Culture and Creativity Seminar Series

Prof. Rachel Davey is the Foundation Director of the Health Research Institute with over 30 years of research experience in areas related to the prevention of non-communicable diseases. Rachel has extensive experience of conducting large-scale trials in both clinical and community settings in the area of physical activity, health and disease prevention. More recently, Rachel has focused on the use and development of ecological models that emphasize multiple levels of influence on health behaviours. She has designed and led large-scale community interventions that have resulted in sustained behaviour change and improved health. Rachel has been awarded over $20 million of research funding over the past 10 years and has supervised 24 PhD students to completion. This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to Rachel_Davey.pptx

Moderator: Denise Thwaites

Melinda Rackam – The Tawdry Nostalgia for Past Forms

I didn’t care about the legacy of -empyre- global media arts list founded in 2002 as part of my PhD in Virtual Worlds. Then, after 22 years of robust dialogues between many hundreds of guests and thousands of members, books, in-person meet ups and exhibitions including Documenta 12, it went silent. A cybersecurity sweep of the servers at UNSW Art & Design had disappeared it and they weren’t talking (to me). My simultaneous umbrage and tawdry nostalgia for the lost -empyre- has generated an internal debate on list death as an urgent loss to research culture necessitating reconstruction, or a prompt to forget it and move on?

Geert Lovink – From Sad by Design to Platform Brutalism

Brutalism is the title of Achille Mbembe’s 2020 book. Known as the 1950s rough-concrete architecture style, Mbembe presents the concept as a ‘thought image’ that can be seen as a not-so elegant synonym for the economic laws associated with the term capitalism in which the emphasis shifts from profit to violence. Mbembe explains: “Brutalism is the name given to this gigantic process of eviction and evacuation as well as to the draining of vessels and emptying of organic substances.” This results in naturalizing social war, a development many see unfolding since Covid and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. In this lecture I will map my own trajectory, from Zoom fatique and the use of memes as copium to the weaponization of social media today. Once we’re stuck on the platform long enough, will the mood inevitably turn violent?

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to Presentation_GeertLovink.pptx

Moderator: Geert Lovink

Sophie Dumaresqu – Inter-Species Connection to Find Joy and Love Among Platform Blues

What is in a postcard? Baby, I Just Want to Make You Smile is an ongoing series of recorded and live cinematic endurance performances. The performances consist of the artist (Sophie Dumaresq) attempting to share a sunset with her handmade 100 kilo, 5 metres long mechanical shark(Baby) by pulling the shark up a hill. Frankie, the artists’ dog is equipped with their own camera recording and sharing in the performance with Dumaresq. In this talk, the artist will discuss their experience in collaborating with both humans and non-humans in creating the different iterations in which the work exists. The artist explores how the goofy and vulnerable nature of hybrid material and digital collaborative performance work can liberate the romantic from the Romantic with a capital R.

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to Presentation_SophieDumaresqu.pdf

Catherine Page Jefferey – Collective Anxiety and Media Panics in an Age of Social and Digital Media

Collective concern about young people’s access to digital media technologies has increased significantly in recent years, culminating in widespread calls to ban social media completely for young people under a certain age both in Australia as well as overseas. These concerns are based on a range of purported harms including the impacts of social media on young people’s mental health, online bullying, exposure to pornography and violent content, algorithmic profiling, and online extremism. These calls have emerged against the backdrop of a long history of media panics about young people and digital media.

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to Presentation_CatherinePageJeffery.pptx

Mathieu O’Neil – Countering Platform Blues: Strategies against Disinformation, Toxicity and Polarisation

When people can no longer tell truth from fiction, we are in an epistemic crisis. For Haidder and Sundin this primarily stems from algorithmic curation by online platforms: information is increasingly volatile (the origins or status of fast-changing newsfeed content is uncertain), fragmented (complex knowledge is re-arranged in continuously shifting shapes), and personalised (access is individualised). Aggravating factors are hostile influence campaigns seeking to worsen social divisions. The crisis increases distrust towards the institutions of liberal democracy such as the news media, science, and representative politics. Alternative sources are on the rise. Health influencers have huge audiences; toxic masculinists are idolised by boys and young men. How can democratic education systems counter platform blues? In this talk will I outline three strategic avenues: against disinformation: instilling effective information processing and curating skills; against toxicity: reclaiming martial arts; against polarisation: fostering collaborative values.

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to Presentation_MathewONeil.pptx

Moderator: Ashley van den Heuvel

Erin K. Stapleton – Catastrophic Loss in Computational Systems: Mass Accumulation

My personal archive is on Instagram. I rely on cloud computing for my externalised visual memory. And at any moment, it could all be lost. And that is completely beyond my control. The term ‘catastrophic loss’ describes total, irretrievable destruction. While it is a term generally used to describe environmental disasters, the mechanics of digital storage beckons for archival loss on a parallel scale. Here, I explore catastrophic loss as the tension between permanence and instability in digital systems and the constant threat of accumulative overwhelm, irretrievable glitches, absolute obsolesce they offer, while operating in response to the processes of material destructions that loom across our material and social worlds. Computational systems are designed for automation, smoothing difference and complexity into binary, hierarchical and comparative data categories. The storage of digital data operates through reduction of complexity and automated efficiencies, risking the complexities of the information it stores. Simultaneously, digital storage efficiencies encourage the mass production, dissemination and accumulation of data across social media platforms. An abundance of images, videos, sound, artefacts, the possibilities of access to these overwhelm, mirroring and distracting from the material destructions that produced them.

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to Presentation_ErinStapleton.pptx

David Nolan – A Fast-Moving Slow-Motion Car Crash: The 2023 Voice Referendum in Today’s Media Ecology

14 October 2023 was one of the bluest days in recent memory, taking its place among a roll call of dates of extreme settler- colonial violence in Australian history. This paper reflects on the dynamics of a media ecology that constituted both a structure and vehicle of that violence, positioning it as a moment of realism and disillusionment. We have lived through two decades in which resistant practices deploying the affordances of social media have offered crumbs of hope that platforms might offer an ‘innovative’ alternative space to contest and disrupt oppressive mediated politics. This paper reflects on findings relating to the communicative dynamics at play during the 2023 Referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament to argue that this position is fundamentally flawed. Despite, and in some respects because of, the desire, celebration and performance of fresh online voices and interventions, the contemporary media ecology contributes to and constitutes a politics that remains and is increasingly – perhaps overwhelmingly – dank in nature.

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to Presentation_DavidNolan.pptx

Phoebe Quinn – Live Polis Experience: Tackling Academic Flying and Climate Change

This interactive session invites participants to experience Polis, a digital democracy platform that has been touted as a ‘pro-social’ alternative to conventional social media. Drawing from recent research, we’ll have a mini-conversation on a hot topic within universities: what to do about staff air travel emissions. Through this hands-on demo, we’ll experience the platform’s design features and critically examine Polis’ capacity to foster productive democratic discussions.

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to Presentation_PhoebeQuinn.pptx

Moderator: Nicole Curato

Ella Barclay – Visualising Messy Connectivity in Contemporary Art

This talk provides an overview of her current research, including her recent institutional solo exhibition Unkempt Cognition at Canberra Contemporary Art Space and her research as a 2024 fellow at ZK/U: The Centre of Art and Urbanistics, Berlin. Ella’s work engages with thematics of agency and fatigue in a 21st Century connected landscape.

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to Presentation_EllaBarclay.pptx

Caroline Fisher – Young People, Internet and News Avoidance

More than two-thirds of Australians actively avoid the mainstream news, higher than in many other countries. News avoidance is particularly high among Gen Z and Y, who have the lowest interest in mainstream news and feel the most ‘worn out’ by it. This sense of fatigue is strongly linked to the use of social media and feeling unable to avoid unwanted news in their feeds. Drawing on ten years of news consumption data and qualitative research, this presentation examines these news avoidance trends among young Australians in the context of an everchanging hybrid media landscape.

This presentation was accompanied by slides. To view the slides head to Presentation_CarolineFisher.pptx