Fantastic Futures held outside of Europe or North America for the first time#
Since its inception, the School of Cybernetics has built strong links with many of Australia’s cultural institutions. Through research projects such as the Library of the Future, culminating in the Custodians and Midwives report for the National Library of Australia and the Hidden Gallery Tour with the National Gallery of Australia, we have employed cybernetic approaches to help navigate societal transformations - such as the changes wrought by the advent of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).
Machine learning and artificial intelligence are playing an increasingly large role in the activities of cultural institutions worldwide - and exploring the opportunities and challenges for the cultural sector here was the focus for the sold-out Fantastic Futures conference - hosted last week by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, in conjunction with AI for Libraries, Archives and Museums (AI4LAM). Attracting cultural leaders from across the world - including organisations such as the BBC, the British Library, the Smithsonian and the British Film Institute - this was the first time Fantastic Futures had been held outside of Europe or North America - signalling both the attractiveness of Canberra as an international conference destination and the NFSA as a hosting institution.
Fittingly, several members of the School of Cybernetics contributed to the conference.
The challenges and opportunities of speech recognition for archival transcription#
One of the key challenges cultural institutions are currently grappling with is a desire to make audio-visual material more discoverable - and accessible. Many organisations are using the freely-available speech recognition tool Whisper, from OpenAI, for this purpose - but this does not come without significant downsides. In conversation with Te Hiku Media CEO, Te Reo Māori Indigenous language advocate and Times 100 in AI 2024 lister Peter-Lucas Jones, PhD candidate Kathy Reid explained how Whisper works poorly for many spoken accents of English due to its training data, drawing on her doctoral research and work with Mozilla’s Common Voice project.
Whisper’s accent accuracy on accented speech evaluated with Common Voice v15. The y-axis shows WER - word error rate - while the x-axis shows how accurately various accents of spoken English from Common Voice are recognised by Whisper. Higher scores indicate worse accuracy. Image: Kathy Reid, generated via matplotlib.
Peter-Lucas went on to highlight how poorly Whisper works for Te Reo in particular, and turned attention to the important issue of data sovereignty, and how benefits of AI and ML systems need to flow to the people and communities whose data are harvested to build them. Peter-Lucas summarised this disconnection of data, language communities and flourishing with a quote that silenced the audience:
“The language that was beaten out of our ancestors is now being stolen from our mouths and sold back to us.”
Kathy rounded off the session by advocating for cultural institutions to have robust policy discussions before large tech companies approach them seeking access to the rich data sources their collections yield to train AI models. Going further, she raised the need for national, shared capability in this space to reduce institutional dependence on models controlled by overseas entities - issuing the provocation of what an Australian-created Whisper or ChatGPT, built with multi-stakeholder involvement, might look like.
Peter-Lucas Jones, Dr. Keir Winesmith and Kathy Reid. Photo: Professor Alex Zafiroglu, used with gratitude and permission.
Imaginative restoration of collection items using AI#
PhD Candidate Charlotte Bradley joined Beth Shulman, Head of the Future Lab at the National Institute for Dramatic Art (NIDA), and Ripley Rubens, Curator at NFSA, to present work-in-progress on Imaginative Restoration – an interactive installation that invites participants to interact with and creatively restore damaged archival films from the NFSA.
Imaginative Restoration is the result of an exploratory collaboration between NIDA, the NFSA and ANU Cybernetics. It emerged from a workshop held in Canberra in July 2024 where experts in dramatic writing, props and effects, curation, and digital technologies came together to explore the future of dramatic arts creation, recording, and archiving in the age of generative AI.
The resulting Imaginative Restoration project aims to foster an on-going partnership between the three institutions, while bringing long-forgotten artefacts back to the public, and using them to weave new narratives - all the while, giving cultural practitioners the skills to create positive and meaningful futures in the sector.
Charlotte Bradley facilitating the Imaginative Futures workshop. Image taken from the documentary Imaginative Restoration, commissioned by Dr. Keir Winesmith of the National Film and Sound and Archive, used with gratitude and permission.
Representation of historical figures#
Masters of Applied Cybernetics Alumnus, Eryk Salvaggio joined a panel with Meagan Loader, Chief Curator of NFSA, and Director and Founder of creative agency Kopi Su, Kartini Ludwig, for a discussion on generative AI. Eryk explained his concept of infrastructure of memory - in that there are distortions when capturing archival items - “ghosts in the dataset”. Using the metaphor of “digital humanities in reverse”, Salvaggio showed how the categories that were once used to describe archival imagery have now become the prompts used by generative AI.
His 2024 award-winning generative AI-produced artwork Because of You leans into the infrastructure of memory, drawing parallels between the removal of information in graphical datasets and the removal of information from Henrietta Lacks, in the form of cells and in her visage. The artwork emphasises the abstract destruction and recombination of visual culture in AI models.
Eryk Salvaggio in conversation at Fantastic Futures with Meagan Loader and Kartini Ludwig. Photo: Kathy Reid, used with gratitude and permission.
Traces and places: empowering GLAM voices to shape AI futures#
As a satellite event to Fantastic Futures, the Traces and Places workshop, run by Senior Lecturer Dr. Paul Wong, Futures Specialist Dr. Jessica Herrington and Senior Lecturer Thomas Biedermann, explored the AI Futures the GLAM sector is encountering and shaping in the present, and shared some of the thinking, methods and artefacts the School and its partners are generating or curating. These included:
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Playground AI Network for Interactive Creativity (a.k.a. PANIC!) - the interactive AI Art installation by Dr. Ben Swift and Adrian Schmidt exploring generative AI, feedback loops, and bias in training models.
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Indigenous Futurisms - the powerful and generous sharing of an Indigenous Futurisms’ perspective on, and visions of, AI by Dr. Ambelin Kwaymullina, drawing from Indigenous Cultures, Knowledge Systems, and experiences of oppressive systems.
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Australian Cybernetic - A point through time - the exhibition imagined by Distinguished Professor Genevieve Bell and curated at the School in 2022 by Professor Andrew Meares, Dr. Amy McLennan and Caroline Pegram, running a thread through the pasts, presents, and futures of technology, creativity and society.
Participants shared and heard stories of serendipitous encounters, curation and conservation, curiosity, experimentation and creative collective imagination, and how the future is built of, and by, these connections and actions we take in our present.
Traces and places workshop held at the Birch Building, ANU, October 2024. Image by Sherice Kazzi, used with gratitude and permission.
Resonant themes#
On reflection, there were several themes resonant across the conference:
- Cultural institutions are custodians of rich collections of multimodal cultural data - images, video, sounds, text - data which is intrinsically described and represented by language. In turn, that language is being used to train AI models, which in turn, are being used to describe and represent collections - a bi-directional feedback loop. There is a strong link between cultural data and language - and how we transcribe, represent and describe cultural collections is bound to questions of how language is used to reinforce or challenge existing power structures.
- Data is power. In an era of generative AI, created through the harvesting of data to be tokenised and trained, cultural institutions hold immensely rich cultural collections, placing them in tension between their roles as both curators and often cash-strapped cultural institutions.
- The collaborations, relationships and connections fostered at the conference are helping the sector share information, learnings and experience - and to create and navigate Fantastic Futures.
Fantastic Futures 2025 will be held at the British Library in December 2025.
At the ANU School of Cybernetics, we use cybernetic thinking and tools steer, shape, and scale, complex systems to build more hopeful futures. Get in touch at: cybernetics@anu.edu.au.