Visions: A forum on the contemporary art, science and politics of seeing

She is the first Indigenous woman to win an Emmy Award, for her work as a producer on the film Harley & Katya (2022).

Anina is fascinated by the human brain and the way in which it creates such a wealth of human experience. Professor Rich’s research focuses particularly on attention, studying how we select relevant information from the complex world around us and the challenges of modern environments for these fundamental processes. She also studies how we integrate information across our senses, including in synaesthesia, where ordinary events result in extraordinary experiences. Professor Rich completed her M.Psych/PhD at the University of Melbourne before receiving a highly competitive National Health & Medical Research Council postdoctoral fellowship to work at the Visual Attention Lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston USA. She returned to Australia in 2007 to take up a continuing position at Macquarie University, gaining numerous competitive grants and fellowships to fund her research. She is an alumna of the Global Young Academy, a Fellow of the International Science Council, and is currently an Australian Research Council Future Fellow.

Grosser's recent exhibitions include Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Barbican Centre and Somerset House in London, Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, SXSW in Austin, and the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo. His projects have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El País, and Folha. The Guardian (UK) proclaimed Grosser’s film ORDER OF MAGNITUDE to be a definitive artwork of the 21st century, “a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times.” RTÉ (Ireland) dubbed him an “antipreneur,” and Slate commended his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.” His artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface and Investigative Aesthetics, as well as volumes centered on computational art practices such as Electronic Literature, The New Aesthetic and Art, and Digital Art. Grosser is Professor of New Media at the University of Illinois (USA), and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Working with archetypal models of representational painting, Christopher's work engages with the medium as sociological and historical text and as a means to address issues surrounding cultural identity, alternative genealogies, and colonial legacies in Australia and the South Pacific. Through critical re-imagining, his paintings become a space for a type of speculative storytelling that considers questions of history and place and the entangling of personal and collective identities. Bassi graduated from the Queensland College of Art in 2017 with a Bachelor of Fine Art and is represented by Yavuz Gallery Sydney/Singapore. He has participated in numerous exhibitions; recent curated shows include: The National 4, Campbelltown Art Centre; Portrait 23, The National Portrait Gallery; I will tell you my story, University of Technology Sydney Gallery, Australia. He was a finalist of the 2021 The Churchie Emerging Art Prize, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia. His work is held in a number of institutional collections in Australia including: The Museum of Brisbane, Queensland Museum, Moreton Bay Regional Galleries, and Griffith University Art Museum.

Dennis is a former Executive Director of the Australian Research Council | Humanities and Creative Arts. His work has been widely exhibited in major group exhibitions including Film Cologne, Battle of the Nations War Memorial Leipzig (joint project with Jenny Holzer), SIGGRAPH, ISEA and in solo exhibitions in museums such as Sprengel Museum Hannover,  Neue Galerie Graz and ZKM Karlsruhe. His work is represented by Galerie Brigitte Schenk, Cologne and Mais Wright Gallery, Sydney. His current work uses Machine Learning based visualisation to explore extreme climate events such as wildfires and flash floods and our interactions with them. Rather than evoking their impact, it explores the unpredictable processes than underpin these interactions. Here uncertainty is central as the interactions destabilise the predictable assumptions and conditions under which we have pictured the world to date. In short, while the world has traditionally been the known backdrop to human action, it probes the world as an emerging and unknown protagonist that is now picturing us.

Her practice is concerned with interrogating the intersectionalities of contemporary Indigenous art between Australian First Nations peoples and global Indigenous kin working across the Great Ocean region. She leads the development of a new collection area for the Art Gallery of NSW focused on the global Indigenous, with particular focus on global Indigenous diaspora living and working within Australia. Her recent curatorial projects include Robert Fielding: Nyaru (2024, Canberra Glassworks); Daniel Boyd: Treasure Island (2022–23, co-curated with Isobel Parker Philip), The National 2021: New Australian Art (2021), and Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology (2021–23, the Museum of Contemporary Native American Arts, Sante Fe). Vink is an alumnus of the National Gallery of Australia’s Indigenous Arts Leadership program, and she currently serves as the chair of Art Monthly Australasia (2021–). Her writing has been published extensively.

Huey was previously the BFC Presidential Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Copeland’s work interrogates African/Diasporic, American and European artistic praxis from the late eighteenth century to the present with an emphasis on articulations of blackness in the Western visual field. In his interdisciplinary research, Copeland focuses on the intersections of race and gender, subject and object, the aesthetic and its others from a black feminist perspective that reveals the biases and elisions of the discipline. An editor of OCTOBER and a former contributing editor of Artforum, Copeland has published in numerous periodicals as well as in international exhibition catalogues and essay collections. Notable among his 60 single-authored publications is Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (University of Chicago Press, 2013). He has two forthcoming books: Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (Yale University Press, 2023), a volume co-edited with Steven Nelson and a book of collected writings entitled Touched by the Mother: Black Men, American Art, Feminist Horizons.

Jennifer works in the intersections of art, anthropology and environmental studies. Her research is concerned with the ways that digital media transform the ways we see, know—and care about—more-than-human worlds. Trained in anthropology and communications, Jennifer brings an innovative approach to social research as a filmmaker, curator and writer. She has held a number of fellowships including an ARC Future Fellowship and visiting positions at the Center for Culture and Media at New York University and the Eye & Mind Lab at Aarhus University, Denmark. Most recently she co-curated Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, a custom designed website that brings together more than 100 scientists, artists, humanists and activists to explore the “feral ecologies” that arise when nonhuman entities get tangled up with industrial and imperial infrastructure projects. In 2019 Jennifer served as President of the Australian Anthropological Society. As a founding member of the Arnhem Land-based arts collective, Miyarrka Media, Jennifer joins CDU with a commitment to furthering the potential of transdisciplinary and co-creative scholarship with her Yolŋu research partners. Their current ARC project sets out to activate a Yolŋu digital art of renewal for threatened coastlines and beaches.

Lee’s research interests explore the intersections of art and politics, transoceanic intimacies, decoloniality, and gender and sexuality. Her book, Shooting for Change: Korean Photography after the War (Duke University Press, 2024), treats Korea’s transnational militarism as a lens through which to examine how photography makes meaning and shapes history. Lee is currently working on a book project about photography and art exhibitions as spaces for transoceanic collaboration, kinship making, and repair. She was a 2022-23 Society for theHumanities Fellow at Cornell University and visiting scholar at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of Communication and Arts in 2022.

An interdisciplinary scholar and artist of Banaban (Fiji), I-Kiribati and African American heritage, Teaiwa has presented her research via visual, material and performing arts in her touring exhibition, Project Banaba (2017—), most recently presented at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. She has been a powerful advocate for Pacific arts, culture and the environment consulting for the Australian Museum, SPC, UNESCO, the EU, AUSAID and DFAT. Teaiwa is Chair of the Oceania Working Party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Editor of internationally leading journal for Pacific Studies, The Contemporary Pacific, and Vice-President of the Australian Association for Pacific Studies. She has won several educational awards and two national teaching awards including the overall university teacher of the year 2021 from Universities Australia.

Kate's latest book, Atlas of AI, won multiple awards including the Sally Hacker Prize, and was named one of the best books of 2021 by New Scientist and The Financial Times. Her project Anatomy of an AI System with Vladan Joler has been shown in more than a hundred exhibitions worldwide (and is currently on show at MoMA). Their latest work, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, won the Grand Prize of the European Commission for art and technology. Her collaboration with Trevor Paglen, Excavating AI, won the Ayrton Prize from the British Society for the History of Science. Kate leads the Knowing Machines Project, an international research team that investigates the foundation of AI. She was named on the TIME100 list as one of the most influential people in AI.

As a curator, educator and media scholar, Katrina's research is concerned with the socio-technical processes informing the datafication of art and photography in computational culture. From 2011–19 she was Senior Curator of Digital Programmes at The Photographers’ Gallery, London developing public projects on machine vision, synthetic imaging, net culture and speculative photographic education. During this period she also co-founded the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University, developing partnerships with Serpentine Galleries, Rhizome and Fotomuseum Winterthur addressing contemporary art infrastructures and advanced technologies in the post-digital museum. Recent research projects include Critical AI in the Art Museum (2023–24), Ways of Seeing Datasets (2018–24) and the Global Humanities Institute, Design Justice AI (2023–24). With Andrew Dewdney she is the co-editor of The Networked Image in Post-Digital Culture (Routledge, 2022).

Kylie is an inaugural Our Watch Fellow, trained in best practice reporting on violence against women and their children, and has a strong commitment to First Nations cultural protocols, access and equity. Her work is culturally and linguistically diverse. Kylie worked as a member of the NITV commissioning team, where she co-wrote the Children’s Content strategy amongst other work and held senior editorial roles at SBS for over eight years, including commissioning editor online documentaries, and executive producer interactives, where she led dozens of large, multi-stakeholder projects with high-impact results across many platforms. Kylie also worked at the broadcaster across feature documentaries, TV series, including premium drama, podcasts, single programs and multi-platform. Her work has screen widely at festivals such as SXSW Austin, and International Documentary Festival Amsterdam where she most recently led the team that won the Creative Technology Award.

Mark Ledbury took his degrees at the University of Cambridge and the University of Sussex, and his first academic post was as lecturer in Cultural History at the University of Portsmouth. He then moved to the University of Manchester where he was lecturer in Art History, until he joined the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, in 2003. As Associate Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark, he oversaw the expansion of the research program's ambition and reach. He devised, planned and ran workshops, conferences and partnerships and worked to develop and oversee a lively residential scholars' program. As Director of the Power Institute, Professor Ledbury ensures that the Power furthers its research and public engagement mission through talks, conferences and the support of research and publications.

She has 15 years’ experience working in arts publishing and for the last eight has been editor and publisher at Power Publications, the academic imprint of the University of Sydney’s Power Institute.
Marni is undertaking a PhD at the Australian National University, Canberra, through which she is developing a ‘generous model of publishing’ that considers the potential for co-designed, multimodal and networked digital storytelling, when combined with digital humanities tools and methodologies, to produce community-centred research outcomes with social impact.

He holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University, is an editor at Memo Review, and has published widely on modern and contemporary art.

After a short stint as a scientist, he switched careers to journalism and now combines research skills learned in science with traditional journalistic techniques. Using a combination of data analysis, data visualisation, and programming he has worked on everything from large investigations like the Nauru Files and Panama Papers to detailed analysis of trends in popular Australian music over time, and using council datasets to determine naming trends for dog breeds. He has won Walkley awards for his work on the Deaths Inside investigation into Indigenous deaths in custody, and his work on the Killing Times project examining Indigenous massacres in colonial Australia.

She is the First Nations Curator with the Cairns Regional Council which has three galleries, Court House Gallery, Mulgrave Gallery and Tanks Arts Centre.
Peggy is an advocate of First Nations Arts and Culture in all forms of traditional and contemporary expression and advocates for the benefits and opportunities that the arts can create socially, culturally and economically. Her ethos as a First Nations Curator is to consider the spaces in which she works, the colonial history and trauma it represents for Indigenous people and create opportunity for healing by reclaiming the space and changing the narrative through thoughtful and meaningful exhibitions. Peggy was a participant in the 2024 (re)situate Biennale Delegates Program, the Creative Australia Program that forms part of Australia’s participation in the Venice Biennale.

Rebecca is a Meriam woman descended from the Torres Strait Islands and is an experienced First Nations curator, writer and cultural heritage researcher. She has a wide range of curatorial experience working across grassroots communities, remote art centres, universities and galleries at regional and national levels.​ Rebecca holds a Bachelor of Arts (History and Sociology) from Griffith University, Queensland and has a research background in decolonisation, identity politics and intersectionality through her prior employment within the Indigenous Higher Research Unit at Griffith University. Rebecca is passionate about re-Indigenisation and the reclamation of autonomous and sovereign spaces, with an interest in global First Nations relationality and solidarity that inform curatorial and research methodologies.

He is a writer and curator who has worked with the Indigenous Australian collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2003–2005), the British Museum, London (2008), the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005–2010), and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (2011–2013). Stephen has curated numerous exhibitions in Australia and the United States and has written extensively on Indigenous Art from Australia. From 2012–2016 he was the Australian Studies Visiting Curator at the Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University. He is the Co-Director of the Berndt Museum at the University of Western Australia.

Smith is also a Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School and Faculty at Large, Curatorial Program, School of Visual Arts, New York. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2010 he was named the Australia Council Visual Arts Laureate and won the Mather Award for art criticism conferred by the College Art Association (USA). In 2022, CAA conferred on him its Distinguished Teacher of Art History Award. He is author of Making the Modern: Industry, Art and Design in America (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Transformations in Australian Art (Craftsman House, Sydney, 2002); The Architecture of Aftermath (University of Chicago Press, 2006), What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Contemporary Art: World Currents (Laurence King and Pearson/Prentice-Hall, 2011), Thinking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, New York, 2012), Talking Contemporary Curating (Independent Curators International, 2015), The Contemporary Composition (Sternberg Press, 2016), One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (Duke University Press, 2107), Art to come: Histories of Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2019), Curating the Complex & The Open Strike (Sternberg and MIT Press, 2021), and Iconomy: Towards a Political Economy of Images (Anthem Press, 2022). A founding Board member of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, he served on the board of the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, and is Board Member Emeritus of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. He is also a member of the Advisory Board of the Biennial Foundation, New York.

Paglen’s has had one-person exhibitions at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art,Washington D.C.; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Prada, Milan;the Barbican Centre, London; Vienna Secession, Vienna; and Protocinema Istanbul, and participated in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and numerous other venues. Paglen has launched an artwork into distant orbit around Earth in collaboration with Creative Time and MIT, contributed research and cinematography to the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, and created aradioactive public sculpture for the exclusion zone in Fukushima, Japan. Paglen is the author of several books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, artificial intelligence, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. Paglen’s work has been profiled in the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, the Financial Times, Art Forum and Aperture. In 2014, he received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award and in 2016, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Paglen was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.