A day of artist-led discussions, performances & workshops that interrogate AI in creative practice.

Are you an artist curious or uneasy about integrating AI into your practice?

Artists, Machines and the Space Between, is a part-lab, part-studio day dedicated to the exploration and interrogation of AI as a tool for new forms of creative expression.

Come wade through the complexity of AI with us, revealing its creative potential and challenges. Through the lens of critical, hands-on experimentation, we will present the outcomes of two Art x AI creative research residencies, an artist-led workshop and pop-up interactive demos.

PROGRAM

• Xanthe Dobbie – The Future is Now, but where are the sex robots?
  Opening performance lecture; a speculative utopian musing

• Artist-in-residence Alisdair Macindoe x Dr Lea Frermann present Depth Perception
  The work explores how automated linguistic meaning can be embodied and negotiated through improvised dance.

• Artist-in-residence Mat Spisbah x Dr Jasmin Pfefferkorn present Hylozoic
  The pair draws on social nostalgia and examines the shifting aesthetics of synthetic media and the emotional resonances surrounding human vs machine-generated content.

• Curator’s welcome and AI interactives at Science Gallery’s Distraction exhibition

• Dance performance - Depth Perception
  The participatory premiere of Macindoe and Frermann’s residency featuring twenty leading dancers and choreographers and a machine.

• Artist-led workshop by Touch Collective (Minnie Park and Nick Marriott), Monica Lim and Mel Huang Buntine
  A MediaPipe workshop as a performative tool to add gesture control, hand tracking and object detection via a webcam. Workshop spaces are limited - please book a free ticket separately, and BYO laptop with TouchDesigner installed.

Decide for yourself whether it’s a creative friend, foe, or something in between. Step in, engage and experiment, and draw your own conclusions. Whether you're excited, skeptical, or just curious, this is a chance to engage with AI as both a tool and a concept – on your own terms.

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Presented by The School of Computing and Information Systems, Faculty of Engineering and IT, The University of Melbourne and Science Gallery Melbourne as part of Melbourne Fringe.