What we imagined as an infrastructure for openness, stability, and resilience has left us instead feeling profoundly unstable, polarised, and trapped inside a chaotic walled garden of nothing but noise. To borrow a phrase from media theorist Wendy Chun, our ground truths have all turned out to be deep fakes. 

This event, spanning two days of workshops and talks at RMIT, will explore how artists, writers, thinkers, and other cultural workers can help us come to terms with the broken promises and chaotic realities of the 21st-century internet. 

Convened by Joel Stern (RMIT), Thao Phan (ANU), and Christopher O’Neill (Deakin)

Supported by ADM+S as part of the project ‘Evaluating Automated Cultural Curating and Ranking Systems with Synthetic Data’. Presented in association with the National Communication Museum, School of Media and Communication RMIT, and the AusSTS 2025 Conference ‘Signals and Noises’, which runs from July 9-11. Details here. 

ADM+S students and ECRs are encouraged to sign up for the first day of AusSTS at the National Communication Museum at a reduced price – featuring performances, workshops, and keynotes from invited scholars and performers. Registrations are now open. 

Monday 7 July
Noisy Joints: Embodying the AI Glitch: Eryk Salvagio and Camila Galaz
12pm-2pm

Artists and researchers Eryk Salvaggio and Camila Galaz present a participatory workshop on interrupting and reframing the outputs of generative AI systems. Drawing from a critical AI puppetry workshop originally developed at the Mercury Store in Brooklyn, New York, Noisy Joints invites participants to think through the body—its categorisation, misrecognition, and noise—within AI image-generation systems. How do our physical movements interact with machine perception? How can choreographies of shadow, gesture, and failure unsettle the logic of automated categorisation?

Across the session, participants will explore these questions through short talks, collaborative video-making, glitch-puppetry exercises, and experimental use of tools like Runway’s GEN3 model. Using shadows, projections, and improvised movement, the workshop will trace a playful and critical path through the interfaces and assumptions that shape AI perception. No technical experience is required.

JODI
2pm-4pm

Workshop description written by JODI

%Install \/\/ifi :Localphone.tracer https://wifi4garden.com 
& making?breaking Alt.app/softwar DIY#Wrong%Browsers💻 .WWW vs Appland
https://zkm.de/en/2025/02/choose-your-filter
Joan Heemskerk about 🖲$Blockchain #alt.sci-fi 
https://rectangle.be/rec

JODI (jodi.org) pioneered net.art in 1995. They were among the first artists to investigate and subvert the conventions of the Internet, computer programs, and video and computer games. Their work radically disrupts the very language of these systems, including visual aesthetics, interface elements, commands, errors, and code. JODI stages extreme digital interventions that destabilise the relationship between computer technology and its users by subverting expectations about the functionalities and conventions of the systems we rely on every day. Their practice spans a variety of media and techniques, including installations, software, websites, performances, and exhibitions.

JODI’s work is featured in most art historical volumes on digital and media art. It has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Documenta X, the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), ZKM, ICC, CCA, the Guggenheim, IMAL, Centre Pompidou, Eyebeam, FACT, MoMI, Harvard Art Museums, Rhizome, and MoMA, among others.

Tuesday 8 July
How to Train Your (Mental) Model: Fabian Offert (UCSB) & Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (University of Basel)
2pm- 4pm

This workshop seeks to interrogate how one may know if/when AI is “bad,” and who gets to make that determination. The objective of the workshop is not to interrogate how training of models happens in contemporary AI systems but to instead collectively come to terms with the methods of studying AI in contemporary STS (and adjacent) scholarship. We shall outline some common methodological trends and issues in the field of critical AI studies, and collaboratively look at, and think about, the precise chains of arguments that undergird our understanding of AI models today. Turning the chain-of-thought process unto a critical register, the participants will be invited to consider the methodological diversity, veracity, and validity of contemporary argumentation modes (across popular, corporate, and academic discourses) and the political emergence and implications of these argumentations. At the core of this exercise is a consideration of how we, as thinkers and tinkerers, may reassess our mental models of how AI models are trained and operationalized. In the face of these issues that we shall encounter, the workshop will aim towards making some headway into a future set of methodologies that might take into account existing strengths in our humanistic and social scientific domains.