The Familiar Unknown

In the field, Magee photographs by rules: short lenses only, and animals are free to refuse her camera. She carries that ethic into generative AI, using the machine to answer back to settler Australian representations that fixed the Kangaroo as pest, trophy or emblem. Magee uses the GAN's naivety to re-represent the Kangaroo. Within this computational world the Kangaroo needed to be imagined before it could be placed in utopic coexistence with humans. The tool is new; the rule behind it is the same one she brings to the camera. What does she refuse to let the machine do?

Robertson works in two stages, each with its own rules. First she prompts AI to invent plants that have never existed. Then she hands the image to one of photography's oldest processes: the cyanotype, exposed by sunlight and developed in water. The machine proposes the form, but the sun, the paper and the length of exposure decide how it lands. These impossible plants look entirely plausible, given weight and permanence by a physical, hands-on method. Look for where the machine's invention ends and the light takes over, and ask what you trust in an image.

Architectonics #24: Radiant Notations extends Barberis' Extended Grid as an architectural and choreographic score. The work draws upon the spatial proposition of Beauchamp/Feuillet notation, the measured intervals of music and movement, and a reflection on Sol LeWitt's instruction-based systems, while incorporating Barberis' own invented language of choreological notations. The grid is no longer fixed geometry, but a field of possibility. Highly coloured lines explode the architectural boundaries while the notational symbols establish the work's choreological syntax.

Radiant Notations in this context proposes drawing as choreology: a performative structure in which architecture, movement and intuition remain open to continual transformation.

Coming from UX design, Marjan Shams knows the rules of the infinite scroll: make it seamless, weightless and endless, so the thumb never stops. Thumbprint keeps the gesture and breaks every other rule. A hand-assembled fabric scroll takes three minutes to pull through by hand, its surface marked with repeated thumbprints, each recording a touch that normally leaves no trace. Speed is replaced with labour, repetition and accumulation; the fabric gathers in the lap and on the floor. A stop-motion video compresses the action back into thirty seconds, showing what three minutes of scrolling actually holds.

Charmaine Macdonald brings a background in computer science and IT to the print studio, and sets herself one rule: use the visible, physical risks of printmaking to understand the invisible risks of artificial intelligence. Starting from a written technical risk assessment of AI, she translates it into symbols, reflecting after each iteration of practice on where the two technologies meet and part. The slow, embodied process keeps the human in the making. In printmaking, every accident leaves a mark you can see; when control is handed to a machine, where would we look for the damage?

Each of Grennan and Jetmar's data-visualisation drawings are a trace of rules identified and (sometimes) followed by the artists or by participants. The artists use algorithmic play to engage the body and its perceptual systems through material, embodied practices of drawing. In this work created for HOME SRIC, a project addressing housing precarity and homelessness, the artists invite audience-participants to reflect on their own housing history. The resulting drawing becomes a negotiation between artists, the algorithmic procedures, the physical and conceptual context, and the participants.

In this work algorithms are not only followed but extended in real time as the artists encounter unanticipated variables posed by participants. The project demonstrates how the integration of drawing practice with traditional academic disciplines can deepen public engagement with research and open up new possibilities for thinking together about collective issues.

Kinetitude is an attitude and a movement, bounded by choreographic rules from the artist's dance background, translated into code and back into your body. You make the music and the drawing. Move in and lines grow bigger, sound louder; move around to compose music. A pinch makes the paint wet; stillness grows a scribbled bloom as an arpeggio plays. The machine enforces these synaesthetic rules but cannot perform them. Hold up the green bat for a physical print; leave, and your drawing replays before fresh ground buries it. If the rules are coded and the movements yours, who is the author?

Aaron Hoffman's practice turns on the moment when making stalls. Drawing on Maxime Chanson's 700 Artists' Processes, he considers the artwork as the product of two co-dependent forces: the Motor, the impulse to create, and the Means, the tools through which it finds form. When these fall out of step, the work comes to rest. Hoffman looks to computer programming for a way forward, adapting the 'slip-set trap', in which a defined event prompts an action. Familiar signs become his catalysts: Pinocchio evokes childhood wonder, dancing emojis the pull of screen culture, a cooktop grill the threat of imminent heat. If the method is set in advance, whose impulse is at work?