Exclusive film screenings exploring AI, climate and what it means to be human
Authors ADM+S Centre
Date 7 October 2026
While AI promises to revolutionise creativity, three contemporary artists are exploring what that revolution is costing the natural world.
Reworking the iconic synth-pop song “Video Killed the Radio Star”, this special evening explores how contemporary artists are responding to the emergence of artificial intelligence, what creative practice reveals about the environmental implications of AI technologies, and how artists variously use, avoid, challenge and critique the ecological dimensions of AI.
Hosted by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM|+S) at Melbourne’s Capitol Theatre on 28 October, the event Artists’ Take on AI + the Environment offers a rare opportunity to experience powerful moving-image works on the big screen and hear directly from the artists behind them: Professor Angie Abdilla palawa, Dr Laresa Kosloff and Rebecca Najdowski.
“Artists are at the forefront of generative AI and are helping us to understand what we know about these technologies, how we feel about them and what they mean for us as a community,” said Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Research Fellow from ADM+S at UNSW and host of the event.
“We are so fortunate to have three leading artists to join us for this special event, Angie, Laresa and Rebecca are all such accomplished artists and academics, and we are so lucky to be hearing from them in person, and seeing their works on the big screen too.”
The artists will share the strategies, artistic methodologies and creative interventions they engage to consider the ecological and creative tactics of critical engagement with AI in media art today.
“This evening is about the cultural understandings of genAI, how are artists’ refusing, using or adapting these technologies, we will deep dive into the environmental consequences of these technologies as well as the ethics of engaging with them.”
The screening program showcases four distinctive works that approach AI, technology and the environment from markedly different perspectives.
In New Futures (4:38), Dr Laresa Kosloff imagines a world where synthetic personalities can be adopted at will, blurring the boundary between authentic and artificial identity. Through dystopian exaggeration, the film examines competitive individualism, digital authenticity and what remains of being human when everyone can become someone else.
Kosloff’s second work, The Bleaching (7:28), turns a satirical lens on climate change and humanity’s growing reliance on AI to solve problems of its own making. As climate change threatens the Great Barrier Reef, an AI system is tasked with answering an impossible question: why do humans want to know how to save something they helped destroy? The film asks who gets to be saved, and at what cost.
In Meditation on Country (~20:00), Professor Angie Abdilla palawa brings Indigenous knowledges and Western astrophysics into dialogue, weaving Creation time, cosmic evolution, language and story into an immersive reflection on our place in the universe and our relationship with Country.
Rebecca Najdowski’s Deep Learning the Climate Emergency (7:35) transforms familiar images of ecological collapse into haunting AI-generated landscapes. Using photography and machine learning, the work reconfigures images of environmental crisis into a new visual experience, asking whether technology can help us see the climate emergency anew before it is too late.
Together, the films offer thought-provoking and at times unsettling reflections on technology, creativity, environmental responsibility and what it means to be human in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence.
The evening takes its inspiration, in part, from the rapid technological transformations captured in the Buggles’ 1979 hit Video Killed the Radio Star and J.G. Ballard’s earlier short story The Sound-Sweep. More than four decades later, the rise of generative AI is prompting another profound transformation in how images, film and other creative works are produced and experienced.
The event draws on recent research by Bailey-Charteris and Professor Deborah Lupton as part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) signature project ADM, Ecosystems and Multispecies Relationships.
Artists’ Take on AI + the Environment
Wednesday 28 October 2026, 7.00pm – 8.30pm
The Capitol, Melbourne
