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The 29th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA2024) took place in Meanjin/Brisbane 21-29 June 2024. The theme of the Symposium and Exhibition set out to explore human perception of timescales, challenging our understanding of past, present and future in the days of singularity and climate change – the Everywhen. First Nations Australians believe that in the time before time, all creation was made and manifest in the landscape; that all stories, art, song, dance, imaginative thought, creative inspiration, technology or invention was made complete in the time before time and can be seen in the topography, plants, animals and natural world. In this concept the creative act is not a process of unconnected inspiration, solo achievement or act of individual hubris but rather the process of timely connection to the landscape, accessing the already laid out ‘creation’ and relaying this to others. The role of the artist is to be the interlocutor between past, present and future through their deep relationship to place. This session reviews selected papers and artworks from ISEA2024, illuminating the engagement of the ISEA community with the Everywhen theme.

Wesley Enoch AM will introduce this session with a poetic Welcome to Country, an Indigenous cultural tradition dating back thousands of years from the land currently known as Australia. A Quandamooka man from Minjerribah, Wesley was inspired by his ancestry to co-design the EveryWhen conference theme. EveryWhen refers to an Indigenous temporal framework where time is fluid, existing simultaneously rather than as a linear sequence. This concept interweaves past, present, and future into a single continuum, challenging Western temporal notions by positioning memory and existence as ever-present. In this paradigm, ‘art becomes memory’, serving as both a vessel and a living connection to ancestral knowledge, cultural history, and cosmological narratives. It is through artistic expression that the temporal collapses, making the act of creation an invocation of memory—an active, dynamic presence that transcends chronological time, embodying the enduring, interconnected nature of life and experience.


June Kim, Juergen Hagler, Daniela Duca and Rewa Wright were instrumental in creating an exchange of animated films between Ars Electronica Expanded Animation, SIGGRAPH Asia and ISEA 2024. This talk highlights the team approach, focussing on the dream of increased community participation and cooperation between these organisations.

In this overview of ISEA2025, Director Roh shares her creative vision for next year’s important Symposium in one of the world’s great cities: Seoul, Korea. The ISEA2025 theme, ‘동동 (憧憧, Dong-Dong): Creators’ Universe’, aspires to transcend the harsh realities of conflict and antagonism, initiating a global wave of unity sparked by a newfound allure. Through the words of the legendary priestess Diotima, Socrates described love as the act of keeping something good within oneself forever, the giving birth to beauty. This “giving birth” or “creation” elevates humanity from a mundane existence to an eternal state. For this God-Man, boundaries become meaningless, replaced by the limitless possibilities of consciousness manifesting in various forms within the quantum realm.

ISEA Co-Chair Prof. Gavin Sade reflects on the theme, organisation and innovations that came together to generate ISEA 2024 Meanjin/Brisbane. ISEA2024 explored innovative practices, transdisciplinary collaborations, and artistic and practice-based research methodologies. Drawing inspiration from the concept of the Everywhen, we welcomed explorations that embody its fluidity and cyclicality, thus challenging teleological methods of knowledge creation.

r e a: NATIVE comprises two interrelated installations delving into the historical and colonial archive. In the first room, we present a remastered iteration of r e a’s Native, 2013, a site-responsive sound and neon installation which was first developed as part of their Indigenous Artist Residency at the Blacktown Arts Centre in 2013. In the second gallery, Native (yugal/song), 2024, incorporates video and motion sensors that enable viewers to use their bodies to experience sound and to perceive it in a visual form. The conceptual and physical touchstone of both installations is the Blacktown Native Institute, founded in Parramatta in 1815 and relocated to Blacktown in 1823, one of the first sites in Australia where Aboriginal children were removed from their parents and institutionalised. This resonated with r e a’s knowledge of their maternal grandmother’s experiences as a child of The Stolen Generation and how intergenerational trauma is passed on. However, the project extends beyond this focal point, offering broader reflections on how their body processes language when immersed in the archive, reclaiming and Indigenising r e a’s history, language and identity.

Desna discusses her award winning practice spanning Indigenous art and design over two decades. Underpinned by seminal cultural concepts from Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge), Whaanga-Schollum’s work sits at the intersection of art, science and technology, operating through the lens of the regenerative life principle/life essence, ‘mauri’. Tracing her ancestry in visual form, Whaanga-Schollum sees art objects as having an intimate relationship with the environment and people, with mauri being the connective life essence that flows throughout all.

The first star cluster mapped by the original stargazers of Southern Africa constellates 444.2 light years away from Earth. 444.2 is a VR experience that uses volumetric filming to script in the black feminine as datafied, quantum bodies in costumed performance with a digital twin of the Southern African Large Telescope site. The digitisation processes are understood as posthumanist process of inscription and incorporation (Hayles 1999), which position and amplify the digital body’s relationship to the material-discursive, and the geopolitical notion of place in the project. Presenting African cultures as cultures of technology, 444.2 becomes a pluriversal proposition of cosmology and space to decolonial ends.

Hagoromo XR is a groundbreaking exploration of cultural fusion and inclusivity in the realm of extended reality (XR) arts performance. Drawing inspiration from traditional Japanese Noh theatre, our performance breathes new life into the ancient tale of Hagoromo, a story involving a fisherman discovering a magical feathered cloak and engaging with a celestial spirit to learn her dance. By bringing together a diverse ensemble of artists, including the neurodiverse sound art ensemble The Amplified Elephants and the acclaimed Noh singer Ryoko Aoki, we create a space where tradition meets innovation.
At the heart of our collaboration lies a commitment to fostering creativity and community among artists of all backgrounds. Through augmented reality (AR) projection and volumetric video capture, the artists transcend physical limitations, ensuring that every voice is heard, and every perspective valued. The result is a hybrid performance that invites audiences to immerse themselves in the mythology of Hagoromo’s narrative, experiencing it in ways both intimate and expansive.
Credits for Hagoromo team: A/Prof Jonathan Duckworth; Prof Shigenori Mochizuki; Dr James Hullick; Mr Ross Eldridge; Ryoko Aoki, The Amplified Elephants (Jay Euesden, Stuart Flenley, Robyn McGrath, Natalie Walters)

Reworlding: Meanjin is an immersive role-playing game set on the streets of Meanjin/Brisbane in 2050. You are invited to join artist and academic Troy Innocent on a three-hour journey through the inner-city, working with your group to imagine a Meanjin of the future. Along the way, take part in urban role-play encompassing augmented reality, participatory games and sound. At the end of your journey, return to the Museum to share your findings together.
‘Reworlding’ is a form of speculative and relational world-building. To ‘reworld’ is to nurture and develop existing patterns in culture, nature and society – evolution over revolution. Reworlding embraces actions for change, do-it-yourself skills and speculative design to answer the question: when one world collapses, how do we build the next?

Art is a emotional machine. If the expression of emotions is considered to be the importance of art, a machine with emotional perception and expression must be an artistic creation. The soul of art is revealed by interactions through this emotional communication and the form of art should be unrestricted. Artificial intelligence is not merely a tool of expression. The true transformation it brings to art lies in its perceptual capabilities. Just as in an artist’s creative process, perception, understanding, and expression are inseparable components. The genuine impact of AI on the art world doesn’t come from providing artists with additional tools to convey tradition. rather, it enables a machine to perceive and comprehend our world much like an artist does. The artistic experience evolves into a process of communication, interaction, and mutual understanding. The sensations it evokes, whether emotional or mental, make up the essence of art itself. As a result, the artist’s creative process is no longer an unconnected inspiration, a solo achievement, or an act of individual hubris, but a shared expression with a digital soul residing within silicon chips.

Professor Gavin Sade is an internationally recognised artist, designer, and educator with over 20 years of experience in the field of interactive computational media. With Wesley Enoch AM, he was Co-Chair of ISEA2024 Meanjin/Brisbane. He holds a PhD in Interactive Media Arts and Sustainability and a Bachelor of Music (Sonology). Gavin is the Deputy Dean in the Faculty of Creative Industries Education and Social Justice at QUT. Gavin’s creative works have been showcased in more than 20 exhibitions globally, including Vivid Sydney Festival and ISEA in Belfast, Singapore, and Sydney. Gavin’s work aims to enrich the intersection of art, technology, and education, making significant contributions to both the academic and creative communities.

Wesley Enoch AM is an internationally acclaimed playwright and artistic director, and Indigenous Chair in the Creative Industries with QUT. With Gavin Sade, he was Co-Chair of ISEA2024 Meanjin/Brisbane. He was the Artistic Director of the Sydney Festival from 2017 to 2020 and was previously the Artistic Director at Kooemba Jdarra Indigenous Performing Arts and the Ilbijerri Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander Theatre Co-operative. Wesley’s other residencies include: Resident Director at Sydney Theatre Company; Associate Artistic Director at Belvoir Street Theatre; 2002 Australia Council Cite Internationale des Arts Residency in Paris; and, Australia Council Artistic Director for the Australian Delegation to the 2008 Festival of Pacific Arts.

Rewa Wright has been working with augmented (AR) and mixed reality (MR) since 2012, and has 20 years of experience in various aspects of photographic, moving, and virtual image creation. Wright weaves together theory and practice in philosophy, cyberfeminism, interaction design, technoculture, camera-less photography, and artificial vision technologies with living plants and custom built software to examine the conditions of our relationship to computation, ecology and the body. Rewa is Māori from Ngati Taweke/Te Rarawa/Te Uri o Hau hapu of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Indigenous practices are emergent in their mixed reality performances that incorporate and adapt gestures from traditional dance, and permeate an investigation of plant-data-body ecologies.