Collaborating with Machines
How can artists be friends with machines?
18 January 2026
3:00pm to 7:00pm
While the threats and risks associated with the rise of AI to contemporary art are serious and a full discussion is warranted, are there alternative - potentially more generative - ways of thinking through our artistic entanglement with algorithms? What might a conscious systems engagement look, sound and feel like for artists (and audiences)?
This event brings together artists and musicians who explore these and other questions involved in exploring non-self agencies and/or collaborating artistically with machines. The day will begin with granular synthesis demonstrations, include a talk and open discussion about artists working with machines, and conclude with (somewhat) musical electronic performances involving technological collaborations.
Feature Image: Tara Pattenden, 'Phantom Chips' (2023), Papiripar Festival. Photography by Claudia Höhne.
“Technology is not neutral. We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections - and it matters which ones get made and unmade.” – Donna Haraway
Contributors
Program
Granulator synthesiser workshop participants
(Cultivating Electronic Music in Regional Australia, ARC research project)
Demonstration of newly-built granular synthesis instruments.
Marian Sandberg
Talk offering reflections and insights on sharing creative agency with non-humans; thinking about machines as tools, collaborators and authors; and how a practice-based relationship with an LLM shaped her experience of being human.
Alex Grant
Talk discussing anthroponormativity and the decentring of human intelligence, where the rise of machine cognition does not herald the end of creativity, but rather this simulacra reveals that “the human” was never the fixed centre we imagined. When art is an emergent social process, what exactly are we defending when we insist on human authorship?
John Ferguson
Talk discussing imagined agency and the role of resistance/inertia in the field of performing technologies.
Tara Pattendom
Electronic music performance with wearable sound and home-made custom electronic circuits.
Stephen Atkinson
Exploration of the liberation of discarded mechanical familiars through improvisational performance.
Bedlam Rigney
Live hyperpop performance exploring the surreal, tender and chaotic worlds between sleep and wakefulness.
Phantom Chips (Tara Pattendom)
Live electronic performance using wearable sound and custom-built electronic circuits.
