an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths, University of London. Past projects include CIVICS, Maroondah Federation Estate Gallery, Melbourne (2020); Startup States, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi (2019); The Conversational Cosmos, West Space, Melbourne (2017); Behavioural Modernity and Jenna Sutela_Orgs, Artistic Bokeh, Vienna (2015); and Contingent Movements Archive, Maldives Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale (2013).
Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist, software developer and educator whose work examines the impact of surveillance, automation, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) on contemporary interpersonal relationships. Her humorous and unnerving works explore our morphing relationship with technology and its increasing role in the most personal aspects of our lives.
Established in 2020 by artist-researchers Sean Dockray (b.1977), James Parker (b.1983) and Joel Stern (b. 1979), Machine Listening is a platform for collaborative research and experimentation, focused on the political and aesthetic dimensions of the computation of sound and speech. The collective works across diverse media. In addition to research, writing and audio installation, Machine Listening have produced an online library and an interview series, staged lectures and performance programs, made films, and an ‘instrument’ for composing with audio and video via text. All of this material has been gathered online as an expanded ‘curriculum’, conceived as an experiment in collective learning and community formation.
The Machine Vision Reading Group convenes online and in person to discuss issues around the politics, social impacts, and aesthetic implications of the ever-expanding machine vision complex. Organised by Chris O’Neil and Thao Phan of Monash University the group is open to students, researchers, and practitioners from any disciplinary background. Sessions in 2022 focussed on topics including adversarial vision, epistemic images, faces and people that don’t exist, text-to-image generation, and more.
Mark Andrejevic is a Chief Investigator at the Monash University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S) and Professor of Media Studies in the School of Media, Film, and Journalism at Monash University. His research covers the social, political, and cultural impact of digital media, with a focus on surveillance and popular culture. He is the author of four monographs, including, most recently Automated Media, as well as more than 90 academic articles and book chapters. He is a member of the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society and heads up the Automated Society Working Group at Monash.
Mat Spisbah is a curator and producer whose work focuses on contemporary new media and building connections between Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. He is Artistic Director of digital arts collective Exhibitionist and also provides curatorial, consultancy and creative producing work for many of Australia’s leading arts festivals, museums and institutions.
Mehak Sawhney is a Montréal-based researcher and activist with research interests in sound and media cultures of South Asia. She is a PhD researcher in Communication Studies at McGill University where her doctoral project explores audio surveillance and the weaponization of sound and listening technologies in postcolonial India. She has been associated with Sarai, the media research programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi, since 2017, and with Liquid Architecture, where she is a member of the Capture All project.
Michael Richardson researches the intersections of war, surveillance, trauma, witnessing, and emerging technology. He is an Associate Professor of Media at UNSW Sydney, where he co-directs the Media Futures Hub and Autonomous Media Lab, and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making + Society. Drawing on a transdisciplinary background in media studies, cultural studies, literature, and international relations, his research examines technology, violence, and affect in war, security, and surveillance. His research appears in edited collections and leading academic journals such as Theory, Culture & Society, Continuum, Environmental Humanities, Cultural Studies, and Media, Culture and Society.
Mimi Ọnụọha is an artist and researcher with an interest in the ways social bias and power dynamics shape and are perpetuated by contemporary technological systems and networks. She works across different fields and disciplines to create projects that use technology to interrogate the power dynamics within digital, cultural, historical, and ecological systems.
Sam Lavigne is an artist and educator whose work deals with data, surveillance, cops, natural language processing, and automation. He has exhibited work at Lincoln Center, SFMOMA, Pioneer Works, DIS, Ars Electronica, The New Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Sam is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design at UT Austin.
Sean Dockray is an artist, writer, and programmer living in Melbourne whose work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligences and the algorithmic web. He is also the founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of the knowledge-sharing platform, The Public School. He is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Fine Art at Monash University. With James Parker and Joel Stern, Dockray is co-founder of the research project Machine Listening.
Shareeka Helaluddin is a sound artist, DJ, producer at FBi Radio and community facilitator working in queer mental health. Creating under the pseudonym akka, her practice is concerned with drone, dissonance, memory, ritual, generative somatics and a pursuit of deeper listening. She is currently creating on unceded Gadigal and Wangal lands.
Suvani Suri is an artist and researcher currently based in Delhi, India. She works with sound and intermedia assemblages and has been exploring various modes of transmission such as podcasts, auditory texts, sonic environments, maps, objects, installations, workshops and live interventions. Actively engaged in thinking through the techno-political processes that listening is embedded in, her curiosity about the spectral qualities of sound lends itself to the uncanny acoustic constructions, often found in her work. She is drawn towards generating chronicles of absurd sonic instances while recomposing the
concepts, histories, fictions, myths, sensations and intensities that the aural carries and reveals.
Tega Brain is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer whose work examines issues of ecology, data systems and infrastructure. She is currently Assistant Professor of Integrated Digital Media, New York University. Tega works with the Processing Foundation on the Learning to Teach conference series and p5js project. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Data & Society, Eyebeam, GASP Public Art Park, the Environmental Health Clinic and the Australia Council for the Arts.
Thao Phan is a Research Fellow at the Monash University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S). Thao Phan is a feminist technoscience researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She has researched and published on topics including the aesthetics of digital voice assistants like Siri, Amazon Echo, and Google Home; ideologies of ‘post-race’ in algorithmic culture; and AI in popular culture.
Tom Smith is an artist, musician, writer and researcher. His work is concerned with the tyranny and poetics of computational systems, the politics of creative economies, emerging digital subjectivities, planetary futures and music as a mode of critical inquiry. He has worked across speculative fiction, video, curatorial projects, live performance, websites, critical writing and electronic music. Thomas produces music as T.Morimoto, is one half of production duo Utility, and runs independent label Sumactrac with Jarred Beeler (DJ Plead) and Jon Watts.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Winnie Soon is an artist coder, researcher and educator who is interested in the materiality and political ramifications of the computational processes that underpin our experiences within the digital realm. Alert to the growing importance of software in shaping our daily lives and identities, their work probes the technological and cultural imaginaries of programming, engaging with topics like queer code and coding otherwise, digital censorship, experimental diagramming and software publishing.
Usma Falak is a DAAD doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Heidelberg where her work focuses on the intersection of sound, time and violence. Her poetry, essays, and reportage have appeared in publications like Guernica, The Baffler, Adi Magazine, Al Jazeera English, Warscapes, The Caravan and several edited volumes and anthologies. She won an honourable mention in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Ethnographic Poetry Award (2017). Her film, Till Then The Roads Carry Her, exploring Kashmir women’s repertories of resistance, has been screened at the Art Gallery of Guelph (Guelph), University of Copenhagen, University of Warsaw, Karlstorkino (Heidelberg), Tate Modern, and others.
Victoria Ivanova is a curator, writer and strategic consultant (with a shadow passion for tennis). She is currently working with the Serpentine’s Arts Technologies team as R&D Strategist and also completing a practice-based PhD. Ivanova’s core focus is on systemic and infrastructural conditions that shape socio-economic, political and institutional realities. To this extent, she develops (i.e. researches, writes about, curates programmes, does public talks and consults on) innovative approaches to organisational design, policy, finance and rights.
Zach Blas is an artist, filmmaker and writer whose practice probes the philosophies, mythologies and imaginaries that permeate contemporary digital technologies and infrastructures, ranging from artificial intelligence, biometric recognition, predictive policing, airport security, the internet, through to biological warfare. His practice spans moving image, computation, theory, performance, and science fiction.