Melbourne folk! In two weeks' time it's ACMI's Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium (FACT 2024) https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/fact-2024/
I'm really looking forward to chatting with Keir Winesmith (NFSA) and Simon Loffler (ACMI) in our session on 'The Machines looking back at us'. See you there?
FACT 2024 is aimed at cultural leaders, policy makers, and practitioners, exploring the intersection of AI, automation, climate and audiences – and how the culture sector is evolving to meet future needs.
Register for tickets: https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/fact-2024/
Now @CyberneticForests #FACT2024
'the information age is finished, we've entered the age of noise.'
'The machine said yes or not so we don't have to'
Images are diffused into noise; from noise into noise.
'Generative AI is just another name for surveillance capitalism.'
Humans can be challenged, absences critiqued. When humans are in the loop, humans can intervene in the loop.
Now Katrina Sluis @katrina https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/sluis-k on 'Beyond AI FOMO'
Phrases include:
'Expertise has fled the institution'
A radical reconfiguration between seeing and knowing
A shift from an optical regime to stochastic photorealistic randomness
Cannibalising and operationalising
Automation sidestepping accountability
'Does the museum risk being an onboarding tool for Silicon Valley?'
A call for practitioner-scholar research in the museum: learning in public with the public
#FACT2024 climate change session. Clare from Watershed - they have:
1. Declared a Climate Emergency
2. Climate Justice Researcher
3. Climate Justice toolkits
4. Carbon Accounting
5. Carbon Literacy Training for all staff
And the public agree that cultural organisations should work on this. (Which makes sense. There's no art on a dead planet)
#FACT2024 Carmel from Powerhouse opens with their Caring for Country Principles used across the museum.
Their climate action plan addresses decarbonising programmes, operations and infrastructure
Really enjoying the Provocative Play session at #FACT2024
Deb Polson designed a game for cotton farmers that showed them they either need to change their values or their pesticides. At the end it prints their pesticide order for the year
Johnson Witehira on his fantastic art game that people can pick up and play then start thinking about what playing it as a coloniser means
Vidyaww Rajan on liveness as essential to contemporary theatre and games; audience as part of the performance
#FACT2024 Game links to try from Vidya Rajan
https://www.liminalmag.com/taste/real-time-cancellation-adventure
https://pbrehill.pythonanywhere.com/
Jarra Karalinar Steel on the impact of putting art on trams, which bring art everywhere as they go everywhere. Which links back to Johnson Witehira making games as a way to reach people (and kids) who don't go to galleries
#FACT2024 My slides on 'Weaving the future: making machine learning work for GLAMs' are at https://zenodo.org/records/10656119
The overall programme is https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/fact-2024/#sessions-speakers
Talk for the Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium (FACT 2024) in a session 'The Machines looking back at us' We’ve heard how artists and creators are making sense of, and testing the edges of artificial intelligence. In this session, we look at how different institutions are using the same technologies to augment access to the archives and activities. We will hear how experimentation with emerging technologies requires the ability to collaborate and be confident in the uncertainties that the experimentation brings. How do machines see and hear archival collections? What new possibilities emerge from the archive as a result?Speakers: Dr Mia Ridge (British Library), Dr Keir Winesmith (NFSA), Simon Loffler (via Zoom) (ACMI), moderated by Jeff Williams (ACMI)
Day 2 #FACT2024 begins with a session on 'producing the immersive' - loving the intersection between design for participation, theatre and immersion.
'Try to make the audience feel something'
'When you're planning interactivity, people are going to do what they're going to do' - and it'll change in different sites and different contexts
Also loving this photo of me speaking yesterday from https://twitter.com/lyndakelly61/status/1757609356299059707
I'll try to blog my talk but in the meantime my slides are at https://zenodo.org/records/10656119
The production values in this session are fantastic - the three panellists have interwoven their slides to address the themes of their session; they're rich with video that gives you a sense of the experiences and the challenges in creating them.
Well done Keri Elmsly (ACMI), Matthew Lutton (Malthouse Theatre), Trent Clews de Castella (PHORIA)! #FACT2024
Closing thoughts from Keri - 'technology' is just techniques to make art, experiences
'Collaboration is messy but necessary. ... Even if you think it's new and cutting edge, its probably not, these are all techniques that have been in market for a long time and we can benefit from this.'
Reflecting on responses to my talk yesterday, and Paula Bray and Lucie Patterson talks on labs and innovation this morning, I think the @BL_DigiSchol Digital Scholarship Training Programme has been key to some of the change we've supported across the organisation, by establishing trust and encouraging digital literacy https://web.archive.org/web/20230912191918/https://www.bl.uk/projects/digital-scholarship-training-programme
You can learn so much by watching talks together, doing free workshops and tutorials - it needs time but not necessarily money
I love this from Claire Pillsbury
Two ways forward:
Commit to experimentation (low stakes) - 'No experiment should be too precious to fail'
Expose your organization and staff to new perspectives (invite outsiders in) - visitors and fellows can transform understanding by asking questions, reflecting an org to itself
The future audiences panel at #FACT2024 - Leaders, adapters, avoiders model for diversifying audiences discussed https://artsreview.com.au/australia-first-survey-shows-where-arts-organisations-can-do-better-on-audience-diversity/
Also thinking of your work with audiences / communities / people as being like planning a party - all the work you do to make sure people are welcomed (I use this analogy when talking about crowdsourcing/digital participation, it definitely resonates)
Many of Australia's arts organisations are talking the talk when it comes to improving the diversity of their audiences, but far fewer are walking the walk on the critical actions needed to get there, according
@mia And add RSS feeds to their blogs!
And maybe even share the things that people *outside* the organisation do with their digital stuff...
Mia
Tim Sherratt
steve.rss
Tim Evans