Saturday 25 May
10:00 – 11:00
Te Kura Hoahoa – School of Design Innovation, Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, 139 Vivian Street, Te Aro
Internationally renowned New Zealand artist and critical engineer Julian Oliver will launch the symposium with a keynote address laying out the current state-of-play of AI. His paper will interrogate the particular ideologies of techno-solutionism that steer AI’s rapid growth and subsequent adoption, and the ontological and environmental impacts that occur alongside. Drawing from artworks such as ASUNDER (2019), psWorld (2010) and his new work, presented in conjunction with the ADA symposium, The Closed World (2024), he will explore how the creative use of a technology can reveal and interrogate the underlying assumptions of the technology and the ways in which it engineers its user.
Julian Oliver is a Critical Engineer, educator, artist, archer, and activist. His work and lectures have been presented at many conferences, museums, festivals and international electronic-art events including Transmediale, the Chaos Computer Congress, Ars Electronica, Tate Modern, FILE, The Vienna Biennale, and the Japan Media Arts Festival. Julian has received several awards, most notably the distinguished Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica 2011 for the project Newstweek (with Daniil Vasiliev). He is the co-author of the Critical Engineering Manifesto, member of the Critical Engineering Working Group, and co-founder of Crypto Party in Berlin, who’s shared studio Weise7 hosted the first three crypto-parties (unrelated to cryptocurrency) worldwide.