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/

#ACMI
#ACMIMelbourne
#FACT2024

@sebchan on the themes of #FACT2024 at #ACMI - computation, climate, community, capital.
Privatisation, personalisation, and their effect on the public sphere, public commons

Also 'when technology change is managed poorly, people feel bad'

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

#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

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

#FACT2024

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.'

#FACT2024

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

#FACT2024

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

#FACT2024