Day One

Looking at the Machine

Let’s begin with that inescapable cultural question of new computational practices and ‘artificial intelligence’. What are the actual affordances, complexities, and realities of artificial intelligence for the arts and cultural sectors? How do we ensure that creators are able to experiment and are not exploited? What does this mean for arts and cultural workers, who need to possess the technological and aesthetic understandings that ensure wise, forward thinking and make ethical choices?

Zero carbon culture

This session explores how arts and cultural institutions are thinking about their role in a societal transition that results from a more erratic and extreme climate. Are arts and culture to be swept along in a societal shifts, or are there opportunities for culture to be a primary force to help our communities think, act and adjust?

From international festivals and touring musicians to cultural institutions that rely upon affordable global tourism, what are the challenges that will most acutely change how we make culture, and how are institutions practically answering these questions? What fundamental questions are being asked by cultural institutions about what they are, who they are for and how they operate? What might zero carbon arts, culture and its attendant institutions be like?

Provocative Play

“Games are a unique social technology. They are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: for recording them, preserving them, and passing them around. And we possess a special ability; we can submerge ourselves in alternate agencies designed by another. In other words, we can use games to communicate forms of agency.” – C. Thi Nguyen, Games: Agency as Art, Oxford University Press 2020

Games and the technologies that are used to construct and play them are now used in the production of theatre, film, dance, and orchestras regularly perform game scores. The popularity of Gabrielle Zevin’s best-seller Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow has recently brought the behind the scenes ‘making of’ indie games into the book club mainstream, with a film adaptation in the works. As we collectively move through the mid 21st century, how are artists, designers, and makers using games to help us explore alternative ways of individual and collective being?

The Machines looking back at us

We’ve heard how artists and creators are making sense of, and testing the edges of artificial intelligence. In this session, we look at how different institutions are using the same technologies to augment access to the archives and activities. We will hear how experimentation with emerging technologies requires the ability to collaborate and be confident in the uncertainties that the experimentation brings. How do machines see and hear archival collections? What new possibilities emerge from the archive as a result?

Presenting the new canon in 2050

It is the year 2050 and the new cultural forms that have emerged this century are mainstream – interactive, networked, experiential, ephemeral, performative, built on and with proprietary tools, and likely controlled through a complex thicket of IP rights and licensing agreements subsequently bought, sold and aggregated by third parties. Cultural institutions in 2050 wish to mount a retrospective of the first half of the century – remounting these so-called masterworks. What might they need to do? And what might we do – socially, legally, and technologically – in the 2020s to ensure a less dystopian cultural future?

Day Two

Producing the immersive

‘Immersive’ has become the descriptor-de-jour in the presentation of cultural experiences. Yet what it is applied to can range enormously: from a single linear large video screen to a live action role play experience, a theatre production, or VR headset experience, or just good storytelling that sees an audience lose track of time. In this session we get into the nuts and bolts of how storytelling, world-building and new technologies combine to create new opportunities – and a host of new challenges – for creators and makers.

Not another lab – embedding innovation in organisations

The popular history of the ‘corporate innovation lab’ is mostly one of failure of innovations generated in labs being rarely integrated into, or seriously transforming a company’s ‘core business’. The low-interest rate era of the 2010s led to a growth of ‘labs’ in the creative industries allowing many innovative but ultimately short-lived ‘projects’. With funding increasingly scarce in the 2020s, is there still a value to the ‘lab’? How are large cultural organisations evolving their practices away from labs, to results-oriented internally-led transformation?

Future Audiences

Over the past decade the audiences of cultural institutions have been changing – sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. Yet there is some inertia to contend with when keeping pace with both the demographic and behavioural changes in our communities. The pandemic-pause and cost of living pressures have made the imperative to change ever more urgent. What are the implications for the types of creative and artistic programs that organisations choose to present with, and celebrate from, their communities? What needs to change to present these works in new, more accessible and approachable ways? What structural changes are coming? And what are the practical learnings that can be implemented now?

How might we fund the future?

Arts and cultural funding is being stretched by the debts incurred through the pandemic, challenging economic conditions, and also the unpredicrable effects of climate extremes. At the same time, technology in the cultural sector is not just expensive, but the salaries required to attract technically skilled workers to produce, operate and maintain these technologies are growing beyond the reach of even the bigger players. This is creating an inability for institutions to present or preserve contemporary works conceived by artist and creators working with the new mediums of this century. The long held thinking is that private philanthropy and corporate partnerships have been seen as a way to mitigate this growing gap, along with new models of direct to consumer funding, but what is actually going to be practical in the Australian context?

How might we work together/better?

The future of arts, culture and technology is full of forking paths that we don’t know enough about, and we don’t quite know how we will afford. The obvious thing would be to work together, collaborate, and do things better and differently – finally letting go of the competition mentality that has dominated Australia’s past. Let’s imagining a different reality that maps out a path that’s practical. What is collaboration across the funded and unfunded, experimental and for-profit, big and small parts of the cultural sector? What more can public institutions do to maintain their social license? What is unique about what we can do here that other parts of the world might learn from?