Exploring an alternate Australian history through First Nations perspectives, blending storytelling, technology and culture to inspire inclusive and transformative futures.
The Cybernetic Imagination Residency at the ANU School of Cybernetics provides a platform for innovative storytellers, thinkers, tinkerers, and creatives as well as critical doers to develop credible, hopeful, and unexpected stories about the future which imagine and instigate positive change. The 2025 residency will focus on the project titled Tomorrow’s Pasts: Address to the Nations created by Tony Briggs and David Pledger.
Longstanding friends and collaborators, Yorta Yorta/Wurundjeri man, actor, curator and director Tony Briggs and artist, curator David Pledger run the collaborative practice, Tomorrow’s Pasts under the moniker – briggsnpledger - inspired by the multimedia theatre event, K, produced by David’s company not yet it’s difficult (NYID). K was written and directed by David and featured Tony as a lead actor.
Tomorrow’s Pasts is a multi-platform concept for digital art, theatre, video game and television that pivots around an alternate Australian history in which a race-based civil war is a defining event. Tomorrow’s Pasts challenges Australia’s mainstream colonial history by presenting an alternate First Nations history that imagines inclusive futures based on First Nations principles.
The digital art series, Address to the Nations, is an evolving archive of moving-image portraits of senior First Nations figures who create an alternate history of Australia. The residency will begin with developing the story and context of two prominent political figures whose influence on the alternate history is profound. The project disrupts the address-to-the-nation mechanism by introducing figures based on leaders from the First Nations community and using dramaturgical tools such as world and narrative building, characterisation and GenAI technologies.
Briggs and Pledger explain: “Our project asks a series of ‘what if’ questions of this country: What if we find a way to tell the truth and coexist? What if we appreciate a nation’s story is not singular but multiple, and begins with First Peoples? What if we integrate new technology in our thinking and practices in ways that advantage the many not the few? What if we tell a great story that inspires us to celebrate our shared humanity, to embrace an alternate history, to go against the current tide?”
