Panel discussion: EcoDigital Futures exhibition

Please join us to celebrate the launch of EcoDigital Futures. This exhibition has been developed in collaboration with Deakin’s Critical Digital Infrastructures and Interfaces (CDII) research group and Deakin Library as part of 2024 Melbourne Design Week. This panel discussion in the Phoenix Gallery will precede the official opening event, which will take place in the Burwood Library exhibition space at 5.30pm (register for the opening).

The panel discussion will explore ‘ecosophy’ – the philosophy of ecological harmony and balance – alongside the pressing ecological challenges and ethical considerations embedded within our increasingly digital lives. This panel will be facilitated by Deakin Associate Professor and co-curator Toija Cinque and chaired by Sally Ann McIntyre. The panel will include select exhibiting artists.

About the panellists

Panel Chair: Sally Ann McIntyre

Sally Ann McIntyre is an artist and writer from lutruwita (Tasmania) who lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne). Sally’s recent work has focused on themes of transmission, memory, sound, silence and extinction, locating acts of ecocide and sonic erasure within particular sites, scoring species extinction as echo, noise and silence within the contemporary landscape, the museum and the archive. Her projects link the methods and materials of expanded-field radio ecology, the anarcheaological fossils of media cultures, the exploitative extraction economies of colonial science, and the poetics and politics of listening. Critical appraisals of her work have been published in Animal Studies Journal, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, The Wire, Leonardo Music Journal, The Journal of New Zealand and Pacific Studies, The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media Art and The Guardian. In 2016 her work study for a data deficient species (grey ghost transmission) was commissioned as part of the exhibition Das Grosse Rauchen: the Metamorphosis of Radio, curated by Anna Friz for the Radio Revolten radio art festival in Halle, Germany. Her work, Collected huia notations (like shells on the shore when the sea of living memory has receded) was nominated for the 2019 Share Prize for contemporary artists working with technology and science in Turin, Italy.

Toija Cinque

Toija Cinque is Associate Professor in Communications (Digital Media). Cinque’s projects focus on problems and affordances of digital life, particularly on media developments of digitisation, datafication and platformization (i.e., data-driven and algorithmically steered platforms), and their socio-cultural and environmental implications. Cinque co-produced Memories That Make Us: Stories of post World War 2 Italian migration to Australia, a feature documentary that won Best Ethnographic Film in the New York International Film Awards and was Official Selection in the Asti International Film Festival, Italy; and, Fiorenzo Serra Film Festival, Italy. Cinque’s sole-authored monographs are Changing Media Landscapes: Visual Networking (Oxford University Press, 2015) and Emerging Digital Media Ecologies (Routledge, forthcoming). Other books include The Dark Social: Online Practices of Resistance, Motility and Power (co-edited, Routledge, 2023); Materializing Digital Futures: Touch, Movement, Sound and Vision (co-edited, Bloomsbury, 2022); and Communication, Digital Media and Everyday Life (co-written, Oxford University Press, 2015).

Spencer Rose

Spencer is a generative artist exploring life through the lens of cellular automata. With an obsession for emergent behaviour in all forms, Spencer leverages his career in video game creation to explore the connections between complex natural systems and the simple rules that appear to govern them. He presents immersive simulated ecosystems and invites observers to manipulate the underlying rules, and explore the fundamental tools that construct aspects of our reality.

Julio Escudero

Julio Escudero, born in Rio Cuarto, Argentina, is a renowned dancer, choreographer, and costume designer with over 20 years of experience in international productions. As a soloist and principal dancer in various dance companies, his journey spans Argentina, France, Spain, the USA, Germany, and Austria.

At Kunstuniversität Linz, he studied Fashion and Technology (BA, MA), focusing on the interplay between movement, body, space, and design. From 2020 to 2022, Julio researched human and robotic motion in the Peek project 'Fashion and Robotics' (funded by FWF). He continues his exploration of somatic practices and interaction design as a PhD candidate at Coventry University (UK) and Deakin University (AU).

Jack Manning Bancroft

Jack Manning Bancroft is 2010 NSW Young Australian of the Year and founder of the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience AIME. AIME is an imaginative educational program and a volunteer mentoring movement – a social network for good. Jack is a proud Indigenous Australian from the Bundjalung nation.