Vision Machines: Operations

Anna Munster is a Professor of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her research currently focuses on new ways to theorise machine learning experience, emphasising critical artistic interventions into AI. Her book Deepaesthetics: On Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning (Duke, 2025) has won the Anne Friedberg Prize for Innovative Scholarship. She has written An Aesthesia of Networks (MIT, 2013) and Materialising New Media (2006, Dartmouth University). She is a practicing artist working across sound, video, and autonomous systems. 

Olga Boichak is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures and the Director of the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC) at the University of Sydney. She is a Ukrainian-born media scholar researching the role of information and communication technologies in shaping public perception and outcomes of wars. Currently, she is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow working on a project that maps colonial topographies of digital sovereignty in Ukraine, as well as chief investigator on a suite of research projects that explore digital and social media in a geopolitical context.

Michael Richardson is a writer, researcher and teacher living and working on Gadigal and Bidjigal country in Sydney, Australia. He is a Professor in Media and Culture at UNSW, where he co-directs the Media Futures Hub and the Autonomous Media Lab, and an Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence on Automated Decision-Making + Society. His research examines technology, power, witnessing, trauma, and affect in contexts of war, security, and surveillance. His latest book is Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2024).

Sian Troath is an associate lecturer at the University of Wollongong, having formerly worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University and Te Whare Wānanga O Waitaha | University of Canterbury. Her research focuses on the political economy and politics of expertise, militarism, emerging weapons technologies, Australian defence and foreign policy, and theories of trust in international relations.

Joel Spring is a Wiradjuri interdisciplinary artist, based in Sydney/Gadigal/Wangal lands, working collaboratively on projects that examine ways of seeing Country through technology and desires for Indigeneity. His current work confronts and channels both the desire for land and minerals at the core of our national identity and what today appear as progressive identity formations.

Exploring the potential of Indigenous materialist readings of art and architecture towards repatriation, reparation, and return of land, Joel is learning how to employ art making, exhibition making, publishing and pedagogy within what is recognised as black or Indigenous studies.