Future of Arts, Culture & Technology Symposium (FACT 2025)

8:30am
Registration desk open
Please collect your lanyard from the Registration desk, located on Level 1 (entry from Fed Sq). This lanyard will ensure your access to all symposium sessions.

9:15am - 9:40am
Welcome and setting the scene

9:40am - 10:40am
KEYNOTE - DR DEB CHACHRA
Dr Deb Chachra (Boston, USA) discusses how we talk about infrastructure, what infrastructure means, how it affects our culture and how culture affects it; what is the new infrastructure we need, how might it affect us, how do we regain agency?
Introduced by and Q&A with Professor Dan Hill.

11:05am - 12:30pm
FUTURE STRUCTURES
If we agree that our current institutions are struggling with the uncertainties and unpredictabilities of the present then how might we redesign them for the future? In this discussion we will hear how ‘nature’ is finding a seat on the Board of Directors, how innovation is being incubated inside local governments, what skills do we need, and how we might actively design our decentralising organisations differently.
Lucy Sollitt (Future Everything, UK), Bonnie Shaw (Municipal Association of Victoria), Professor Dan Hill (The University of Melbourne), Natalie Turmine (Service and Creative Skills Australia), Dr Christen Cornell (Creative Australia), moderated by Gavin Somers (ACMI).

1:30pm - 2:45pm
FUTURE OF MEDIA
This panel explores the future of media, from broadcast to narrowcast to multicast, what is gained and lost as these changes multiply. How might we include those who have been excluded, and ensure equity in media access both as consumers and producers.
Angela Stengel (ABC), Keri Elmsly (ACMI), Stuart Buchanan (Sydney Opera House), Scott Smith (Changeist, USA), moderated by Dr Indigo Holcombe-James (ACMI).

3:00pm - 4:00pm
FUTURE MODELS
This session explores different models for revenue generation and funding the investment required to develop, maintain, and sustain our institutions and infrastructure. What compromises, and new ethical approaches might we need to experiment with and how might we learn to collaborate better.
Tony Holzner (Art Processors), Jayne Lovelock (Creative Australia), Georgina Russell (ACMI), David Strauss (Bloomberg Connects), moderated by Sarah Slade (ACMI).

4:15pm - 5:15pm
KEYNOTE - PROFESSOR JENNIFER DEGER
Gathering our Fractured Futures
Co-Curator of Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, Co-Founder of Miyarrka Media and Professor of Digital Humanities Charles Darwin University
Introduced and Q&A by Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth.
This keynote explores the special conviviality of thinking, worrying, and making together in times of escalating uncertainty and peril. As the futures that some of us once took for granted fracture and burn, new coalitions of researchers are emerging to challenge disciplinary and institutional conventions, motivated by a shared conviction that scholarship itself must change in response to the stakes of contemporary life. By turning to the dynamically interactive zones of computer screens, speakers, and the click-and-scroll haptics of online navigation, publications such as Feral Atlas and curatorium pursue a collective recalibration of our senses and a renewed attention to the arts of making sense in troubled times.

5:15pm - 6:15pm
IN CONVERSATION WITH TODD ECKERT (Tin Drum, USA)
Join a conversation between Tin Drum founder Todd Eckert and Seb Chan (ACMI) on the creative and technical production of Kagami, the award winning mixed reality experience of one of the final performances of Ryuichi Sakamoto. This conversation will examine the complexity and conversely, the new opportunities still afforded by mixed reality, as well as discussions of multi sensory performance, production techniques and more.
Eckert produced the award-winning feature film Control about Ian Curtis, the lead singer in Joy Division. In 2012, he joined the mixed reality technology group Magic Leap and served as director of content development before leaving to found Tin Drum in 2016. Eckert directed Marina Abramovic in The Life, which premiered in 2019 as the world’s first mixed reality, large-scale public performance.
This session is presented in connection with AsiaTOPA.

6:15pm - 8:00pm
NETWORKING DRINKS IN CAMEO
Attendees will have the opportunity to explore work being done by Swinburne University of Technology, State Library of Victoria and ACMI at the intersection of arts, culture and technology. The regular “ACMI X Works in Progress Night” will be taking place this same evening, and delegates will be welcomed to drop in to check out some of the projects in development.

8:30am
Registration desk open
Please collect your lanyard from the Registration desk, located on Level 1 (entry from Fed Sq). This lanyard will ensure your access to all symposium sessions.

9:15am - 9:25am
Welcome to Day Two

9:25am - 10:45am
KEYNOTE - ADRIAN HON
The Age of Immersion
Game designer, author, and former CEO and founder of Six to Start (UK)
Introduced by and Q&A by Jini Maxwell (ACMI)
Everything is "immersive" now: theatre, cinema, video games, restaurants, even cocktail bars. Immersive experiences are the fastest-growing form of entertainment – but why? What is it that people are looking for with "immersion", and what are they getting.

11:15am - 12:15pm
THE FUTURE IS INTERACTIVE
This panel explores new forms and new ways that creative people are working with ‘interactivity’ through games but also in performance and screen.
Avinash Kumar (Elsewhere in India), Professor Deb Polson (RMIT University), Dr Sam Mcgilp (media artist and researcher), Jillian Clark (Melbourne Museum), moderated by Emily Sexton (ACMI).

1:15pm - 2:30pm
FUTURE MUSIC, MUSIC FUTURES
Moderated by radio presenter and musician Tim Shiel, this conversation explores what the future might sound like, how machines not only make but also listen to music, how a different future of music is happening under our noses in South East Asia, and drawing on new research from Music Australia, how Australians are discovering and consuming music.
Dr Ollie Bown (The University of New South Wales), Dr Joel Stern (RMIT University), Dr Christen Cornell (Creative Australia) moderated by Tim Shiel (Green Music Australia).

2:45pm - 3:45pm
KEYNOTE - AARON STRAUP COPE
It’s not magic - finding our way back to “just f*cking do it” from “move fast and break things”
Head of Internet Typing at San Francscio Airport Museum (USA)
Introduced by and Q&A with Seb Chan (ACMI)
We only have so much time in our lives for foundational myths and the effort it takes to re-enforce them before they become trite, tiresome and ultimately tuned out.
Stories about absence are a hard sell.In the grand scheme of things we may need to accept that the internet is not as important as some other things which we hold to be inalienable truths. It is still worth understanding what the internet has changed, what those changes have made possible and that the web, in particular, represents a deliberate and considered reaction to the past rather than some comforting platitude like the sun rising every day or a broken clock being right twice a day.
In a moment which every aspect of our lives can often feel like a merry-go-round of baiting-and-switching this is a talk about the sensibilities and motivations, beyond the day-to-day tactical strategies, necessary for promoting and nurturing the scaffolding which might allow the whole notion of cultural heritage to outlast the reluctance and fickleness of the present.

4:00pm - 5:15pm
FUTURE OF HERITAGE, HERITAGE OF THE FUTURE
When we look at how museums and libraries are presented in popular media we might think that they would be allergic to the future, but they are rapidly changing. Moderated by Katie Russell, CEO of the Australian Museums and Galleries Association (AMaGA), this panel explores how First Nations communities are changing how and what museums are for, and how they operate; how a museum transformed the highly specialised knowledge of close knit expert community into an interactive public museum; how the public thinks museums should use technology; and how Wikimedia is becoming a cultural institution.
Dr Bianca Beetson (Queensland Museum), Dr Emily Siddons (National Communication Museum), Elliott Bledsoe (Wikimedia Australia), Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth (RMIT), moderated by Katie Russell (Australian Museums and Galleries Association).

5:15pm - 5:30pm
Symposium wrap up and what's to come