Hacking Visual Culture Exhibition
All photography © Willow Ferris
Exhibits
1
Ng Wun (Doris Li) (UTS) & Justin Harvey, Knit Forward: Threads of Time (UTS) (2024)
Machine knitted garments
Fashion design faces transformative challenges with the coming of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Simultaneously, advances in seamless knitting technology are revolutionising the knitting industry, foregrounding sustainable practices through higher productivity and broader capabilities. Despite concerns about the potential displacement of young designers by machines, there is a lack of studies exploring the synergy between traditional knitting craftsmanship and cutting-edge technology: the role of generative AI in conjunction with knitwear designers remains underexplored. This creative practice research project asks: how can generative artificial intelligence be used to design sustainable, seamless knitwear based on hand-knitted originals. Using generative artificial intelligence and cutting-edge seamless knitting technology, two seamless knitted pullovers were produced, inspired by Australian knitter Myra Mogg’s award winning original 1930s hand-knitted garments held in the Powerhouse Collection.
3
Cristina S. Martinez and Zoom Rockman, Hogarth a la Mode, A Visual Story (by Trump) (2024)
Drawings
This cabinet display presents the collaborative work between Cristina S. Martinez and Zoom Rockman on William Hogarth’s aesthetics and his influence on generations to follow. Narrated by Hogarth’s dog, Trump, the graphic story unfolds to show how the eighteenth-century artist’s legacy is still relevant today, in the age of Artificial Intelligence. It touches upon Hogarth’s ongoing battle against copyists that led to his involvement with the creation of the 1735 Engravers’ Act – the first copyright law to protect an image. The story draws historical connections to current dilemmas surrounding law and the image in a copy-paste culture.
4
Andrew Burrell (UTS), Twice Again, Virentis (2024)
Screen-based installation
Twice, again: Virentis is a virtual world-building installation that uses a fine-tuned large language model and a custom text-to-image network that run locally as part of a generative system. It uses a series of interlinked computational techniques to create new worlds as maps, or perhaps, ideas of maps. The underlying logic of the world-building is based on early personal computer text adventure games and develops the narrative as a relationship between the world itself (Virentis) and a cartographer sent to map the unknown. Image and texts are generated locally, and in real-time, animating across the two screens as an interplay between the two characters. An archive forms from the fragments and new relationships between these pieces are forged—becoming part of a system and incorporated into an overall logic of an emerging world.
5
Leo Impett & Cindy Roman, Copies and Computers (2024)
Digital exhibition
This digital exhibition explores the multifaceted connections that computer vision can reveal within and beyond the works of William Hogarth. We look at the different kinds of visual link and how that relates to the connections made by computer vision: different stages of a plate by Hogarth, copies and re-engraved versions, iconographic borrowings and parodies. Examples include iconographies from Hogarth’s stages of cruelty linked to Caravaggio or satirical echoes in modern reinterpretations of “Gin Lane”. By juxtaposing historical engravings with contemporary references, this non-interactive presentation illustrates how computer vision might uncover layers of resemblance, parody, and influence across visual culture.
6
Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer, AI Tapestries (2024)
Tapestries, Video documentation, 3 mins
The 4 tapestries, each measuring 35 x 35cm, are part of an ongoing body of tapestry works. The images are created using AI image generators, namely DALL-E 2 and Midjour- ney, as non-human collaborators, whose own biases and peccadillos produce unexpected ruptures and oddities. The generators are prompted with what I call “the folklore of the internet”. In a process that aims to encourage a self-reflectivity of these AI platforms, the works use incel greentexts from 4chan, body-building forums, fringe online political extremist manifestos alongside art historical references, as prompts to generate an allegorical hero’s journey. The process of feeding the logic of networked cultures through these generators, and subsequently through various means of machine translation, reveal tendencies to particular mediums, such as manga and comics. The combination of all of these disparate references seems to reveal of AI’s inability to imagine outside expected conventions, but equally reveals the impotence of these stories. The images are produced via vector path, converted to pen plotter, then machine-woven on a jacquard loom. The tight weave of these tapestries recall the pixelation of a digital image: breaking down into abstract fuzz on close examination, and suggesting the push and pull of disparate sources, human and non-human, on our grand narratives.
7
Marie Genevieve Cyr, Jeu de Mots: Absurdist Poetry and the Reimagining of Fashion in the Post-Internet era
Caftans
My artistic practice investigates the evolution of fashion languages in the Post-Internet era, integrating hypertext poetry and zero-waste caftans. Influenced by the Internet, travel, popular culture, and online discourse, I developed “Jeu de mots”, a series of absurdist poetry critiquing post-hyper-consumption, capturing visual experiences and photographic memories. Embracing the fluctuating nature of images and cultural objects in the digital age, my research explores how fashion is redefined through internet subcul- tures and recontextualized in online social contexts. Fashion has evolved into an assemblage or collage of digital materials re-contextualized into new forms of visual advertisements or memes. These creations, fueled by nostalgia, popular culture, and political commentary, produce attention-grabbing visual statements.
My work critiques visual literacy, neo-materialism, spectatorship, visual hyper-consumption, meme theory, and accelerationism. Methodologies and mediums are constantly evolving, integrating history, theory; it manifests in various forms, including photographs, essays, hypertext poetry, digital simulations, and print designs, continually pushing the boundaries of artistic expression. For the conference, I present parts of the caftan series, highlighting how the garments become ritualistic objects in the context of online social advertising.
By approaching writing as a creative process, writing as designing, this is a unique practice that merges fashion design with creative writing to explore the constantly changing relationship between fashion and the internet.
8
Aude Jomini & Eben King, City Pile (2024)
2 x Interactive Experiences
“City Pile” centers around a satirical forced pairing of two cities: New Britain, CT and Venice, Italy reimagined as digital public spaces. The cities are remade using a limited shorthand of visual symbols and recognizable monuments, extracted from heterogeneous gleaned images. City Pile is built using a patchwork of technologies purposely at odds with its subject matter. It plays on fair-use as fair-game on the borders of viability and recognition.
Game 1: “City Pile: Crawl” is a first person shooter (FPS) style crawl built on 1993 Doom’s code base. Players run in an ersatz Venice under an interruptive overlay of copyright metadata, all the while destroying animated artifacts 3D scanned in-situ by the artists and turned into flattened Doom monster sprites.
Game 2: “City Pile: Collage” is a WebGL interactive 2D drag & drop user interface (UI) built in Unity. It allows users to create collages from a circumscribed set of degraded image assets, forced into intentionally biased and limiting pseudo-catego- ries.
9
Xanthe Dobbie, Cloud Copy (2023)
360 Installation
Cloud Copy, remastered in 2024 for the UTS Data Arena, invites audiences into an immersive exploration of the chaotic future of our digital and social media landscapes. Originally conceived as VR installation in 2021, it now spatialises the fragmentation of digital images and thoughts, submerging answers in a cosmos filled with floating corporate logos and internet ephemera. Accompanied by an original score composed by Jorde Heys, the installation evokes a sensory doom scroll that reflects the relentless and seductive nature of contemporary digital culture. A robotic voice, growing increasingly human, draws participants into a sub-cultism or fragmented thoughts and infinite echo chambers.
Cloud Copy invites viewers to reflect on their place within the algorithm-driven landscape of the 21st Century, where every scream into the void is met with reaction, and individuality is subsumed into a greater digital consciousness. The work critically examines the magnetism of techno-utopianism and the reality of our post-truth digital age, questioning the implications of living in a world where digital and analogue experiences coexist in a continuous state of information overload.
10
Kurt Mikalojczyk (UTS) & Anna Savery (UTS), Artificial Symbiosis (2024)
Interactive Installation & Performance
Artificial Symbiosis is a work that reflects on the themes of this conference, exploring the relationship between creativity, copyright law, and artistic practice in the data-driven, digital age. Anna Savery (violin) and Kurt Mikolajczyk (saxophone) will perform a suite of four audio-visual compositions on their instruments as part of a chain of software, generative algorithms, and electronic technologies networked together in an interactive system.
A survey asking UTS staff and students about their perspectives on AI today was conducted by the artists, and analysed to inform the sonic, visual, and conceptual elements in the works. The visualisations are generated in real-time on a projection above the performers as part of an interactive system for performance and data visualisation/sonification.
