Visual Research Program

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.

Machine Listening is a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, founded in 2020 by Sean Dockray, James Parker and Joel Stern in order to subject automated systems to political and aesthetic scrutiny. The collective works across writing, installation, performance, music, software, curation, pedagogy and radio.

Machine Listening has presented work at major institutions including the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Cricoteka Tadeusz Kantor Museum (Kraków), Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, Galerie Nord (Berlin), the National Communication Museum, RMIT Design Hub and MUMA, and has performed at Unsound Festival, Soft Centre, and Melbourne Recital Centre, among others.

Christopher O’Neill is a Lecturer in Media at Monash University. His work draws upon critical media theory and science and technology studies (STS) to investigate the technical inscription of the body. His work focuses especially on the relation between e

Elizabeth Stephens is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Communication and Arts. Her background is in gender and sexuality studies, and her current research focuses on popular histories and representations of science, medicine and technology, collaborations between the arts and sciences and the critical medical humanities. Elizabeth is author of over 100 publications, including four books: Artificial Life: The Art of Automating Living Systems (University of Western Australia Press, 2025), co-authored with Oron Catts, Sarah Collins, and Ionat Zurr, A Critical Genealogy of Normality (University of Chicago Press, 2017), co-authored with Peter Cryle; Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (Liverpool University Press, 2011), and Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet's Fiction (Palgrave 2009).

Thomas Smith/T.Morimoto is an Eora/Sydney based artist, musician and researcher. His practice combines performance, video, electronic music, speculative fiction, websites, curatorial projects and critical writing. Thomas’ work is concerned with the social effects of computational systems, the politics of creative economies, emerging digital subjectivities and electronic music as a mode critical inquiry. Thomas is a member of the Trackwork label collective alongside Utility, with whom he released the collaborative album Nexus Destiny in 2019. He also runs independent record label Sumac with Jarred Beeler (DJ Plead) and Jon Watts.

Dr André Dao is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law at the Melbourne Law School. He is the author of an academic monograph, Human rights for the data society: Big Tech, the UN and the datafication of rights (CUP, 2026). His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award.

André was awarded the 2024 Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism for essays published in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin and Liminal. He is the co-founder of Behind the Wire, the award-winning oral history project documenting the stories of the adults and children who have been detained by the Australian government after seeking asylum in Australia.

Thao Phan is a feminist science and technology studies (STS) researcher who specialises in the study of gender and race in algorithmic culture. She is a DECRA Fellow and Lecturer in Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU). Thao has published on topics including whiteness and the aesthetics of AI, big-data-driven techniques of racial classification, and the commercial capture of AI ethics research.

Gary Foley is teacher and Supervisor at Victoria University as well as the Director of the Aboriginal History Archive. A Gumbainggir man, Gary Foley was born in Grafton, northern NSW. After being expelled from school aged 15, Foley moved to Sydney as an apprentice draughtsperson. Since then, he has been at the centre of major political activities including the Springbok tour demonstrations (1971), Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra (1972) and Commonwealth Games protests (1982) among many others.

Foley was involved in the establishment of the first Aboriginal self-help and survival organisations including: Redfern’s Aboriginal Legal Service, the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service, and the National Black Theatre. In 1974 he was part of an Aboriginal delegation that toured China and in 1978 he took films on Black Australia to the Cannes Film festival. 

Having a keen awareness of the power of media in advancing the rights of Aboriginal peoples, Foley has appeared in various films including Backroads (1977), in which he had a hand in writing his dialogue to achieve an accurate depiction of the Aboriginal struggle at the time.

Throughout his working life Foley has been director of the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service (1981), Aboriginal Arts Board (1983-86) and Aboriginal Medical Service Redfern (1988). Other career highlights include his role as a senior lecturer at Swinburne College and The University of Melbourne, a consultant to the Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody (1988), a board member of the Aboriginal Legal Service (Redfern) and national executive of the National Coalition of Aboriginal Organisations.

In 1994 Foley created the first Aboriginal owned and operated website when he created the Koori History website, which remains one of the most comprehensive Aboriginal education resources available today online.

Foley conducted his postgraduate studies later in life completing a PhD in History at the University of Melbourne in 2012, for which he received a Chancellor’s medal. Foley has been at Victoria University since 2008 as a professor in History, a PhD supervisor and the director of the Aboriginal History Archive. Housed at Victoria University’s Moondani Balluk Indigenous Academic Unit this archive contains a wealth of unique primary source history materials relating to the struggle for Aboriginal rights in Australia constituting over 80,000 items and growing. 

Foley has received numerous awards for his tireless work advancing the rights of Aboriginal peoples. These include the Australia Council’s Red Ochre Award (2015), the Jerusalem (Al Quds) Peace Prize for advocacy work (2021), and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2024).

Junior Major is a collective of artists and technologists who make and merge digital and physical worlds. Founded in 2022 by Shunji Davies, Claire Evans, and Tom Siddall, Junior Major’s practice sits at the intersection of art and technology, creating experiences that challenge perception and invite reflection.

Credit: Aristo Risi

Worlds Only is Alister Hill (guitar), Darren Lesaguis (vocals), Jenny Trinh AKA Wytchings (electronics/vocals), Justin Tam (saxophone), Mara Schwerdtfeger (viola), Reginald Harris (bass) and Thomas William Smith AKA T. Morimoto (electronics). It is named after Megan Alice Clune’s short-lived yet seminal zine World’s Only, which explored the intersection of classical music, experimental subgenres and the indie ethos. The septet explores intertwining instrumentation, internal worlds and the distortion of time, a collaborative practice focused on site-specific musical works that only exists in the liminal space that happens with live improvisation.

Drawing from four decades of experience and their respective practices – from performing at major institutions like the ICA London, Sydney Opera House and the Red Rattler, creating influential labels and collectives (Eternal Dragonz, Sumac, Serial Space) and collaborating across the full spectrum of contemporary music spanning trance to drill and slowcore rock, Worlds Only is a shape-shifting entity based in Sydney and Barcelona that embraces a collectivist philosophy where each lineup is fluid, and studio recordings are foregone in favour of live documentation that captures the personal and the incendiary.

Their debut album Courage to Detour and Patience to Wait was released exclusively on The Internet Archive, selected as the premiere digital distribution network that’s home to classics such as the DJ Screw mixology and Collarbones Waiting for the Ghosts. The album was recorded live at Phoenix Central Park, where they debuted as a collective, and later released on Bandcamp and YouTube with a live film directed by artist Sophie Penkethman-Young.

Since then, Worlds Only have undertaken a performance and recording residency at Dark Mofo and MONA, been commissioned by Soft Centre Festival, appeared at ACMI FACT Festival, and performed a live film score for the influential cult film Limité curated by the Art Gallery NSW. They are nominated for two SMAC Awards for best album and best live act by Sydney’s station, FBi Radio.

Their next album Would you leave yourself was released on Monday 9 February, exclusively on The Internet Archive, Bandcamp and Nina Protocol, with evil streamers maybe later.